So this past weekend I was a participant in the Borderlands Press Boot Camp. Motivated doesn’t come close to describing how I feel right now. It’s more like I’ve come out of there having decided to accept Writing as my personal lord and savior.
It’s much too early to fully assimilate the lessons from forty-eight hours in that highly-pressurized bubble. But here are some of the initial discoveries that I have been able to process so far:
- The authors of the works that I thought were the best-written turned out to be the best company. In fact, I saw direct correlations among skill, modesty, generosity, and personality.
- It turned out to be a great field test of my thesis about taste, confidence, and condescension. The snarkiest critiques were from the writers whose self-assurance of their craft mastery was at the greatest odds with the quality of their written product.
- Holy shit, I really have found my tribe after all. But I don’t regret my previous self-imposed exile in the wilderness because it allowed me to first develop a healthy sense of what “being a writer” really means for me — a robust understanding of the difference between a writing lifestyle and a writing life.
Onward, writing soldier. The defeats and victories, struggles and successes to come will make for great war stories.
And deep thanks to the writers and instructors for their comradeship, insight, dedication, and decent Scotch.
I’m a big fan of David Denby’s film critiques in the New Yorker, where he alternates with the equally talented Anthony Lane. (The two make an exquisitely well-balanced pair; while Lane plays the part of the quintessential public, discussing why he liked or disliked a film, Denby is the quintessential connoisseur, focusing on why you should like or dislike it.) I’ve only just heard about Denby’s new book Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation, and I’m looking forward to reading it because it’s a subject in which I’m interested — both as an occasional dilettante practitioner and as a fortunate recipient of far less than my fair share. But having read some of the eloquent (and several snarky) reviews of the book, I can’t help weighing in with a kind of pre-review because they have already got me thinking about the subject.
Snark is said to be “irony’s brat” (or, by those who would cast aspersions on its parentage, irony’s “bastard child”). Attempting to home in on a more concise definition, people see in snark elements of “cruelty,” a tendency to be both “acid-tongued” and “disengaged,” to demonstrate “reflexive contempt” along with a “little curlicue of knowingness,” to strike “like a schoolyard taunt without the schoolyard,” even to exhibit “a higher form of dandyism,” evoking images of Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote floating around the edges of many a Park Avenue cocktail party.
Along that latter line, Denby, in a fine CJR interview by James Marcus, notes almost tangentially that in one of Wolfe’s famous early pieces (“These Radical Chic Evenings,” about the infamous 1970 Black Panther/Leonard Bernstein party), the snark is “just his taste against theirs.” I guess it’s appropriate that a film reviewer would spot that, but Denby’s passing observation made me pause and think hard.
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