Snarking, a time-honored pastime of pasty-faced, eye-rolling internet bloggers is the subject of a new book by New Yorker critic, David Denby, entitled "Snark," and a recent journal entry posted by Roger Ebert on the Chicago Sun-Times site.
I'm sorry. Let's try that again without the snark.
Snarking is the subject of a new book by New Yorker critic, David Denby, entitled "Snark," and a recent journal entry posted by Roger Ebert on the Chicago Sun-Times site.
OMFG. Just typing that sentence sent me to sleep.
Read Roger Ebert's journal here.
Here are some excerpts:
"Snarking is cultural vandalism. I have arrived at this conclusion belatedly. I have been guilty of snarking, and of enjoying snarks. In the matter of snarking, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But it has grown entirely out of hand. It is time to put away childish things. I must restore my balance, view the world in a fair way, hope to inspire more appreciation than ridicule. No doubt there will always be a role for snarking, given the proper target and an appropriate venue, and I reserve the right to snark when it is deserved, as in certain movie reviews. But in general I must become more well-behaved."
"What concerns me is that snark functions as a device to punish human spontaneity, eccentricity, non-conformity and simple error. Everyone is being snarked into line. All celebrities are under unremitting scrutiny. How dare Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, or Mia Farrow before them, adopt more than one Third World baby? Do they have nothing better to do with their money?
A snarker is one who snarks. The word is said to be a combination of snide and remark. There are slithering undertones of shark, bark, and stark. There is also, for me, an association with snipe. The practice involves holding someone up to ridicule not so much for anything they actually did, as for having the presumption to be who they are."
"This process of reevaluating snarking has been good for me. It is easy to snark, and I am a clever writer. I must resolve not to take cheap shots, except in those cases of truly bad movies; in such reviews, I believe readers understand the rules can be bent. In true snarking, there is no such thing as a cheap shot; the gold standard is the Good Shot. It's important sometimes to be reminded that it's okay to admire. To praise. To enjoy yourself. To admit to having a good time. To not care about what other, snarkier, people might say. I need to keep in mind the words of Robert Warshow I like to quote: A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit he is that man. I watched the Oscar program. I thought it was the best I've seen. So that's what I think, and if you don't agree, you can go snark yourself."
Read Ebert's snarky review of the forgettable, teen cheerleading flick, Fired Up here. This is my favorite bit from it: "Oh, is this movie bad. The characters relentlessly attack each other with the forced jollity of minimum-wage workers pressing you with free cheese samples at the supermarket."
Fragments of a Q&A with David Denby conducted by the LA Times:
LA TIMES: "To be a skeptic for a moment: If you think of the Web as a giant cherry tree, you could really cherry-pick examples to illustrate just about any trend you’d like. And to be sure, there are enough snarky cherries to fill a fleet of dump trucks. But the Web has also enabled plenty of high-level discourse. Is it fair to say that the claim that snark is infecting the national conversation might be exaggerated?
DENBY: The Internet is the greatest revolution in democratic practice since popular suffrage. Everyone knows that, and I am just as dependent on the Internet as anyone else. In the wake of a democratic revolution like that, there’s both an enormous explosion of information and expression, much of it useful or fun, and also an explosion of pent-up rage, social anguish, resentment, bilious, other-annihilating nastiness, prejudice and all the rest of the dark side. If that stuff is destroying conversation threads, screwing up people’s...
...reputations, spreading around unchecked rumor or just snark, it’s worth pointing to it and saying, “Stop lousing up my revolution.” The point of the book is to protect the best kind of humor by criticizing the worst."
DENBY: "The trouble with snark is that it doesn’t engage. It’s almost bulimic: It takes something into its mouth and then regurgitates it. So that’s something you can ask yourself: Am I really engaging with the subject or am I just trying to show off and be clever?" Read further.
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