Denby's Snark reeks, Hall's Boxes seeks

I read two short books recently that while linked in no one’s mind but my own, neatly complement one another. The first is David Denby’s Snark. The book has been earning more than its fair share of coverage, likely because it is a) short, b) easy to parse and c) sure to rile a large swath of its audience.

In the book, Denby, the New Yorker’s film critic, addresses snark, something that is, well, see the thing is, he never really defines it. He spends plenty of time telling the reader what snark is not — a definition that boils down to any social or political commentary with which he agrees — but surprisingly little time telling us what it is. It’s a sort of dangerous “I know it when I see it” argument that, as a good liberal, Denby ought to be above.

Contest interlude: Because Denby doesn’t define snark, I’d like you to. The comment offering the best definition of snark by midnight Sunday wins a free copy of Snark. Let the games begin.

That’s not to say the book isn’t interesting. He fashions it as a sort of modern day answer to Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark,” a tangentially related poem that was told in eight “fits,” an early term for a canto. Denby adopts that conceit, if not its form, calling his “a polemic in seven fits.” Of course, his fits are more, well, fitting with today’s term, for they read at times like a child throwing a tantrum. He reserves particular vitriol for bloggers, online commenters and sites like Gawker. These arguments — which, if the subjects are to be believed, are wrong as often as not — center on the notion that any critique without a larger motivation, usually political, is snark.

One bit of wrongheadedness comes at the expense of an acquaintance of mine, Patrick Beach, a writer with the Austin American-Statesmen. In a piece about Nancy Pelosi that he calls “hapless,” Denby recounts that Beach wrote she was “arguably so left leaning that her parenthetical should be D-Beijing.” “China is certain authoritarian, a nationalist-capitalist hybrid nightmare, but does it make much sense to see it as “left” any more?” he writes. “Moss is growing on Beach’s keyboard.”

Now, ignore the fact that his parting shot is, of course, snarky, and think of this: could it be a joke of geography, asserting that someone in California (Pelosi’s home state) leaning very far to the left might find herself in China? Maybe. Or maybe Beach used a well-known trope to make a point, kind of like using moss as an antiquated indication of being out of touch. Whether I’m write or Denby is, he is clearly the one looking for offense and finding it all too easily.

And the other book, the one that complements Snark? It’s Unpacking the Boxes, “a memoir of a life in poetry,” by form Poet Laureate Donald Hall. In it, Hall wanders a meandering path through his writing past. If a book can have gravitas, this has it. It was a pleasure to join Hall as he recollected and recounted stories from his life that shaped him as a poet. In lesser hands it would be the offputting work of a name dropper, but Hall’s reminiscence’s are fond, rarely bitter. Someone with his life and career could surely find things to be snarky about if he so chose, but he doesn’t, and the result is a book that made me eager to carve out a moment so I could return to my visit in Hall’s world.

What does this have to do with Denby? He could learn a lesson or two from Hall. Denby misreads situations, overanalyzes and is quick to look for a slight. It’s everything Hall, at least as indicated by Unpacking the Boxes, is not. And while one is posited as an important book — that would be the one subtitled “It’s Mean, It’s Person and It’s Ruining Our Conversation” — the other is the one that tackles weighty topics with grace and humility. It is Hall that will stick with me, making me want to persevere and make the best of bad situations, and Denby who appeals to my baser self, all but urging me with his whining prose to call him dirty names.