A few weeks ago, I read this in comments at Pandagon, from one emjaybee, and it still makes me chortle:
Camille Paglia is the Crazy Cat Lady of feminism.
What the hell, I’ll stick with the feminist snark: here’s ginmar’s take on a film called Dragonstorm, a made-for-cable fantasy from 2004.
The castle looks suspiciously concrete-like and the costumes look Halloween-ish, and the hero has a Heroic Mullet that just screams: He’s supposed to be the eye candy for this flick! Be afraid, be very afraid! Oh, yeah, and there’s a feisty girl who you also get the sinking sensation is supposed to be the love interest for Mulletman, thereby producing a scary crew of mullet-headed kids for God-awful sequels.
I think she nails a film that I haven’t seen, but when IMDB sez
If you enjoyed this title, our database also recommends:
Reign of Fire | Mars Attacks! | The Mummy Returns | Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace | Spawn
you know it’s got to be pretty dire.
So, what’s the best snark you’ve read lately? Epigrams, rants, comics, polished satires, the works. It doesn’t need to be feminist, that was just my pick for the week: I just want to see someone mockworthy mocked mercilessly. Sock it to me.
Thou eunuch of language; thou butcher, imbruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense.
ROBERT BURNS: Memorandum on an unidentified critic, c. 1791
Snark not directed at those in power or with pretensions to power is as misdirected as bird droppings that miss the head and land on the sleeve.
How many world leaders wear mullets I ask youse?
You middle class Fabian socialist suck-ups make me sick.
” Activists in public life, politicians, academics and journalists must make a commitment to restoring the primacy of reason, rejecting a paranoid view of history and ‘telling truth to power’. As he lay dying, Leo Tolstoy reaffirmed his commitment to rationality: ‘Even in the valley of the shadow of death two plus two does not make six’.
When Primo Levi was a prisoner in Auschwitz, he broke off an icicle and sucked it to relieve his thirst, until a guard knocked it out of his hand. ‘Warum?’ (‘Why?’), he asked. The guard replied, ‘Hier ist kein Warum’. (‘Here is no why’). In too many of our public acts, there is no ‘Why?’ Australia’s blind adoption of irrational policies, supine and unquestioning acquiescence, is destructive. Democratic society depends on insisting on answers to the ‘Why?’ questions.
I live in the spirit of Samuel Beckett’s words in his novel The Unnamable:
It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know. I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know. You must go on. I can’t go on.
I’ll go on.”
Yeah, me too Baz.
Last para of Barry Jones Manning Clark lecture 2007
http://www.manningclark.org.au/MCLLecture2007.html
Robwindt- Robbie forgot “nattering nabob of negativism”!
I’d like to nominate Shane Moloney’s address to Scotch College, a superb spray on the private schools from right inside the bunker.
Googling for a copy of it, I found a lot of references to it, with sputtering outrage, by RWDBs. Heh.
Then I remembered the inimitable possum had reproduced it for posterity. Enjoy.
Peter Conrad on Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia in the latest Monthly. It’s a polite but cutting, indeed Jamesian, piece of snark.
Mmmph
That whole commentary on her is inaccurate. She may be a lot of things but Camille Paglia is never incoherant. And Sexual Personae was a great book. It’s really disappointing when the Left respond to criticisms from within and independent thinking with accusations of treachery or insanity.
Yeah, Adrien. Camille’s totally a dog person.
The eminently mockworthy Earl of Sandwich predicted that John Wilkes would die either of the pox or on the gallows.
Wilkes riposted: ‘That depends, my lord, whether I embrace your mistress or your principles.’
Some famous theatre critic or other: ‘I have knocked everything except the knees of the chorus girls, and Nature had anticipated me there.’
Dorothy Parker on Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books: “Tonstant weader thwowed up.”
It’s a couple of weeks old now, but still an awesome piece of snark. Wonkette on rumours that Cheney was on the DC Madam’s list:
And now some old highbrow snark – on June 8, 2005 Edge published this interview with philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein. On July 27, also at Edge, Verena Huber-Dyson slit Goldstein up a treat.
Dave Noon at Lawyers, Guns and Money on Jewel.
That sounds like an intentional dig at the film on IMDB’s part.
The best snark as I understand it is cruel first and funny second, if at all. Polite, never.
The lastsuperpower lot do it best around here at the moment—you know it’s true.