Snark

What is snark? You recognize it when you see it -- a tone of teasing, snide, undermining abuse, nasty and knowing, that is spreading like pinkeye through the media and threatening to take over how Americans converse with each other and what they can count on as true. Snark attempts to steal someone's mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her effectiveness. In this sharp and witty polemic, New Yorker critic and bestselling author David Denby takes on the snarkers, naming the nine principles of snark -- the standard techniques its practitioners use to poison their arrows. Snarkers like to think they are deploying wit, but mostly they are exposing the seethe and snarl of an unhappy country, releasing bad feeling but little laughter. In this highly entertaining essay, Denby traces the history of snark through the ages, starting with its invention as personal insult in the drinking clubs of ancient Athens, tracking its development all the way to the age of the Internet, where it has become the sole purpose and style of many media, political, and celebrity Web sites. Snark releases the anguish of the dispossessed, envious, and frightened; it flows when a dying class of the powerful struggles to keep the barbarians outside the gates, or, alternately, when those outsiders want to take over the halls of the powerful and expel the office-holders. Snark was behind the London-based magazine Private Eye, launched amid the dying embers of the British empire in 1961; it was also central to the career-hungry, New York-based magazine Spy. It has flourished over the years in the works of everyone from the startling Roman poet Juvenal to Alexander Pope to Tom Wolfe to a million commenters snarling at other people behind handles. Thanks to the grand dame of snark, it has a prominent place twice a week on the opinion page of the New York Times. Denby has fun snarking the snarkers, expelling the bums and promoting the true wits, but he is also making a serious point: the Internet has put snark on steroids. In politics, snark means the lowest, most insinuating and insulting side can win. For the young, a savage piece of gossip could ruin a reputation and possibly a future career. And for all of us, snark just sucks the humor out of life. Denby defends the right of any of us to be cruel, but shows us how the real pros pull it off. Snark, he says, is for the amateurs.

In the follow-up to Cronus, an American spy travels to London to locate a high-profile missing person, and is faced with terror from the past If they’re going to take you, let them take you with your eyes open. That’s the credo of Clifford Driscoll, the American spy at the center of Snark, the follow-up to William DeAndrea’s Edgar Award–winning Cronus. Driscoll has gone by many names in his short, eventful life, and he’s just borrowed another: that of Jeffrey Bellman, an agent his Russian enemies at Cronus consider dead. As the son of a formidable secret intelligence director, Driscoll/Bellman is used to all kinds of existential ducking and weaving. The new Bellman is sent to England to find Sir Lewis Alfot, a missing former British intelligence chief. He hasn’t even left the London airport, though, before assassins target him. They come courtesy of Leo Calvin, a terrorist Bellman’s dealt with in the past—and Calvin has just kidnapped Alfot as bait. Can Bellman stop Calvin in his tracks, and is Alfot, for his part, as respectable and law-abiding as he seems?

IT began in the swimming pool at Glen Ellen. Between swims it was our wont to come out and lie in the sand and let our skins breathe the warm air and soak in the sunshine. Roscoe was a yachtsman. I had followed the sea a bit. It was inevitable that we should talk about boats. We talked about small boats, and the seaworthiness of small boats. We instanced Captain Slocum and his three years’ voyage around the world in the Spray. We asserted that we were not afraid to go around the world in a small boat, say forty feet long. We asserted furthermore that we would like to do it. We asserted finally that there was nothing in this world we’d like better than a chance to do it. “Let us do it,” we said . . . in fun. Then I asked Charmian privily if she’d really care to do it, and she said that it was too good to be true. The next time we breathed our skins in the sand by the swimming pool I said to Roscoe, “Let us do it.” I was in earnest, and so was he, for he said: “When shall we start?”

The Snark had two masts and was 43 feet long at the waterline, and on it London claims to have spent thirty thousand dollars. The snark was primarily a sailboat, however, it also had an auxiliary 70-horsepower engine. It was further equipped with one lifeboat. In 1906, Author Jack London began to build a 45-foot yacht on which he planned a round-the-world voyage, to last seven years. After many delays, Jack and Charmian London and a small crew sailed out of San Francisco Bay on April 23, 1907, bound for the South Pacific

It’s impossible to go a full day without using snark, so why fight it? Snark is everywhere, from television to movies to everyday life. This lively collection provides hours of entertainment—better than an Etch A Sketch, and more fun than Silly Putty! At the heart of it, being in a state of snark can be one of the most useful tools at one’s disposal and hence (yes, I used “hence”), a powerful way to get what you want. With snark, you can catch people completely off-guard, and royally piss them off. Included here is the Snark Hall of Fame, the Best Snarky Responses to Everyday Dumbassness, and much more. It’s a book that will make you laugh. It’s a book that will make someone else cry. It’s a book every student of the American psyche (that’s all of us, Sparky) needs to have. Let loose. Let your inner anger become a positive rather than a negative, but most of all, have fun. (Yeah, like that’s something you know how to do.)

The Cruise of the Snark is a non-fictional, illustrated book by Jack London chronicling his sailing adventure in 1907 across the south Pacific in his ketch the Snark. Accompanying London on this voyage was his wife Charmian London and a small crew.A history of what was once viewed as the heart of the American city. Urban historian Robert Fogelson gives an account of how downtown - and the way Americans thought about it - changed between 1880 and 1950. Recreating battles over subways and skyscrapers, the introduction of elevated highways and parking bans, and other controversies, this work offers a perspective on downtown's rise and fall.