![]() ![]() The tone of virtue is the heart of smarm: “It is a civilization that says ‘Don’t Be Evil,’ rather than making sure it does not do evil.”Ī decade of time has led to some mild embarrassments. Some snark Denby likes-Jon Stewart and Juvenal-and some snark he dislikes-people who hate The New Yorker-and the double standard requires elaborate intellectual gymnastics. Denby sorts the morass of snark into a manageable pattern, with a lightness of touch and a historical distance that is illuminating in a way nobody else has managed. I must say this book holds up much better than I remember. Snark and smarm had a more explicitly institutional framework for Gawker: It was the outsider internet response to unworthy legacy insiders.ĭavid Denby’s 2009 book Snark was the most direct, most acute establishment response to snark. Gawker had a slightly different definition of snark than Julavits’s: “righteously indignant but comically defeated, sighing in unison with an audience that believed nothing was as it seemed and nothing would ever really change.” Snark was upstart criticism, an at least half-honest despair, a recognition of a basic systematic collapse. “She’d probably hate Gawker,” Gawker wrote in response. The title of Julavits’s piece was “Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!” Three exclamation marks in a single title. Incredible as it may seem, in the beginning, the argument against snark was a defense of joy in art, tied neither to the establishment nor to its opponents. He liked his sentences standing rigidly at attention, with their beds made and their shoes polished, but he was no snarkist he knew what he was talking about and he didn’t judge writers by their choice of footwear. In Wood’s famous essay against “hysterical realism,” then still fresh in mind, Wood had articulated a passionate repression. And in the immediate aftermath of the Obama-Romney election, it was possible, just possible, to imagine that American political discourse was too civil. The Obama years, its walls plastered with posters of hope, had revealed that there was no going back. The Boomers, given the greatest institutions the world has ever known, had squandered them out of obliviousness and greed. The scars from the 2008 crash were forming but the wound hadn’t yet healed. Media and literary institutions were feeling the death grip of social media but hadn’t yet been swallowed. In a sense, “On Smarm” matters more now than it did when it was published. Every critic, every cultural commentator, pro or con, highbrow or lowbrow, fancy or scuzzy, has been shaped by the debates over snark and smarm that came to a head in Scocca’s piece a decade ago. “On Smarm” is the kind of piece that hovers in the background, framing debates, determining styles, fixing approaches and assumptions even in readers who reject its premises or have never read it. And its penumbral influence has been even wider. Many careers, whole online networks, have been directly inspired by it. “On Smarm” has been, with the possible exception of Between the World and Me, the most influential essay of its period, and certainly among writers. For an essay whose material was negligible even at the time of publication-tone and manner in New York media circles in the early 2000s-its relevance has been out of all proportion to its subject. Ten years ago, Gawker published Tom Scocca’s “On Smarm.” Gawker died but “On Smarm” lives. ![]()
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