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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for January 14, 2009

TT: Snark and its discontents

January 14, 2009 by Terry Teachout

MENCKEN%20AT%20TYPEWRITER.jpgApropos of the current debate over snark, a neader writes:

I read your book on H.L. Mencken, a personal hero of mine. It was a very good biography. I just wondered whether you ever wanted to cut loose and be a real asshole while you were writing the book, like H.L. Mencken, since nobody writes like that anymore, and frankly, who can stand human beings and their phony sensible perspective? Your tone was pretty academic, despite the subject matter….The Internet has unleashed a lot of juvenility and hatred but very little that is quite so focused and “intellectual” and satirical as Mencken’s style. Our mainstream norms nowadays seem to prevent that kind of expression, like you didn’t say “trousers” in the presence of a lady in Victorian England. I like vicious expressions of highfalutin sentiments.

Oddly enough, I received this e-mail on the same day that I was quoted in Florida Weekly as follows:

I just don’t like snarkiness. It’s a cultural trend, I think, driven by the Web, where snarkiness is considered a virtue. It’s legitimate to be funny in a review, but there’s a certain kind of nastiness that I don’t like. Sneering about the serious efforts of a serious artist is not, in my opinion, an appropriate way to respond to things.

This being the case, why did I write a biography of Mencken in the first place? Because Mencken, as my correspondent clearly implies, wasn’t snarky: he was a serious man with a satirical turn of mind. Unlike the drive-by snarkmeisters of the Web, he carried more than enough intellectual guns to justify his bruising sarcasm. The reason why I didn’t write about Mencken à la Mencken, on the other hand, is because I don’t think that kind of rough stuff holds up very well at book length (not to mention the regrettable fact that I’m not as good a writer as H.L. Mencken). I, too, like “vicious expressions of highfalutin sentiments,” but a five-hundred-page biography is an altogether different proposition, one that calls for a cool head and a fair amount of detachment. Sarcasm is for short hitters.

As for snark, I’m against it–mostly. But sometimes not. As Noël Coward said in Private Lives, “You mustn’t be serious, my dear one, it’s just what they want….All the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable. Laugh at them. Be flippant. Laugh at everything, all their sacred shibboleths. Flippancy brings out the acid in their damned sweetness and light.” It also cuts through the grease of smugness, which of late has become endemic to the American cultural conversation. In the ever-relevant words of Justice Holmes, “I detest a man who knows that he knows.” The thumbed nose is the only appropriate response to such odious self-satisfaction.

TT: Snapshot

January 14, 2009 by Terry Teachout

Doc Watson performs “Deep River Blues”:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

TT: Almanac

January 14, 2009 by Terry Teachout

“Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.”
Jimi Hendrix (quoted in Charles Shaar Murray, Crosstown Traffic)

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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