Do we live in a snarky world?

Snark
Snark is mean, it’s personal, and it’s ruining our conversations.

“Snark” is a new book by David Denby on the history of snark.

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.

David is a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker.


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.

What I Believe

When no one was looking I had a great idea...while driving alone in the car I used to compose and recite to myself my credo: what i believe. Whitmanesquely I would list ideas and
personal philosophy intending to write it down someday and inspire my friends to do the same. But then about four years ago NPR started a segment called 'This I Believe' in which
they do that very thing eclipsing my idea and making me redundant (which so often happens). So 'what i believe' is unnecessary and hence I've forgotten what i believe but
'This I Believe' has produced two books full of articulate and insightful compositions by many famous and non-famous people of the world. (The series is going to end this year).
I was reminded of this when i recently read this poem which i like very much:

What I Believe
by Michael Blumenthal

I believe there is no justice,
but that cottongrass and bunchberry
grow on the mountain.

I believe that a scorpion's sting
will kill a man,
but that his wife will remarry.

I believe that, the older we get,
the weaker the body,
but the stronger the soul.

I believe that if you roll over at night
in an empty bed,
the air consoles you.

I believe that no one is spared
the darkness,
and no one gets all of it.

I believe we all drown eventually
in a sea of our making,
but that the land belongs to someone else.

I believe in destiny.
And I believe in free will.

I believe that, when all
the clocks break,
time goes on without them.

And I believe that whatever
pulls us under,
will do so gently.

so as not to disturb anyone,
so as not to interfere
with what we believe in.

"What I Believe" by Michael Blumenthal, from Days We Would Rather
Know. © Pleasure Boat Studio, 2005.

On a completely different note:
February 28th is the birthday of Daniel Handler, (books by this author) born on
this day in San Francisco (1970). He's most famous for his
best-selling series of macabre children's books, A Series of
Unfortunate Events, which he wrote under the pen name Lemony Snicket.
The books follow the adventures of the orphaned Baudelaire children —
Violet, Klaus, and Sunny. Their parents die in a fire, and after that,
things keep getting worse and worse. There are 13 novels in A Series
of Unfortunate Events, including The Bad Beginning (1999), The
Carnivorous Carnival (2002), and The Penultimate Peril (2005).
Daniel Handler said, "A library is like an island in the middle of a
vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and
the surrounding area has been flooded."

Who Do?

A question comes me: am I getting more(or less) agreeable with age? In years past I thought my taste was completely out of the mainstream, that maybe one in ten of
my friends and aquaintances would concur with my opinons about films, books or other cultural events. So when I shared this poem with some friends and 50%
concurred with me that it was delightfully creative, I thought maybe I'm coming around, maybe meditation is helping, maybe I won't become a grumpy old man after all.
(Of course the other 50% thought I needed more meds).
So here is the poem in question by Barbara Hamby :


Who Do Mambo
A sports writer complained to Joe Louis about another boxer who didn't like
to take punches to the body. Louis replied, "Who do?"

Mon Dieu, said the Hindoo, I don't want to stop drinking. Who do?
But sometimes you have to put down your glass so you
can pick it up for another round. At the University Ladies' Tea
with the pill-popping dean's wife and Marxist shrews,
you don't want to talk to them or anyone else. Who do?
But like Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady you say
How do you do, call on Andrew Marvell and George Herbert
to rescue you, but you draw the short straw,
and there's Julie Andrews in The Sound if Music with her igloo
smile and Christmas sweater. You are the Sioux
in this cavalry charge, and you need some firewater pronto,
gin and lighter fluid or a gun, but that's so American,
and who would you shoot but yourself, so you try to spin some voodoo
around this vampire soirée. Where are the chicken bones
and bat fangs when you need them, Miss Nancy Drew?
Face facts, you don't have a clue. Let me preview
my upcoming bout of spinal meningitis for you,
or shall I invoke Bob Dylan, mathematician and Hebrew
troubadour, for I am tangled up in glue or something like it, goo
or ooze. If I were a cow, I'd be bigger than I am, say moo
and pray to Shiva, but as it is, I am a fourth-rate kangaroo
praying for rescue in a bottle, my mind a zoo,
a giraffe popping out my left ear, a zebra out my right. Whew,
that hurt, but so much does these days. Much Ado
About Nothing, that's my play, Beatrice and crew. Let's review.
Everything I adore is either forbidden to me or taboo,
which is pretty much the same thing. O Alice, I grew
an inch with that one, or was it my nose? Hey, Pinocchio, you
want me to chop you for firewood? Who do? Wait, I have a few
things to say about hue. I'm orange but, carissimo, you
are as blue as you were the day Picasso, or was it Braque, drew
you in Montmartre in the Bateau Lavoir, and now that my shoe
is wedged in my mouth again and my underpants askew,
I'll take this opportunity to bid you an affectionate adieu.
Parting is such sweet sorrow that I would pitch some woo
with you till next Wednesday; O Shiva, the queue
to your divine brain is teeming with supplicants, so in lieu
of the old one-two, I'll sign off. Something nasty just blew
in from Kazakhstan, and my electric bill's twenty years overdue.
Mirror, mirror on the wall—Oh, God, not you.

Barbara Hamby

All-Night Lingo Tango
University of Pittsburgh Press



Here are some reviews of the book (now wouldn't you like to get such nice reviews?)

About All-Night Lingo Tango

All-Night Lingo Tango

This collection is a love letter to language with poems that
are drunk and filled with references to the hyperkinetic
world of the twenty-first century. Yet Zeus and Hera tangle
with Leda on the interstate; Ava Gardner becomes a Hindu
princess; and Shiva, the Destroyer, reigns over all. English
is the primary god here, with its huge vocabulary and
omnivorous gluttony for new words, yet the mystery of the
alphabet is behind everything, a funky puppet master who
can make a new world out of nothing.
"Scant verbiage cannot rise to the occasion of these
brilliantly overbrimming, beautifully bountiful, life-stuffed,
word-smart, unconstrained but strangely formal, wise and
wicked and zaftig lovelies. They turn 'wretched excess' to
'blessed excess' and declare a new physics of plenitude."
—Albert Goldbarth

"With its hyperintensity of imagery, humor, and substance
sustained throughout, All Night Lingo Tango is a whirling
genius of a book."
—Susan Hahn
All-Night Lingo Tango
University of Pittsburgh Press
Pittsburg, Pennsylvania

Surviving a cruise

How do you survive a Cruise?

Learn to read.

Learning to Read
by Franz Wright January 19, 2009 New Yorker

If I had to look up every fifth or sixth word,
so what. I looked them up.
I had nowhere important to be.
My father was unavailable, and my mother
looked like she was about to break,
and not into blossom, every time I spoke.
My favorite was the Iliad. True,
I had trouble pronouncing the names,
but when was I going to pronounce them, and
to whom?
My stepfather maybe?
Number one, he could barely speak English;
two, he had sufficient intent
to smirk or knock me down
without any prompting from me.
Loneliness, boredom and terror
my motivation
fiercely fuelled.
I get down on my knees and thank God for them.
Du Fu, the Psalms, Whitman, Rilke.
Life has taught me
to understand books.

The Other - a book review

David Guterson's new novel "The Other." Guterson, best-known for his richly evocative bestseller "Snow Falling on Cedars," once again sets his story in the Pacific Northwest. Neil Countryman, the narrator, comes from a blue-collar family and becomes a schoolteacher; his closest friend, John William Barry, is Seattle royalty—born into a fabulously wealthy dysfunctional family. Brilliant but increasingly eccentric, John goes beyond drugs, quasi-mysticism and so much else that was fashionable in the 1970s to dropping out of society altogether, living as a hermit in a cave in the woods. His co-conspirator is Neil, who initially believes this is only a passing phase but then can't summon the will to try to save him by breaking his vow of silence about his "disappearance."

from review by Andrew Nagorski Newsweek

This is my book review of sorts :
The Ohter by David Guterson
The book covernotes say this "...is a novel about youth and idealism, adulthood and its compromises, and two powerfully different visions of what it means to live a good life." I found this book profoundly affecting. Possibly because the two main characters are of my generation and and come of age in '70's which revives many reminisces of my own life. One character,the narrator adapts to the pressures of the times and life to become an English teacher, marry, have two children and be generally happy and adjusted. The other, with a Thoreau-like uncompromising contempt of American materialism and ecological blindness, withdraws from society by living a hermit's life in an Olympic mountain cave near the Hoh rain forest. The hermit has a $400 million trust fund.
The narrator notes the irony of his becoming a teacher: '..i made my living opening my mouth. And all the while I privately preferred silence.' The new year's first snow/how lucky to remain alone/at my hermitage is from Basho . He taught this haiku which bored his high school students but spoke for him. I identified with his sense that even though he succeeded in worldly terms he severely compromised his true values. Without revealing any of the plot I will quote from the narrator's lyrical meditation near the end of the book: "..the truth is that truth is too complicated. If I extrapolate from myself there is a lot of deceit in the world without a beginning, middle, or end. The way it really works, a lot of the time, is that you suffer from the weight of what happened, from what you said and did, so you lie as therapy. Now the story you make up starts to take up space other-wise reserved for reality. For phenomena you substitute epiphenomena. Skew becomes ascendant. The secondary becomes primary. When it comes to confess, you don't know what you're saying. Are you telling the truth, or do you confuse your lies with reality? The question is comical. The answer is lost in the maelstroms of consciousness. It's even possible to pretend, eventually that the question wasn't asked. You've been kidding yourself about yourself for so long, you're someone else. Your you is just a fragile fabrication. every morning, you have to wake up, assemble this busy, dissembling monster, and get him or her on his or her feet again for another round of fantasy. Is this what some sutras by Buddhists are about? ...

I don't know much about myself...but I'm glad to still be breathing, to still be here with people, to still be walking in the mountains, and to be still uncertain....I'm a hypocrite, of course, and I live with that, but I live."