Snark Culture

There’s a passage in Fay Weldon’s Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (a work I highly recommend, by the way) that sums up how I’ve always felt about writers and writing. Weldon’s conceit, in her letters to an imaginary niece who has sought out the novelist’s help in reading literature for the first time, is that Austen and all writers, through the Houses of the Imagination that they’ve built, book by book, have created a City of Invention. Its inhabitants inform and influence each other; its architecture is rich and multi-layered, with its own hoity-toity neighborhoods and red-light districts. Weldon writes:

Writers are privileged visitors here. They have a house or two of their own in the City, after all. Perhaps even well-thought of, and nicely maintained; or perhaps never much reckoned and falling into disrepair. But to have a house of any kind, even to have brought it only to planning stage, and have given up in despair, is to realize more fully the wonder of the City, and to know how its houses are built: to know also that though one brick may look very much like another, and all builders go about their work in much the same way, some buildings will be good, some bad. And a very few, sometimes the least suspected, will last, and not crumble with the decades. Writers, builders, good or bad, recognizing these things, are usually polite to one another, and a great deal kinder than the people who visit as outsiders.

When I ran across this passage the other day, it got me thinking about something that’s bothered me increasingly throughout the last few years. It seems to me that lately the City of Invention has been overrun with a particular breed of tourist I despise—and let me make it plain here that in the City of Invention we are all tourists, writers and readers alike. Furthermore, I believe the City of Invention includes all the entertainments that feed our dreaming, including the scripted television series we love and the movies we see.

But there’s a particular breed of visitor to the City that bothers me increasingly, of late. They’re loud and shrill, and fill the streets with shouts and catcalls. Their hoots of derision as they drive by in their souped-up jalopies block out the usual civilized, mannered conversations to which its citizens are used. It’s the internet culture of snark that’s invaded, and its celebrants make me want to flee the City for good.

The culture of snark glories in its own cleverness. Its practitioners are like the catty bullies in the middle school lunch room who gather around the exit to the cafeteria line in order to rip to shreds anyone and everyone who steps into their line of sight. One of them sights a flaw, real or imagined, and the rest dogpile onto it, attacking with fangs exposed, until the victim manages to escape. Then they all congratulate themselves. They’ve done a fine job of savagery, yes indeed. They’ve cut that one down to size. But their hunger is never satisfied, because there’s always another target to come.

It’s easy to be snarky on the internet. There’s no real investment there, often no need to associate one’s name or face to the comments one posts. All one needs is the rallying cry of snark aficionados everywhere, Is it just me, or does anyone else think. . . ? And off they go.

Reading websites visited by those who love snark culture makes clear that they believe they are doing a service the books and shows and movies they rip apart; they are convinced they’re setting things straight, and reclaiming the Houses of the Imagination that are rightfully theirs. They know exactly how to fix 24 or Battlestar Galactica. They use the word Whedonesque as a weapon, thinking they know what’s more Whedonesque than Whedon himself. And the breed has its variants, including the well-meaning crusaders anxious to whip the world into a frenzy. If someone’s written a book about which it’s possible for the crusaders to be outraged, because the author’s built the world differently than the way it is or the way the crusaders believe it should be, they gang up and demand apologies. Puffed up and superior, all of the snark lovers kick and pummel until they imagine they’ve superseded anything the original builder could say, and they move on to the next victim.

They think they’re being constructive. I even suspect they think that the time they spend polishing their knives is time spent erecting their own houses within the City, shining and admired. But they aren’t. Snark doesn’t build anything. It only attempts to erode. It’s the antithesis of the creative act. It’s graffiti of the least colorful and artistic sort, drive-by sniping that’s designed to harm. Clever-clever it may try to be, but in reality it reworks the same tired old tropes, over and over again—the cute nicknames, the attempts to pinpoint the shark-jumping, the eye-rolling, and lately, adding the suffix -fail to whatever it can. On the internet they yell and point and laugh and shrill out any real dialogue, until it all echoes so loudly in their ears that when the ringing stops, they’re convinced that everyone must think like they do.

Never does it occur to its practitioners that there’s an entire vast world outside the internet, and many of them don’t agree, or care. I get tired of hearing the din, though. It makes my head hurt. It dismays me. Because on a fundamental level, I don’t understand how or why culture’s shifted to a point where a new House of Imagination doesn’t get to earn any derision or scorn; it’s automatically entitled to it. Even before the paint’s dry and the front door is open, the graffiti is often there; the snark lovers don’t even have to visit to render judgment.

Erecting fifteen little shanties of my own along the City of Invention’s streets does not give me any more privileges than anyone else visiting, let me say. I’m a tourist too. Often I turn up my nose at what’s been built, and I’ll say so. But like Weldon points out, having a few houses of my own makes me painfully aware of how much work and love goes into building them. When I see a crowd outside one, jeering for the sake of hearing their own voices, my sympathies are always going to be with their builders. No one wants to write a script to a chorus of naysayers who believe their know one’s characters better. No one cares to spend months or years on a book at which a few people are throwing rotten fruit in the hopes that everyone will follow suit. That’s too much time and imagination spent in a life that’s already too short.

I’m aware how old-fashioned I sound, but the City of Invention is thousands of years old, and deserves respect. There’s civilized conversation. And there’s dogpiling, disguised as it may be with righteous intent. Snark culture is built on the latter, and that’s why I steer as clear from it as I can.

See the City of Invention with opened eyes. Be a builder. That's the billboard I want to erect, right on the outskirts of town for everyone to see as they drive in.

Be a builder.

The Other Runway

Bravo has thrived on making facsimiles its popular programs. When Project Runway debuted and became a hit, the network immediately capitalized with Top Chef, which was as entertaining in its own right, though slightly unfocused. From Top Chef sprung even less sharp imitators—Top Design, Shear Genius—that provided some, if not all, of the fun of the vastly superior original. Now Project Runway is moving to Lifetime, and Bravo has been stripped of its flagship property. What they’re left with is The Fashion Show, the fuzziest of all fuzzy photocopies stuck in the maws of the machine.

When I first read the press about The Fashion Show in the months before its premiere, I had gotten the impression that although it would naturally resemble Project Runway in its focus on fashion design, that the two were supposedly to be fundamentally different in some manner. I thought that the new show was going to focus more on the production of completely lines, or something, rather than a single hastily-produced garment for that week’s challenge.

Apparently I was wrong. The Fashion Show appears to have been designed from the ground up as a Project Runway clone. There are the same wacky challenges—“Design an evening gown for a socialite using only ten dollars!”—and the same inevitable episode in which the aspiring designers are asked to create clothing for women smaller than a size zero and spend an entire hour whining about it. Isaac Mizrahi pretends to be Tim Gunn and Kelly Rowland fills in for Heidi Klum. It doesn’t really work. Mizrahi knows what he’s talking about, but seems to have been instructed to copy Gunn’s patented “I’m worried!” expression whenever he visits the designers. Rowland looks pretty and enunciates exquisitely, and that’s pretty much her entire contribution.

It’s the designers who make Project Runway compelling, and here it’s the designers who make The Fashion Show such a wallow in joylessness. It’s as if designers with actual talent were somehow advised to steer clear of this street corner Gucci handbang knockoff of a show, and the casting directors were left only with Z-list designers. Not even that . . . the directors seem to have assembled the cast solely from any fast-food worker they could find who once stared off into space and thought, you know, I wish I could be a fashion designer.

If for some reason my description compels anyone to watch (please don’t let it), I’ll catch you up. There’s a bitchy black guy who’s quick with the finger waving and the head bobbing. There’s a Zoe Deschanel lookalike. There’s a pimply sylph of a fellow of pan-Asian extraction who giggles like a geisha behind his hand every time the camera turns in his direction. And then there’s a special appearance from Tingle, famed fairy from the Zelda series.



I ain’t lyin’.

Squirrel Patrol

Since her kittenhood, Fred has appointed herself as the household squirrel patrol. For the better part of the day she sits at the back door of the house, peering through the glass from behind a curtain, so she can monitor every little movement of any small creature venturing up onto the deck. Sometimes she’ll change position to the side window, propping her fat butt onto the rear sofa cushions and resting her front legs on the sill so she can twitch and chatter and watch in comfort.

Last year she became emboldened by a outdoors encounter in which she body-slammed a squirrel against a fence. I witnessed its sequel over the weekend, when I took her out into the back yard for a supervised roll in the dirt, and was appalled when the first thing she did was to spy one of her rodent enemies and chase it, at the highest speed imaginable, into the neighbor’s yard. Then, almost as quickly, she realized what she’d done, slinked guiltily back, ducked behind a stack of mulch bags, and emerged to squeeze her eyes at me and rub against my leg and attempt to convince me that everything I’d seen had been a hallucination, because she was really a sweet kitty who would never eviscerate small mammal. Unless it was really, really fat and tasty.

Then there was last night. The Mont and I were both sitting in the den at the back of the house after dinner, when Fred spied a squirrel on the roof. It thudded noisily over one of the three skylights, then hopped onto the edge of the next. Fred was fascinated. She craned her neck up to stare at the squirrel’s underbelly as it munched seeds from the maple tree. She hopped onto one of the chair, leapt to a bookshelf, and then sprang onto the top of the entertainment center—the tallest object in the room.

From the edge of the entertainment center Fred watched the squirrel for a good five minutes, until the squirrel moved forward into the last of the skylights, directly above her. I heard the Mont inhale sharply. When I looked up, I saw Fred spring into the air and heard a hollow boom as her body collided with the skylight glass. There was a terrible moment in which time seemed to freeze, like in some Warner Brothers animation in which the coyote is suspended in mid-air after chasing the roadrunner off a cliff’s edge. Fred looked down at me from nine feet in the air, eyes wide, paws extended, her face plainly saying, Uh-oh.

She fell to the ground and landed safely, though immediately she sat down, tucked her tail around her rump, and attempted to look dignified. The Mont and I looked at each other with horror, but once we realized she was fine, we started to laugh. And laugh. And laugh. We couldn’t stop, though tears were stinging the corners of my eyes. Fred tried to ignore us, but it was too late. She stalked to the door, lay down, and tried to pretend that none of it had ever happened.