First of all. Where’s our cut? If anyone’s buying this book, we want our piece. Wait, no, it’s an anti-Snark book. Ohh Snark is mean, it’s personal, and it’s ruining our conversations.
WTF man? Who wants to read 144 pages about the fact that you have no sense humour? (UK reader shoutout! We see you!)
Here’s the synopsis:
What is snark? You recognize it when you see it — a tone of teasing, snide, undermining abuse, nasty and knowing, that is spreading like pinkeye through the media and threatening to take over how Americans converse with each other and what they can count on as true. Snark attempts to steal someone’s mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her effectiveness. In this sharp and witty polemic, New Yorker critic and bestselling author David Denby takes on the snarkers, naming the nine principles of snark — the standard techniques its practitioners use to poison their arrows. Snarkers like to think they are deploying wit, but mostly they are exposing the seethe and snarl of an unhappy country, releasing bad feeling but little laughter. In this highly entertaining essay, Denby traces the history of snark through the ages, starting with its invention as personal insult in the drinking clubs of ancient Athens, tracking its development all the way to the age of the Internet, where it has become the sole purpose and style of many media, political, and celebrity Web sites. Snark releases the anguish of the dispossessed, envious, and frightened; it flows when a dying class of the powerful struggles to keep the barbarians outside the gates, or, alternately, when those outsiders want to take over the halls of the powerful and expel the office-holders. Snark was behind the London-based magazine Private Eye, launched amid the dying embers of the British empire in 1961; it was also central to the career-hungry, New York-based magazine Spy. It has flourished over the years in the works of everyone from the startling Roman poet Juvenal to Alexander Pope to Tom Wolfe to a million commenters snarlingat other people behind handles. Thanks to the grand dame of snark, it has a prominent place twice a week on the opinion page of the New York Times.
Denby has fun snarking the snarkers, expelling the bums and promoting the true wits, but he is also making a serious point: the Internet has put snark on steroids. In politics, snark means the lowest, most insinuating and insulting side can win. For the young, a savage piece of gossip could ruin a reputation and possibly a future career. And for all of us, snark just sucks the humor out of life. Denby defends the right of any of us to be cruel, but shows us how the real pros pull it off. Snark, he says, is for the amateurs.
….annnnd stretch out, move around the room a little, shake it off, do that neck rolling thing. Man how many wedgies has David Denby gotten in his life? (You have another one coming, stay away from LA.)
Thankfully the people of the internet seem to be rallying against this. The best rally coming from Adam Sternbergh of New York Magazine. He writes:
Denby’s book invites—even begs masochistically to receive—a snarky response, but he won’t get one here. I enjoy snark. I practice snark. And I hope herein to defend snark. But it’s too easy to stamp this book with some snarky dismissal (EPIC FAIL) and continue on one’s self-satisfied way. Denby’s book is serious, and wrong, and it deserves an appropriate response. Moreover, the book is premised on a popular meme: that so-called snark, what he calls “a nasty, knowing strain of abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation,” is both increasingly unavoidable and intrinsically corrosive. I disagree on both counts. Snark can be misused and misdirected. It can be mean, and it can be personal. It’s also not only useful as a form of public conversation but necessary, for reasons that Denby either ignores or fails to comprehend.
Read the rest of the review here: http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/53159/
Will I buy this book? Hanoseriouslyfolks. But will I read it if someone sends me a copy for a very unobjective opinion? Sure. Will I put it on my list of library books to check out and not read? Possibly. Now if you don’t mind Mr. Denby, we’d like our ball back and we’d appreciate it if you didn’t call our moms.
What’s your interest level in this book? Join the conversation below and tell us how you feel.
