It's Bart Simpson, without the saving grace of Matt Groening's contempt. (Ever notice that, by the way? The number of characters transparently created to be objects of contempt or loathing that are adopted as heroes? Bart Simpson, Archie Bunker, Beavis and Butthead? The number of people who root for S.M. Stirling's Draka?)As others have pointed out, snark is one way contempt is expressed. But of all the things one may feel contempt for: wickedness, complacency, stupidity; he doesn't seem to understand what it means that many feel sympathy and compassion towards what one could see as ignorance, comfort, weakness. There's something powerful and useful to his thesis in this parenthetical, but he has left it behind and flown off into a densely written book on rhetoric to discuss approved and disapproved uses of reduction and refutation.
Snark is best employed (in moderate doses) with those whom you share assumptions about the underlying nature of the universe and the relative importance of things, to be sure.why the fuck would you hang out with people like that
Does he have a newsletter to which I might subscribe?He does have quite a few excellent novels. I strongly disliked "Earth Made of Glass" and "A Princess of the Aerie", but everything else I've read of his has been decent-to-fantastic. Start with "Orbital Resonance" (or anything else in the same series; they're not strictly sequels) for something in the fantastic category.
Robert Jordan pushed aside the saddle blanket that hung over the mouth of the cave and, stepping out, took a deep breath of the cold night air. The mist had cleared away and the stars were out. There was no wind, and, outside now of the warm air of the cave, heavy with smoke of both tobacco and charcoal, with the odor of cooked rice and meat, saffron, pimentos, and oil, the tarry, wine-spilled smell of the big skin hung beside the door, hung by the neck and the four legs extended, wine drawn from a plug fitted in one leg, wine that spilled a little onto the earth of the floor, settling the dust smell; out now from the odors of different herbs whose names he did not know that hung in bunches from the ceiling, with long ropes of garlic, away now from the copper-penny, red wine and garlic, horse sweat and man sweat dried in the clothing (acrid and gray the man sweat, sweet and sickly the dried brushed-off lather of horse sweat), of the men at the table, Robert Jordan breathed deeply of the clear night air of the mountains that smelled of the pines and of the dew on the grass in the meadow by the stream. Dew had fallen heavily since the wind had dropped, but, as he stood there, he thought there would be frost by morning.Hemingway knew how to use short sentences well, and he knew how to use long sentences well. He was a good writer. But you knew that.
Questions and answers depend on a game—a game that is at once pleasant and difficult—in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of dialogue.posted by TheGoodBlood at 11:00 AM on September 1, 2012 [17 favorites]
The polemicist, on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied. link
In response to the hegemony of metafictional and self-conscious irony in contemporary fiction, writer David Foster Wallace predicted, in his 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," a new literary movement which would espouse something like the New Sincerity ethos:posted by the man of twists and turns at 5:28 AM on September 3, 2012
Reduction got going as an argument in the twentieth century with Freud ("you refuse to believe in the unconscious because you were weaned too early") and Marx ("you value property rights because you are a prisoner of the ruling ideology"), jumped over to the conservative side with Milton Friedman ("you only worry about the poor because silly irrational Keynesians keep you from seeing how free it makes them to choose to be poor") and defense-geekery ("the only reason you criticize using this weapon to massacre civilians is that you don't know its rate of fire and where it fits into tactical doctrine"), and can today also be found in the arts ("you're just throwing paint at canvas because collectors pay money for that" and "you put sex in there to sell more copies") and even in some of the sciences ("you only think that idea because you have the meme for it.")He just "snarked" all over Freud, Marx, Friedman, Dawkins, et al. in the exact same manner he was complaining about. He reduced huge bodies of work to glib quips which show how the original writers were obviously wrong and don't need to be read to be rejected. I don't like reductionism either, but it deserves to be rigorously engaged with and debunked, not just tossed aside lightly (it should be thrown with great force etc.).
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posted by philip-random at 11:11 PM on August 31, 2012 [9 favorites]