Q&Q contributor Sarah Weinman outlines her troubles with the whole notion of getting books signed in a blog entry on the Guardian site:

The last vestiges of excitement about inscriptions disappeared when I became a freelance writer. Now there were scads of books arriving on my doorstep, more than I knew what to do with and most of which I did not want to read. And even though reading for a living is definitely the best job in the world, it’s still accompanied by the stress of paying the bills and chasing down errant pay-cheques. My snobbery about separating church from state, so to speak, worsened - to the point where I’ve skipped book parties and signings because I’d rather avoid the awkwardness of not having a book to present for a signature. When I heard National Book Award-winning novelist Richard Powers read from his work-in-progress and then explain that he didn’t sign books because it fostered a connection between author and reader that did not exist, I thought it was liberating.

Now I wonder if I’ve taken the proverbial wrong turn at Albuquerque, brought home with embarrassing clarity after a recent interview of an author I admired very much. I’d just shut off the tape after 40 minutes of nervous, disjointed conversation. A copy of his new novel sat to my left, propping up the two sheets of paper filled with questions I’d ended up not asking during the conversation. I’d begun packing up my things, certain the interview hadn’t gone well at all.

And then he asked, “Do you want me to sign your book?”

Instead of saying “yes, thank you” or politely demurring, I mumbled some incoherent twaddle about not wanting a signature because it had no meaning for me. He took my comments with reasonable humour despite the fact that he had ample justification for pointing out my rudeness. On the way out, conducting small talk on autopilot, I cursed myself for my idiocy and pondered why I had been so flippant, why I had missed the boat so badly. The dynamics were odd, yes, and I was more nervous than usual because I was in his home and didn’t want to come off like a blithering fool, but would a signature have really breached the invisible line between professional journalist and enthusiastic fan? Is this “bah, humbug” defence mechanism, adopted as a means of keeping distance, actually detrimental?

Experimental French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet has been dead for only a few weeks, but it looks as if the touching eulogy phase is already over. Salon has just posted an essay by Canadian author Stephen Marche (Shining at the Bottom of the Sea) on Robbe-Grillet’s influence on the modern novel, and it’s clear that Marche wasn’t too sorry to see him go.

I should have felt grief at the news of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s death last week. Instead I recognized in myself only confusing relief. He was a great champion for the innovative novel, so in a way I owe him: I’m a novelist, and while I would be loath to call myself avant-garde, my first book did have marginalia all the way through and my second was a literary anthology of an invented country. But the truth is, Robbe-Grillet was a disaster for innovative novels. After him, literary innovation, experiment with form or anything mildly unconventional came to be seen as pretentious and dry, the proper domain of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and nobody else.

[…]

English fiction in the wake of Robbe-Grillet has become a deliberately old-fashioned activity, like archery or churning your own butter. He represented, through his status as cultural icon of the avant-garde, an entire generation that turned literary experimentation into self-involved blandness. In the ’50s, writers like Nabokov could produce Pale Fire or Lolita and feel themselves part of the mainstream of literary culture. After the ’60s, after Robbe-Grillet, anyone who experimented in fiction was being consciously marginal, or at least countercultural.

This Quillblogger, for one, tends to agree with Marche’s overall sentiments, but he seems a little misguided in pinning everything on poor Robbe-Grillet, especially when he makes groaner statements like this:

The relief I felt when I heard about Robbe-Grillet’s death was also partly hope. Now we can go on, I was thinking.

The comments section following the piece is worth a read, too, if only for a number of strong counter-arguments.

Defences of the old-skool paper-and-ink book against the nefarious Borg-like proponents of the e-book too often sound, for all their passion and sincerity, as if they should be read aloud by Wilfred Brimley, or even Andy Rooney . Call it a fatal folksiness. This piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, listing all the ways in which paperbacks have it over e-books, is not really any different, though it does point out an important advantage possessed paper books: their stick-aroundedness.

For those of us who read books (I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea but it should be) there’s nothing quite like:

• Rediscovering an old friend of the dustier shelves and getting reacquainted (Catch-22);
• Lending a book to a friend because you think they will enjoy it (Darkly Dreaming Dexter);
• Getting it back;
• Giving copies of your favourite books (To Kill A Mockingbird, Lord Of The Flies, No Country For Old Men, anything by Chuck Palahniuk) to your children and hoping they’ll get as much joy out of them as you did. Then maybe, one day, they’ll take it down from their bookshelf, pass it on to their children and say, “My Dad gave me this.” It’s just as Kahlil Gibran wrote: “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.” And if, like Robin Hood, you can attach a little written note to your arrow, all the better.

Try doing that with an e-book.

Fair enough. Though it should be pointed out that the ability to be leant out and passed on is far less a boon for publishers of books than it is for readers. Just saying.

“Few people who spend much time in the literary world emerge without at least one paranoid conspiracy theory,” writes Mark Lawson in The Guardian. Hard to disagree with that. His own theory as to what ails publishing is equally hard to dispute: “Increasingly, judgments involve not literary quality but commercial prospects.”

Though he’s referring specifically to the situation in the U.K., Lawson’s gloomy take on the current state of literary publishing is easily applied to the North American scene:

At the Christmas parties, many publishers were talking guiltily about new books by authors you might have heard of – winner of a Whitbread 20 years ago, writer of that book that became that film – that they have been forced to turn down because marketing was alarmed. This has happened largely because of a shift in the priorities of libraries, which used to be a guaranteed haven for several thousand copies of hardbacks that take a bit of brain work, but which are now rapidly ceding shelf-space to Citizens Advice Bureau leaflets or DVDs. And pressure on leisure time has made both producers and consumers of entertainment reluctant to sample a product that does not have some advance buzz.

None of this is particularly shocking, and at times it’s hard to see what Lawson’s point is beyond “we’re all doomed,” but still, it’s a cheery way to start the new year, isn’t it?

Perhaps in conjunction with the 10th anniversary of blogging, Guy Gavriel Kay has a piece in this past weekend’s Globe and Mail Books section about the perils facing authors in the digital age.

Gavriel Kay has a strong Web following himself and has been known to write blog-like diaries in conjunction with book tours, but that doesn’t mean he likes any of it. Overall, he believes the proliferation of chatter online has led to a decline in privacy.

For some of us, no context is “limited” any longer. That is the point I’m offering for consideration. And “some of us” can be pretty extensive. This isn’t about Brad Pitt or Amy Winehouse. Ask any high school student whose pratfall is recorded by a classmate’s camera phone and posted to YouTube. Or the microcelebrity (a nice term I first saw in Wired magazine) snapped while at a party looking less-than-sober, with the photo online immediately, to derision-inducing effect.

We are, in other words, always “on” now, at least potentially, always in a wider public than might appear to be the case, and it compels adjustments, and some regret.

Here, for example, is how he reacted when approached by four Yale students “with questions about other writers and their books”:

And I looked at them and “saw” four blogs, with links to a plenitude of others. Given the ease of searching blogs now - for my name, or those of the queried writers - it was suddenly impossible to treat this as a quiet exchange of thoughtful literary opinion. I was as careful as a politician in a scrum, all of us with teacups in hand in a beautiful room.

Now, Gavriel Kay may have a general point about the erosion of privacy in the wired world. But it’s difficult to understand his timid reaction given the students’ benign and unpersonal line of questioning. After all, a writer’s “thoughful literary opinion” is unlikely to come back to haunt him, even if it is circulated online. As Martin Amis pointed out in a recent essay, “What you say about something is never your last word on any subject.” Fear of being overheard certainly hasn’t kept Amis from running his mouth.

The answer is “yes,” according to Bits, The New York Times’s tech blog:

For years it was impossible to even suggest that Amazon buy eBay because eBay’s market value was three or four times that of Amazon. And there was good reason for that: EBay’s margins have been far higher because it simply moves bits around, while Amazon has to move boxes (and take the risk of owning inventory it can’t sell).

Now the tables are turning. Amazon is in favor on Wall Street. Its shares are up 150 percent over the last year, giving it a market value of $38 billion. EBay’s stock has been flat for a year, and it is now worth only a little more than Amazon at $45 billion.

Amazon has been improving its margins, in part because it is increasingly acting as a broker for goods sold by other merchants (and doing a better job for new merchandise than eBay stores or eBay’s Shopping.com). Amazon’s margins, to be fair, have been hurt because it is paying for a lot of two-day shipping under its Amazon Prime program. Amazon also has a wild card in its growing sideline business of selling storage and processing services to other Web businesses.

The real question, as far as we’re concerned, is, “Should some restless and massively rich tech company looking for a little lit-cachet buy Quillblog?” The answer to that is also “yes,” provided that we are guaranteed total editorial freedom, paid handsomely and by the word, and that each contributor is provided with a summer residence located near water.

Let the bidding begin.

Reactions to Amazon’s new e-reader generally fall into two opposing camps: on the one hand, there are those who are shocked and appalled at the very notion, while others believe a wonderful new era has dawned. (We suppose a third camp could be made of people who don’t really care one way or the other.)

A cautious pro-Kindle article in the Los Angeles Times includes quotes from some publishing notables, including the New York Review of Books’s Jason Epstein and authors Cynthia Ozick and Jonathan Franzen, who are heavily in the anti-Kindle camp. Franzen’s thoughts on the whole notion of e-reading, it must be said, make him look less like a defender of the simple virtues of the perfectbound, and more like a pretentious twit:

“People who care about literature care about substance and permanence […] The essence of electronics is mutability and transience. I can see travel guides and Michael Crichton novels translating into pixels easily enough. But the person who cares about Kafka wants Kafka unerasable.
Am I fetishizing ink and paper? Sure, and I’m fetishizing truth and integrity too.”

[…]

“The difference between Shakespeare on a BlackBerry and Shakespeare in the Arden Edition is like the difference between vows taken in a shoe store and vows taken in a cathedral.”

There are a couple of points to be made here, while remaining Kindle-neutral: vows made in a shoe store mean just as much as those made in a cathedral (a point Matthew Yglesias makes in his blog at TheAtlantic.com); most people read Shakespeare in cheap, ratty, paperback student editions, not the Arden, and they are not any worse off for it; a lot of people listen to music on their iPods via files that are mutable and transient, but that doesn’t mean Beethoven and Bob Dylan and Kanye West and The Arcade Fire are themselves erasable. The portability of the medium does not necessarily have a retroactive impact on the creator of the content. If that were true, then this Quillblogger would be forced to apologize to the families of all the authors left behind on buses and streetcars or dropped in the bath and ruined.

Not that genuine, unpretentious criticisms of the Kindle itself are not being made. Even if one is to accept the near-blasphemous idea that words can be read on a screen as well as on paper, Amazon’s new device has some glaring shortcomings. The latest to be discovered is that, in some cases, the texts being offered for the reader are incomplete.

Here’s blogger Marc Rochkind on his own experience with the Kindle:

The device itself works fine. Yes, the screen could be more readable and it’s awkward to handle because the previous- and next-page buttons are much too big. (You can’t grab the device by its edges.)

I finished reading my first book on the Kindle yesterday (The Kite Runner), and the experience was fine. I really like the ability to preview any book by reading the first three chapters. Web access is clumsy because most web sites expect a much wider screen and clicking on links is roundabout and flakey, but it does work, it’s very fast, and it doesn’t depend on WiFi. Buying even best sellers for $10 or less is a great deal, as is the free web access.

But the problem is that the books are incomplete. I started the sample of my second book, Under the Banner of Heaven, and I noticed that the footnotes, marked with an asterisk in the text, were missing. (You’re supposed to be able to select them as hyperlinks, but they weren’t connected to anything.)

I checked another book I had in paper form, Einstein: His Life and Universe, and the only footnote that I could find in the sample seemed to be linked, although I couldn’t actually access it since it wasn’t part of the sample. Fair enough.

But The Path Between the Seas failed. A footnote was marked with an asterisk, but not linked.

I queried Amazon’s very responsive Customer Service, and they responded (on a Sunday!) with this: “Kindle Editions are electronic versions based on the original publication issued by the publishers. Occasionally, conversion of that content for reading on Kindle may require modification of content, layout, or format, including the omission of some images and tables and in this case footnotes.”

Well, I don’t want to read Kindle Editions, whatever they are. I want to read the books as written.

From The Guardian:

The inanities of the internet have seduced a generation, and we live in a fragmenting culture where people read nothing and know nothing of the world, the new Nobel laureate novelist Doris Lessing warned yesterday.

Lessing, described by the Nobel committee as “that epicist of the female experience”, has been in poor health, and the £750,000 Nobel prize for literature was presented yesterday in London, while a recording of her acceptance speech was relayed to the Swedish Academy hall in Stockholm. Her tone was profoundly pessimistic. Although she is still working hard at the age of 87, and she insisted the world would always need stories and storytellers, she also warned: “Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books. We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned, and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing.

Though we’re fairly sure that well-educated know-nothings existed long before the Net, and though we happen to think that questioning certainties can be a very good thing, we take her point – especially when it comes to houses without books.

As it does every year, The Globe and Mail’s book section published its “Globe 100″ this weekend, a list of the 100 top-reviewed books of the year (with some exceptions: no anthologies were included, for example). Any year-end list engenders much discussion, both for and against, and the Globe’s is no exception. (For the record, we at Q&Q welcome any and all comments on our own “Books of the Year” list, published in our December issue.)

Dan Wells at Biblioasis shares his own thoughts on the Globe list on the press’s blog. Having had a number of books favourably reviewed in the paper, Wells was counting on one or two Biblioasis titles appearing on the list, but it was not to be.

I’m not going to lie to you: I was a bit disappointed. I’ve just finished writing my first Canada Council Block Grant this past week, and I could have used the pick-me-up. Grant writing, I’ve discovered over the last few years, is one of the primary functions of a Canadian publisher; though I’m now writing about 10 -12 a year between press and magazine, they don’t seem to get any easier. I find the whole experience both depressing, frustrating and exhausting. As I’ve said elsewhere, there are times I feel more like a minor functionary in the literary bureaucracy than a publisher, and this week — paring down my contribution to Canadian literature, my artistic vision and editorial excellence, my management and 3-5 year plan to approximately 1500 words — I was feeling particularly bureaucratized.

But it’s also not Martin Levin’s job to give me a timely pick-me-up. It’s his job, in this section, to list the 100+ books he and his crew considered among the best of 2007, and if Biblioasis titles couldn’t crack that line-up, in their opinion, than they shouldn’t be there. I might respectfully disagree — and, trust me, I do — but that’s about as far as it goes.

What gets Wells’ goat, however, is what he sees is as a backhandedly condescending comment in Martin Levin’s editor’s column about the list. (”Have we given small presses their due? This year, I would say: Probably not.”)

What sticks in my craw a bit is what seems to me the underlying assumption of Levin’s example. It suggests that quote-unquote small presses operate on some different, likely lesser, level. That the criteria used to judge a book published by a smaller house is not the same — and may need a touch more generosity — than that of the larger presses. We’re the country cousins and provincials who don’t know what all the silverware is for and drink from the finger bowl. I fear it indicative of some belief that quote-unquote small presses need to be, in some fashion, propped up. That their best books can’t stand up on their own.

Guardian scribe Richard Lea has written a longish piece about the dearth of translated works in the English book publishing market.

In any library or bookshop, the vast majority of books on the shelves are by authors writing in English. In stark contrast to publishing throughout the rest of the globe, translated fiction accounts for only a tiny fraction of the books published in the English-speaking world. In Germany 13% of books are translations. In France it’s 27%, in Spain 28%, in Turkey 40% and in Slovenia 70%, but in Britain and America the best estimates suggest that the fraction of books on the shelves which started off in another language is somewhere around two per cent.

Just to interrupt here for second, how much do these stats really mean? It may well be that smaller countries like Slovenia and Turkey just don’t have as extensive (or well-supported) a literary scene as Britain or the U.S., requiring the importation of more foreign authors. But back to the piece:

Translators also suffer from a lack of status […] Translation is considered by many universities to be insufficiently significant or original to add lustre to an academic CV, while publishers routinely sweep evidence of translation off the covers of books. “It’s weird,” says Allen. “There’s no stigma attached to being an actor rather than a playwright, or a pianist rather than a composer, but there’s this horrible stigma attached to being a translator.”

Can we interrupt again? Is there really “a horrible stigma” attached to being a translator? They surely suffer from a general lack of recognition, but they’re not exactly the damned. And there’s something weird, too, about the attempt to liken the art of translation to the art of acting or playing the piano. Yes, all three jobs are “interpretive,” but theatre and music require actors and musicians to bring a work to life. A novel does not need such mediation; we value the art of writing specifically because it is a direct communion between author and reader. Consequently, translations are always going to fall just short of the ideal. Does that mean translations aren’t worth doing? Of course not. But to deny that there’s something just-slightly-less-than-desirable about them is pointless.

In any case, the most level-headed commentator in Lea’s piece is probably Bloomsbury’s Bill Swainson, an enthusiast for literature in translation who published W.G. Sebald and Javier Cercas, among others.

He’s “sceptical” of figures suggesting that only around two per cent of books in the U.K. are translations. “I think the way to look at it is: ‘Are the good books coming out in the rest of the world finding their way into English, and in good translations?’,” he suggests. “And I think the answer is, ‘Yes, a great many are’.”

Here in Canada, of course, there’s a whole other kettle of fish: are enough of our French-language authors translated into English? Thoughts, anyone?

Two weeks ago, it was writers under 40 who were being unfairly denied their fair share of the CanLit pie (or tourtière). This week, it is authors of literary non-fiction who are being left behind, writes Ken McGoogan in The Globe and Mail. We get excited about the big fiction prizes, but pay little attention to the efforts of fact-based scribes.

But McGoogan has a plan to end this disparity:

Going forward requires a slow-motion, two-step action plan. First step: We divide fact-based literature into two broad categories - narrative non-fiction and polemical non-fiction. The first includes biography, memoir, travel, popular history, true crime – you get the idea; the second comprises thesis-driven works, artful jeremiads – political, scientific, philosophical. Along these lines, we reorganize our book world.

Second step: We abandon “non-fiction.” Yes, you read that correctly. We cease to define countless literary works by what they are not, and in relation to some other genre. As a corollary, recognize that, as a concept, “creative non-fiction” has taken us as far as it can. Let it go. End result: We will be left with two fact-based literary genres, Narrative and Polemic, both on par with Fiction.

Again: Where today we have two main categories, Fiction and Non-fiction, tomorrow we have three: Fiction, Narrative, and Polemic. And that should translate into three G-Gs of equal prestige, three Giller Prizes, three Main Events – and 10 times the engagement.

Radical? If anything, McGoogan’s plan is too modest. If new names and further subdividing are the answer, then why stop at three? The category of fiction alone could be broken down into Meta-fiction, Bildungsroman, Tri-generational saga, Roman à clef, Semi-Autobiographical Novel About Author’s Divorce, Promising First Novel, Novel That Is Really a Short Story Collection in Disguise, Novel That Is One-Third Too Long, Novel That Everyone Talks About But Nobody Really Enjoys, etc.

On the non-fiction side, we could have Self-Serving Political Memoir, Addiction Memoir, First-Time Parent Memoir, Ponderous Tome By Respected Intellectual, Quirky Subway Read by Young Hipster, Book About How Some Commonplace Object Changed Everything, Book That Would Have Made a Better Magazine Article….

We can keep this going for as long as Jack Rabinovitch’s bank account holds out.

Stephen Marche, author of the recent Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, having recently returned to Toronto from Brooklyn with his wife (Sarah Fulford, Toronto Life’s editor-in-waiting), rails in the Toronto Star against a literary culture he finds to be “so, so old: It felt like moving from a frenetic day care to an old folks’ home.” Whereas Brooklyn’s literary culture was young and hip and sparky and whiz-bang-wow, Toronto’s readers and writers need a shawl when it’s nippy outside.

It’s not just that young people write in Brooklyn; writing itself is considered a youthful activity. It’s the kind of thing that 32-year-old men who go to work by skateboard do. Literature in Toronto is something your smartest aunt does once she’s cozied up in her favourite sweater. And the work therefore is less exciting.

The popular novels here are generally ponderous, draped in sanctimony over suffering and history, melodramas in exotic settings. One thing you are not going to get out of a novel on the Giller list or indeed the best-seller list is a good laugh.

Marche specifically mentions Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers as prototypically youthful Brooklyn authors whose books are typified by their “obsession with traumatized children.” (Some might call that “arrested development,” but never mind.)

In Canada, however, everything is just dullsville, man:

Setting is everything in Canadian fiction. Plots don’t matter much. There are only a few plots anyway: recovering from historical or familial trauma through the healing power of whatever (most common); uncovering historical or family secrets and thereby achieving redemption (close second); coming of age (distant third place).

The characters are mostly the same: The only thing that changes is the location of the massacred grandmother, what kind of booze the alcoholic father drinks himself into fits with, what particular creed is being revealed, in deft and daring ways, as both beautifully transcendent and oppressive.

And thus another not-very-useful CanLit-crit dichotomy – young and cool versus old and boring – can be added to “urban versus rural” and “experimental versus traditional.” Maybe handing out skateboards and Fantastic Four comics at the next meeting of The Writers’ Union of Canada will help.

This is all fairly boilerplate “Canadian writing’s for squares”-type criticism – Douglas Coupland wrote a similar screed last year for The New York Times. And is the solution to the relative staidness of our books a literary Poochie?

All the same, many of Marche’s criticisms find their mark, and it’s always good to have more authors add their voices to the debate over whether CanLit has entered a golden age or, conversely, gone way offtrack.

Feel free to weigh in with your comments. What are the true dichotomies at play in CanLit? French versus English? Poetry versus fiction? Dog-people versus cat-people?

The Guardian’s book blog currently features a kind of “you go girl” shout-out to Canadian Literature from Jean Hannah Edelstein, a former New Yorker, now Londoner, who discovered the heady joys of CanLit while spending some time in Montreal.

At less than 200 years old, Canada is an infant in national terms: like the bullied younger sibling of a high-achieving elder one, it is often dismissed as a bit innocent, naive and unformed. Robertson Davies, one of Canada’s foremost writers, described it as “a country you worry about” and the prime minister Stephen Harper recently established a cabinet portfolio for “Canadian Identity”, perhaps in an attempt to help the nation define itself on the international landscape as something other than a left-wing, polite America awash in maple syrup.

But though I can’t help but bristle when I come across people being dismissive of Canadian writing - I was disheartened when I worked in publishing to find that “Canadian” is an adjective often used to justify not publishing a book in the UK - I can’t really blame those who overlook CanLit. I was once equally uninformed. Although I grew up a mere 200 miles from the border, which is inches in North American terms, I am sorry to say that I spent very little time even thinking about Canada, much less reading about it, while I lived in the States.

But then I went to study in Montreal, where I was swiftly – within hours – disabused of the south-of-the-border assumption that everyone in Canada is a bit sorry they’re not American. And once I began to tackle my required reading, I realised that my Canadian colleagues were unequivocally correct in their rejection of Americanness: although the world seems to regard Canada as the U.S.’s slightly slow cousin, Canadians are quietly and deservedly smug about their rich and distinctive culture, which includes a distinguished literary canon.

It is perhaps inevitable that this kind of thing will mostly serve to make most readerly/writerly Canadians bristle, too – did they really need to illustrate it with a shot of a prairie, and did she really need to bring up maple syrup? Edelstein’s intentions seem pure enough, but all the same there is  a tone of “don’t be mean to the wimpy kid” about the piece. About Michael Redhill’s Giller-longlisted novel Consolation, Edelstein writes: “Toronto is a perfectly good place to set a novel.” Hey, thanks – so is London!

Still, just to show that we don’t take it seriously, Quillblog has endeavoured to return the favour by writing our own defence of BritLit:

At over a 1,000 years old, Britain is a bit of an old fogey in national terms: like the cranky and forgetful grampa who can’t stop telling you what he did in the war and how much better things were back then, it is often dismissed as hopelessly decadent, tired, and culturally sclerotic. George Bernard Shaw, one of Britain’s foremost writers, said this about his people: “We don’t bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don’t dress well and we’ve no manners.” Britain has long laboured to define itself on the international landscape as something other than a literal-minded and unromantic France awash in sausages and warm beer.

In case you haven’t noticed, Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine, tends to divide critics and political pundits into two camps: those who support her contentious thesis – basically, that Chicago School neoliberals capitalize on natural and social catastrophes – and those who don’t. That divide couldn’t be made more clear than by a spread in today’s National Post, which pairs an excerpt of the book’s opening pages with salty commentary by right-wing columnist Terence Corcoran, who not only counters Klein’s argument but claims its opposite, maintaining that Klein blames Chicago School guru Milton Friedman for what are really “socialism’s failures.” However, what makes the column good reading is Corcoran’s description of the book as a kind of surreal travelogue:

By the end of the book, the Klein shock theory is careening like an out-of-control Bolivian bus on the road to La Paz, Milton Friedman strapped to the hood as a symbolic ornament, her rhetoric and ideas flying off in all directions.

If that’s the case, I can’t wait to get to the end of The Shock Doctrine.

The Post will be running excerpts of the book until Friday, presumably with more accompanying commentary. For more tempered perspectives, see The Globe and Mail’s review (where Todd Gitlin essentially agrees with Klein, but won’t stomach her “tendentiousness” and left-wing romanticism), Q&Q’s review (where Dan Rowe compares the book to Dr. Seuss’s story “The Sneetches,” and lauds Klein for her timeliness), or the Toronto Star’s review (where James Grainger opens with this line: “The Shock Doctrine may be one of the most important non-fiction books aimed at the general reader published in the last decade”).

In the latest o tempora, o mores-type essay about the endangered species known as the newspaper book review, Steve Wasserman writes a (very) long essay for the Columbia Journalism Review. Wasserman is well-placed to comment on the decline of the book review, having served as the Los Angeles Times‘ book editor for almost 10 years, ending in 2005.

Wasserman does not spend the essay tearing his hair out or rending his shirt over our book-hostile times – in fact, he suggests that the erosion of the book review section is neither new nor, in some senses, unwelcome, given how mediocre so many printed reviews can be. He also puts paid to the notion that it is a book section’s unprofitability that dooms it. Book sections have always been unprofitable. What is at least partly to blame for the decline is the anti-intellectual bias firmly in place at most (North) American newspapers. In disdaining book culture, Wasserman writes, newspapers are not only neglecting a solemn cultural duty, etc., but missing an opportunity.

Never before in the whole of human history has more good literature, attractively presented, sold for still reasonably low prices, been available to so many people. You would need several lifetimes over doing nothing but lying prone in a semi-darkened room with only a lamp for illumination just to make your way through the good books that are on offer.

This is, strangely, a story that has not received near the attention it deserves. And yet its implications are large, especially if papers are to have a prayer of retaining readers and expanding circulation. There is money to be made in culture, if only newspapers were nimble and imaginative enough to take advantage of the opportunities that lie all around them.

The whole thing is well worth reading.

Over at the Insider’s Blog on the Random House Canada BookLounge website, Todd Babiak uses an author guest post to talk about book clubs – or, more specifically, his awkwardness at book club meetings. Since publishing The Garneau Block, he’s been invited to appear at several gatherings, he says, and he always overdoes it when it comes to tie-wearing, boob-staring, and hummus-eating.

I always wear a suit, which is always too much. The host invites me in and I sit down in a comfortable chesterfield and smile. As we introduce ourselves, I investigate, by the tone and tenor of their voices, whether any of them disliked the novel. Women in book clubs always seem to be attractive and intelligent, so I worry about being caught checking them out (after two glasses of wine, my gaze tends to linger). And, of course, I worry about eating too much hummus and horrifying these lovely readers with my garlic breath.

Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) has also blogged at the Random House site, and his entries range from the morbidly amusing (increasingly violent sketches he has drawn to accompany his signature in books, and the follow-up entry about how Brits and Canadians respond to his sense of humour versus how Americans respond) to the annoyingly whiny (publicity is hard and journalists are manipulative hacks).

The Canadian Magazines blog is keeping track of the battle between Maclean’s and the Canadian Bar Association in the wake of last week’s interview with Lawyers Gone Bad author Philip Slayton and the subsequent heated reply from the CBA. An editorial in the Aug. 13 edition of Maclean’s (which was also publicized with a press release) maintains that while the editors had some misgivings about the splashy “Lawyers are rats” cover headline, they stand behind it and the issues raised in the story, because (they say) other legal experts have brought them up before.

In an introductory note to the editorial, they also accuse the CBA of leaning on the magazine’s financial backers to force an apology.

Furthermore, the CBA has repeatedly attempted to apply financial pressure to our parent companies, Rogers Publishing and Rogers Communications Inc., in order to force an apology from Maclean’s.

Ken Whyte, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Maclean’s, made the following comments: “That the CBA would refuse to debate the serious issues raised by our piece and instead try to — let’s put the best face on this — use its financial muscle to purchase an apology from us rather confirms the sentiment of our cover line.”

Ouch. Lawyers, back to you.

Meanwhile, in Sunday’s Toronto Star, regular crime fiction reviewer Jack Batten looks at Slayton’s book through the lens of Batten’s own time at the University of Toronto Law School. Batten says he’s seen some legal rats himself, and deems the book “smart and lively.”

The most recent edition of The Times Literary Supplement contains a review of a book/essay entitled (in French) “How to discuss books one hasn’t read.” Written by French literature professor and practising psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard, the book tackles what must surely be a common problem: having to fake one’s way through conversations or writing about great lit one hasn’t read. Don’t feel guilty, Bayard says – you aren’t alone, and society shouldn’t be pressuring you like that anyway.

During a discussion of “literary embarrassment,” Bayard himself confesses to referencing Joyce repeatedly in his teaching, though he hasn’t read Ulysses, and he isn’t alone in his chutzpah, the review says:

Bayard focuses on a scene in Lodge’s novel Changing Places, in which the English academic Philip Swallow initiates his students and fellow academics into a “game of Humiliation,” according to whose rules players have to give the names of great works they have not read: the head of the English department who hasn’t read Paradise Regained is bested by the American academic, Howard Ringbaum, who, in a moment of professional recklessness, confesses to not having read Hamlet. Ringbaum’s mistake, according to Bayard, was to have made this unambiguous confession, for Hamlet is part of what Bayard terms our “virtual” library – works we cannot help but be familiar with. There was simply no need for Ringbaum to be so rash.

As discussed in the review, Bayard focuses on the question of reviewing without reading the works in question:

The most enjoyable chapter is on Balzac’s novel Illusions perdues … in which the hero, Lucien de Rubempré, who has come to Paris to find literary fame and fortune, receives a brisk lesson in the cynical conventions of Parisian literary journalism.… Rubempré, who is full of foolish notions about “la sainte critique,” learns from his more worldly friends that … to read a volume for review would be considered humiliating – it’s a task best left to one’s mistress: the reviewer’s job is to express general opinions about the author in question, opinions that comply with the wishes of one’s editor. Bayard would see this approach to literary journalism as “transgressive”: all opinions, no matter how ill-founded, are valid, and the book has ceased to have importance, “has ceased to exist.” Balzac’s chancers are free to construct their own virtual libraries.

The practice of reviewing a book without having read it inevitably brings Oscar Wilde into the discussion: Wilde (the patron saint of non-readers) recommended six minutes as the proper time to spend reading a book for review, and advocated reviewing as a good way of talking about oneself.

Quillblog should state, for the record, that Q&Q’s reviewers never try this at home.

The argument has been made, with respect to last week’s iPhone Tickle-Me-Elmo Harry Potter midnight madness, that breaking the embargo on the book’s contents just ruins it for readers. According to Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times, however, review embargoes are usually just about money.

Here it’s necessary to distinguish between the newspaper critics and the cyber crooks, who may have posted sections of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the Web. That’s theft, and if we don’t protect the intellectual property of even fabulously wealthy creative people like Rowling, they’ll have less and less incentive to produce the things that entertain and delight us. Her publishers are right to go after these looters with laptops with every lawyer they hire.

Embargoes on reviews and discussions are another matter. All the outrage surrounding this particular book notwithstanding, contemporary publishers impose these blackouts not in the interest of readers but to protect the carefully planned publicity campaigns they create for books on which they have advanced large sums of money.

This is the economic imperative that leads publishers to withhold the contents of even nonfiction manuscripts that contain news that the public has a vital interest in knowing.

It’s also why newspapers, including this one, routinely break those embargoes without any pang of conscience. Our first and most compelling obligation is to our readers’ right to know and not to the commercial interests of publishers.

Rutten goes on to note that the before-the-witching-hour reviews that did appear were very respectful in terms of not giving away the book’s shocker ending, in which Harry discovers that he was a ghost the whole time, the ape-planet was really Earth, soylent green is made out of people, Ron was Keyser Söze, and Hermione was a guy.

Globe and Mail film critic Rick Groen had a feature essay in the weekend paper arguing that books are better than movies or TV. It seems to be a numbers game for Groen: “Over any given year in the movies, when the likes of a Pan’s Labyrinth or a Capote graces the screen, I can maybe see 10 films good enough to qualify as – I’m sorry to have to use the word – art.” Literary fiction, though, apparently produces as many as 20 books per year that deserve the “art” tag.

Groen attributes this to a number of things. First, he argues that the relatively low financial stakes of publishing encourage experimentation (though many experimental writers would probably debate that one). Groen then touches briefly on what really distinguishes literary fiction from all other storytelling – the use of language to mediate experience – but he’s more interested in content, arguing that fiction conveys “a discernible undercurrent of sadness, a recognition that the human heart is always in conflict with itself.”

Of course, that “undercurrent of sadness” should theoretically be capturable in any storytelling medium. And there are plenty of literary novels about a heart in conflict not with itself but with other people’s mean or insensitive hearts. Quillblog agrees with much of what Groen has to say, but wishes he’d focused more on the language thing.

Though graphic novels have attained a strong level of acceptance among traditional prose readers, comic stores still don’t seem to be making an effort to embrace those readers. As Douglas Wolk argues in an essay on Salon, “comics culture” is still just as closed-off and unwelcoming to the casual reader as it’s ever been, and, as he sees it, it’s time for things to change.

Over the last half century, comics culture has developed as an insular, self-feeding, self-loathing, self-defeating fly-trap. A lot of the people who hit their local comics store every Wednesday think of comics readers as some kind of secret, embattled fellowship. (That’s why most comics stores are deeply unfriendly places: everything about them says, “You mean you don’t know?” In some of them, even new pamphlets and books are sealed in plastic before they go out on the shelves; if you don’t walk into the store knowing what you want, you’re not going to find out.) It’s a poisonous mind-set for any number of reasons, the biggest one being that to enjoy a comic book, you either have to be a Comics Person or be able to explain why you’re not really a Comics Person.

As Wolk sees it, comics fans continue to act insular because they’re still a little insecure about the aesthetic worth of the medium.

A lot of comics readers are unhealthily attached to the idea that everyone else thinks what they do is kind of trashy and disreputable, and that they have to prove their favorite leisure activity worthy of respect — to show the world that they were right all along. […] It’s probably time to let go of that strain of earnest defensiveness. The snobbery of the rest of American culture toward comics is, if not entirely gone, dissipating quickly.

The Guardian is running an abridged version of a review by Sarah Bradford of Tina Brown’s Diana Chronicles, a piece that was originally written for The Spectator but rejected for unspecified reasons.

Bradford wrote her own book Diana, so her criticism of Brown’s book might be seen as too biased. But certainly her charges that the writing is schlocky seem to be supported by quotes such as this one, describing Diana the last time Brown saw her: “The gently flushed skin of her face wasn’t just peachy; it was softer than a child’s velveteen rabbit.”

The books’ sins run from distastefulness to sentimental drivel, Bradford writes:

I find [Brown’s] comment that Charles would have welcomed back a crippled Diana utterly grisly. “For the Prince there could have been something redeeming in having his ex-wife return to him in a condition of dependence.” And Brown sums up the failure of the French doctors to save Diana with a true sob-sister line: “This time Diana’s broken heart would never mend …”

The review also seems to contain a rather thinly veiled accusation of plagarism:

All the old stories are repeated. Some of them are eerily reminiscent of stories in my Diana book. The story of the Queen’s private secretary informing Her Majesty that Prince Charles was sleeping with Camilla is the same one as in both my book on the Queen and my book on Diana, which I based on my interview with the courtier in question.

Let’s hope the young princes have better luck remembering their mother and inspiring some goodwill at the rock concert they are staging on her birthday this weekend in London.

Zach Wells – poet, Canadian Notes and Queries review editor, and frequent Q&Q contributor – reacts on his blog to a Books in Canada essay entitled “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” by The Malahat Review editor John Barton. Barton says he is saddened and confused by the lack of poetry submissions he’s receiving of late; Wells replies, in effect, that the Malahat makes suitors jump through too many hoops for too little reward.

Wells takes a spin through the myriad reasons he doesn’t submit to the Malahat: no electronic submissions (and SASEs required for the written ones), a likely sluggish turnaround time by the editors (who discourage simultaneous submissions), and little financial recompense. All of that, Wells concludes, is compounded by the fact that no one really reads the journals anyway.

His suggestion? Poetry editors need to stop overfarming the fields and get out there and grow some new potatoes – er, solicit more submissions.

Y’know, if I was an editor and I wasn’t getting many high quality unsolicited submissions, I might just, oh, I don’t know, SOLICIT SOME SUBMISSIONS!! If you’re a poetry editor, part of the job description, it seems to me, is scouting, keeping an ear to the ground and seeking out work that will distinguish your publication from all the others. Boohoo, no one sends us stuff anymore, what are we to do? What will become of our poor little magazine? Why are my potatoes so puny and few? Oh well, guess I’ll go out and get the ploughing done before winter.

Wells also recommends openness to e-mail submissions, and improving web presence in order to increase readership. Hey, the Malahat says on its website that it has a Facebook group – isn’t that enough? It’s good enough for Michael Winter…

Heather Smith has posted a witty piece on Bookslut about the recent vogue for deluxe, multi-volume, hardcover collections of old comic strips, which she traces back to Fantagraphics and its Seth-designed Peanuts volumes. As Smith concedes, many of these collections are quite lovely and are enormously appealing to adult collectors, but she wonders what will become of the children who first encounter these old strips in such reputable formats.

Pardon me while I get out my corncob pipe and reminisce here, but in my day, comics were cheap. Skinny paperbacks like Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, and Family Circle were four for a dollar at ubiquitous used bookshops. […] What would it be like, as a kid, to first encounter comics in a format that suggests that comics are actually important? […] The tide of comics as something endlessly disposable is receding before our very eyes, and as we look ahead, the future looks suspiciously like a fluttering mountain range of sewn bindings and velveteen ribbon bookmarks. So how is this strange thing called “dignity” conveyed? Does a velveteen bookmark a classic make? Are we ready for the deluxe leatherette edition of Beetle Bailey?

After expounding further on the topic, Smith takes a closer look at the relative value of several recent collections, including the aforementioned Peanuts volumes, Hank Ketchum’s Complete Dennis the Menace 1951-1954, The Complete Far Side 1980-1994, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, and Daniel Clowes’ Ice Haven.

According to The Guardian, Philip Pullman, bestselling author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, has taken aim at modern children’s television programming.

Pullman castigated broadcasters for sacrificing high-quality programmes in favour of those that yield more marketing opportunities. “Children are regarded by broadcasters as a marketing opportunity at best, a dangerous and feral threat at worst, and an expensive nuisance otherwise,” Pullman said. “This social poison goes much deeper than broadcasting, of course, but it’s particularly visible there.

“There used to be … a sense of responsibility among broadcasters: a feeling that this extraordinary medium … should be used to make things better, richer, more interesting for those who made up the audience - especially for children,” he added.

He won’t get much of an argument out of us about marketing-driven kids’ TV, though we do think it would have been more effective had Philip delivered his rant to, say, Big Bird. Perhaps in song.

Last Sunday, author Mark Helprin wrote an op-ed for the New York Times arguing that writers and their descendents should own the rights to their works in perpetuity, not just for 70 years after their deaths. The article has attracted a lot of online debate in the days since, and yesterday Gawker posted an “Ask an Expert” interview with Maud Newton, in which Newton haughtily dismisses most of Helprin’s assertions. The gist of her position is as follows:

Authors hold copyright for life plus 70 years, meaning that their heirs reap the benefits of exclusive rights for seven full decades after they die. But the purpose of exclusive rights like copyright and patent — both of which flow from the same twenty-seven words of the Constitution — is “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” not to fund vacations for John Grisham’s great-great-grandchildren.

While we understand the grossness of celebrity spawn leeching off their parents’ life work, we have to wonder why authors should be treated any different from real estate moguls, say, or corporate bigwigs. Why do they get to pass on the benefits of their life’s work in perpetuity and not lowly artists?

One of the best counter-arguments we’ve seen was made by Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor and copyright expert. He has created a wiki-style page for the express purpose of rebutting Helprin’s argument, and in it he makes this fairly convincing point:

Physical property, such as real estate, is a finite resource that operates as a zero sum game. And the laws regarding physical property treat it as such. Intellectual works are abstract concepts and do not naturally operate as zero sum games.

(Thanks to the Chronicle of Higher Education for the Lessig link.)

Apropos of Don Delillo’s new 9/11-themed novel, Falling Man, Jerome Weeks wonders, on his Book/Daddy blog, whether such a thing is even necessary.

Why do we expect our writers to produce the “Great 9/11 novel” anyway?

Has there ever been a “great” Pearl Harbor novel — the event most often compared to the Towers’ collapse? From Here to Eternity is about all that memory can conjure up, and it surely doesn’t qualify as great.

[…]

I’m not in any hurry for a fictional re-conception of 9/11. There are plenty of ways to grapple with it in book form already — politically, strategically, even in its engineering and city planning. And we still don’t even really know how the war in Iraq will be viewed by history: idiot-devious neo-con escapade or valiant first beachhead for re-shaping the region on a more egalitarian model?

Must the novel compete in the news-media information overload? Or does it risk irrelevance if it doesn’t? Many novels offer a retreat from the shouting match, a solace, but if they can also cut through the din, is it necessary to demand they do it in such a newsworthy fashion? Can’t it still participate meaningfully in the culture without being … so immediately pertinent? It’s as if we want the damned things to be useful and relevant, to help us now.

George Orwell, in his essay “Confessions of Book Reviewer,” wrote that “until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.” He saw this mostly despairingly, with the professional reviewer wasting precious time and words on unworthy books and ultimately “pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time.”

Joe Queenan, however, views the ever-growing pile of crappy books as something to be celebrated. In an essay in The New York Times, Queenan contends that bad books should be seen for what they are: the life of the party in an often solemn and overly serious field.

Most of us are familiar with people who make a fetish out of quality: They read only good books, they see only good movies, they listen only to good music, they discuss politics only with good people, and they’re not shy about letting you know it. They think this makes them smarter and better than everybody else, but it doesn’t. It makes them mean and overly judgmental and miserly, as if taking 15 minutes to flip through The Da Vinci Code is a crime so monstrous, an offense in such flagrant violation of the sacred laws of intellectual time-management, that they will be cast out into the darkness by the Keepers of the Cultural Flame. In these people’s view, any time spent reading a bad book can never be recovered. They also act as if the rest of humanity is watching their time sheets.

Such prissy attitudes are neurotic and self-defeating. Bad books are an essential part of life, as entertaining and indispensable as bad clothing (ironic polyester shirts), bad music (John Tesh at Red Rocks, Phil Collins anywhere), bad trends (metrosexuality, not using toilet paper for a year in order to “help” the environment) and bad politicians (take your pick). I started reading extremely bad books as a boy, when my beloved but slightly unhinged Uncle Jerry lent me the classic Reds-under-the-beds screed “None Dare Call It Treason,” and have been reading them ever since.

Of course, even Orwell admitted as much, in another essay entitled, appropriately enough, “Good Bad Books”:

All of these are definitely absurd books, books which one is more inclined to laugh AT than WITH, and which were hardly taken seriously even by their authors; yet they have survived, and will probably continue to do so. All one can say is that, while civilization remains such that one needs distraction from time to time, “light” literature has its appointed place; also that there is such a thing as sheer skill, or native grace, which may have more survival value than erudition or intellectual power.

New literary press Biblioasis has posted an excerpt on its blog from editor John Metcalf’s upcoming memoir, a kind of mauvaises-lettres work entitled Shut Up He Explained. (The title is a lift from Ring Lardner, and, in the case of this book, probably an excellent example of truth-in-advertising.)

In the excerpt, Metcalf gives his thoughts on the oeuvre of one Margaret Atwood – no points for guessing he’s unimpressed. He is especially incensed at Atwood’s apparent belief in a dichotomy of “craft” and “message” in literary fiction, with greater importance residing in the latter, which is like waving a red flag in front of someone like Metcalf, who tends to almost fetishize craft in his voluminous critical writings.

Plus, you know, Atwood’s a dame:

All too often [Atwood’s] messages seem to me to urge a raucous and almost hysterical feminism. Bill Hoffer used to grump that Atwood’s work was most appreciated “by girls of the most unpromising kind”. Doubtless less perceptive criticism than irritated misogyny. Yet the work does have designs on us. She does indeed want to send us messages. And like telemarketing, they’re messages I’m not interested in listening to. It comes down to a question of artistry. I would stand, rather, with William Faulkner who is supposed to have said to a lady who asked him what message he had wished his book to send that had he wanted to send messages he would have used Western Union.

The Guardian has posted a blog by William Skidelsky in which he takes issue with the seeming lack of comedy in modern fiction. The impetus for the essay was the list of 21 top young authors unveiled by Granta magazine last month.

…of the 21 best young novelists in America, not one is producing work that makes people laugh. Isn’t this more than a little peculiar? It isn’t as if the comic novel doesn’t have a distinguished pedigree. Many of the acknowledged greats have been comedies, from Cervantes’ Don Quixote in the early 17th century, via Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in the 20th. So what’s going on?

Skidelsky’s column leaves you with the impression that there aren’t a lot of respected comic novelists around right now, which is a dubious assertion. Has he never read Tom Perrotta? Ken Kalfus? Not to mention Mark Haddon, Jincy Willett, Miriam Toews, Marina Lewycka, etc, etc. But if Skidelsky is simply trying to say that “serious” novelists get more respect, then the argument begins to look a little more plausible.

It’s when he tries to explain why we place a higher value on serious literature that he really begins to sound bogus. Quoting heavily from an essay by writer Julian Gough, Skidelsky argues that there are two main reasons: 1) That “far more tragedies survived from ancient times than comedies, and since many western writers have taken the Greeks as their model, this has resulted in tragedy being favoured over comedy.” And 2) Christianity.

The one church spoke in one voice, drawn from one book, and that book was at heart tragic. All of human history, from the creation, was a story that climaxed with the sadistic murder of a man by those he was trying to save. Essentially, the church had to crush the comic impulse because it was so vulnerable to it. If people had started making jokes about Jesus, the entire edifice would have collapsed.

So if it weren’t for Christianity, we would all be worshiping Aristophanes, not Jesus? And instead of wearing crucifixes around our necks we’d be wearing rubber chickens?
If there is a shortage of comic novels these days – and that’s a big if – the reasons are probably a lot less fancy than those supplied by Skidelsky. Isn’t it more likely that, in North America, we are just so up to our eyeballs in comedy that novelists can’t help but feel that the comedic terrain is already well-covered? When every ad on TV is attempting to be a 30-second comedy classic, when every billboard displays a clever double-entendre, when every politician feels the need to appear on Jon Stewart to appeal to the under-40 generation, maybe a little more seriousness is finally in order.

One of the 21 authors that Skidelsky erroneously labels “unhumorous” is Jonathan Safran Foer, who spends at least the first half of Everything is Illuminated in flat-out humor mode. But then the novel takes an abrupt turn about halfway through. Quillblog doesn’t have the book at hand, but we recall the kooky Ukrainian narrator, Alex, suddenly announcing that he is tired of treating everything as a joke, that maybe comic detachment isn’t the ultimate attitude to aspire to. And from this point on, Foer himself becomes more serious, and the novel improves immensely for it. This is probably where a lot of young writers are coming from now; they’ve spent their lives being tickled to death, and they’re ready for something more.

In the wake of the massacre at Virginia Tech this week, Salon has posted a fascinating article about what creative writing professors should do when confronted with disturbing works by students. As has been widely reported, the perpetrator of the massacre, Cho Seung-Hui, wrote several scripts for his playwriting class that deeply alarmed the school’s English department faculty. Now, a lot of media pundits are questioning whether faculty could have done more to get Seung-Hui some medical treatment.

But this opens the door to a lot of potential problems, of course, the chief one being that creativity and freedom of speech could be trampled on.

Creative writing teachers have long wrestled with what they should do with students who turn in gruesome stories, as many colleges do not have formal policies about how teachers should respond. Further, there are no set rules for determining whether a story is the product of a febrile artistic imagination or a potentially violent criminal. Or both.

[…]

Creative writing teachers still have to rely on their own imprecise judgment, especially in classes where students may be encouraged to write with intense emotion. What may be one student’s cause for concern may be another’s catharsis, says Michelle Carter, [professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University]. “Sometimes working through rage in that way can be healthy,” she says.