There’s a lot of stuff floating around already. It’s inevitable. When you stick your chin out, it’s going to get hit. That’s fine. It’s part of saying something, not just doing the old soft-shoe down to the bottom of the page. My idea was to get a conversation going. Pile on!
Finally: do you think your book will have any effect on the runaway train of snark?
I doubt it. Although we may be entering a different era. There’ve been a lot of lies over the past eight years, and maybe snark was one way of dealing with lies, by turning everything into a joke. But if we’re not going to be genuinely witty, which is hard, we might as well talk sense to each other. And perhaps an anti-snark tract will help in that respect. Maybe not. It’s the media juggernaut: you can comment as it goes by, but derail it? No.
If this book blog turns out to be as good as those at the TLS, it will be valuable. A real need is for blog entries that consider fiction and non-fiction as they reflect on each other and the news. For example, a review of "No Country For Old Men," "2666," and the LA Times coverage of Mexico's drug problems would be interesting, as would reviews of "Tree of Smoke" and "Legacy of Ashes" together. Many books slip through: We still do not have a great review of "Terror and Consent."
Reader comment in the Australian Literary Review online is very weak. The Paper Cuts blog is chaotic. The New Yorker has not been able to find an excellent formula for book blogs. If CJR attempted to change the nature of reviewing, with more depth in analysis, it could stimulate better reader comment.
#1 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Thu 22 Jan 2009 at 03:29 PM
Hi Clayton Burns, and thanks for commenting. Your suggestion about tandem reviews of fiction and nonfiction titles is definitely worth a try--we'll start looking for a likely pair. For the moment, Page Views will probably be less bloggy than some of the other sites you mention. Which is to say that we'll be concentrating more on reviews, interviews, and reportage, and less on quick notations of literary events and the latest tempest in the publishing teapot. But we are eager to bring visitors into the conversation. Thanks again for breaking the ice.
#2 Posted by James Marcus, CJR on Thu 22 Jan 2009 at 05:25 PM
I didn't come from the traditional school of media, however, I am very interested in seeing what's said in this book. It feels that I'm probably the only person I know under 40 who thinks snark went from being an okay novelty to overboard.
#3 Posted by Jason Cliknkscales, CJR on Thu 22 Jan 2009 at 11:37 PM
I stopped and restarted typing my last name and messed up. Sad, I know, but I can't delete the previous comment.
I didn't come from the traditional school of media, however, I am very interested in seeing what's said in this book. It feels that I'm probably the only person I know under 40 who thinks snark went from being an okay novelty to overboard.
#4 Posted by Jason Clinkscales, CJR on Thu 22 Jan 2009 at 11:41 PM
Delightful news! Although Denby would probably argue that snark hasn't been a true novelty since the second century AD, when Juvenal produced his trash-talking hexameters. In any case, thanks for stopping by--and we'll see about deleting the previous comment.
#5 Posted by James Marcus, CJR on Fri 23 Jan 2009 at 08:29 AM
Denby is accurate on several points here, including the role of anonymity in facilitating snark and the deeper cultural impulse toward it as a reaction against dishonesty in the public sphere. John Knowles wrote that "sarcasm is the protest of the weak," and the popularity of the Daily Show, Gawker, etc. over the past decade has been a kind of mass refuge-taking from the abuses of the powerful in the sanctuary that the court jester's comedy provides.
To a point that's only healthy and natural; the problem becomes the poverty of ideas behind all the mockery. There's a reason the court jester never usurps the throne: he doesn't pose a serious threat to the reigning orthodoxy, and in fact is subtly dependent on it. And so the culture has been overrun by jesters (some great talents, many hacks) whose pose of rebellion masks their fundamental complacency. The solution isn't to encourage somber scolds--there's a happy medium to be found, since true wits are also great moral teachers beneath the brilliant surface--but to encourage genuine ideas.
Congratulations on the launch of Page Views, and we'd love for you to join the discussion at our (more "bloggy") arts and books blog, The Abbeville Manual of Style.
#6 Posted by Austin, CJR on Fri 23 Jan 2009 at 11:42 AM
A writer for The New Yorker attacking Tom Wolfe - what a surprise. I've reread Wolfe's tour de force on Leonard Bernstein's party for the Black Panthers, and it can only be interpreted as 'snarky' by a committed and uncritical upper-crust urban liberal. Denby does not acknowledge that Wolfe was going very much against the media grain in 1970 as well. Members of a self-consciously evolved cultural, urban upper class don't take it too kindly when the weapons of ridicule they employ are turned on them, which is understandible, and Denby doesn't see this. He should have learned from the way his colleague Alex Ross made himself look foolish by literally fabricating kooky scenarios surrounding Bernstein's weird party, in a recent New Yorker column.
#7 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Fri 23 Jan 2009 at 02:50 PM
Nice to hear from you, Mark. I think Denby would actually agree that in 1970, when he published that piece, Tom Wolfe was going against the media grain, puncturing liberal pieties, etc. (Not completely against the grain, since the New York Times joined Wolfe in ridiculing Bernstein's party.) His argument is that the piece has aged very badly--especially the bits where Wolfe ridicules civil-rights activists for their infra-dig, off-the-rack suits. Of course the spectacle of Leonard Bernstein trading jive talk with the Panthers is the stuff of comedy (as is Wolfe's own attempt to grapple with rap music in A Man In Full). But what I meant to ask was: which parts of Alex Ross's column do you think he fabricated? That wasn't clear to me.
#8 Posted by James Marcus, CJR on Mon 26 Jan 2009 at 03:45 PM
Good to find you at CJR, James. I enjoyed your interview with David Denby, whose appreciation piece on Norman Mailer some years ago in The New Yorker was the best anyone has done. (I wish I could find it now--any ideas?)
#9 Posted by Charles Smyth, CJR on Fri 30 Jan 2009 at 06:48 PM