Book Review, Snark by David Denby

Best way to kill a blog: not write, even when you're inclined to, and then wait until you're no longer inclined to.

Best way to kill a blog 2: publish a too-long review of a book you're certain no one you know has read.

Here goes anyway:

David Denby, one of two film critics for the New Yorker, recently published a book called Snark. I saw him on C-SPAN discussing his tract and was immediately delighted: someone was taking on the anti-everything aspects of popular intellectual culture. So I bought his book, read it, and was left somewhat upset. I should have expected it from a typical New Yorker writer -- an extremely intelligent, well polished analysis of something just un-mainstream enough to make me feel like I was being a cultured badass, with attacks on the American neo- and theo-cons ranging from peripheral to vociferous, but with no real attack at what's at the heart of the matter. I made my way through his at times exasperating and at times spot-on book, and I don't think that he's entirely correct in his ideas about why and how we talk to (or more importantly, about) each other in this vast internet realm of links and tagging and occasionally text.