David Denby is a film critic for the New Yorker; he’s also the author of the recently published book Snark, an important essay which traces the evolution of snark from ancient Athens to Gossip Girl, loosely defining it in its ideal form as so: “Two girls are sitting in a high-school cafeteria putting down a third, who’s sitting on the other side of the room. What’s peculiar about this event is that the girl on the other side of the room is their best friend. In that scenario, snark is abusive or sarcastic speech that operates like poisoned arrows within a closed space. Its intention is to offer solidarity between two or more parties and to exclude someone from the same group.”
In this same scenario we imagine that Denby would be the head of the judiciary society. Not because it looks good on his transcript, but because it’s the right thing to do and he doesn’t care what the cool kids think of him. It’s important to have people like that around. It keeps us honest.
While his argument is not without flaws (as Sarah Weinman notes here), we ripped through the extremely yellow book in a single evening and we haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since — especially when we’re sitting at the keyboard. And without a few holes to pick at, where would the interesting conversation start? (Generating a discussion about style, Denby explains, was his goal in writing Snark.)
Our own conversation with the writer after the jump.
