“The upshot, however, is this: snark is a reflexive disorder, whether those who employ it realize it or not; the pointlessness of fiction only comes back to suggest the pointlessness of its commentator. The real question then becomes: If you don’t believe in this, what do you believe in? What do you care about? What is the purpose of this destructive clear-cutting, if you don’t have anything to suggest in its place, save your own career advancement? Reading many reviews these days (ones that aren’t regurgitated press copy, ones that are purportedly “critical”), I have the feeling of dust settling on a razed landscape, in which nothing is growing, in which nothing can grow. And this is what makes me depressed, and then angry, and then invigorated by the possibilities that every wasteland suggests. Like Wood, then, I will find my elation through my disenchantment.”

Heidi Julavits’ enormously influential anti-snark launch essay for The Believer is a piece of writing I just keep coming back to. I find myself less and less impressed by naysaying and carping as time passes. Just get on and do something, anything. In a non directional nike sort of fashion.