Shoring up our base

• David Kipen bemoans the dwindling amount of book coverage in newspapers at Salon.

More of the same drumbeating argument, with some interesting bits.

Instead, strong anecdotal evidence suggests that book reviews fall somewhere near the middle. So why don't editors feel as sentimental about them as they do about plenty of other stories that won't ever knock terrorist attacks or wardrobe malfunctions out of the top 10? For one thing, freelancers contribute most of the copy to newspaper book review sections, and freelancers cost a few extra bucks. For another, trying to publish a review of every halfway interesting new book each week is like trying to review every new video on YouTube. It's beyond hopeless. So why should we blame some harried arts editor for thinking, "That beat's uncoverable. Let's just give up and run sudoku-plus instead."

That editor might almost have a point, if book reviews and the people who write them weren't what biologists like to call an "indicator species." An indicator species is the newt or worm in an ecosystem that nobody much notices until it starts to disappear. And even then, who really misses another polliwog -- until six months later when, suddenly, even the buzzards are dead?

Like it or not, the indicator species for American daily journalism is the book review. Newspapers were cutting book coverage before the current flurry, among other places in Detroit, San Jose and Boston. Without exception, losing their book pages failed to stanch either reader loss or red ink. Were these papers already in trouble before they started cutting book coverage? Of course, but what did their publishers expect by further alienating people who like to read -- the one constituency no newspaper can survive without? Put another way, how can institutions that cover electoral politics be so deaf to every campaign's first commandment, namely, "Shore up your base"?

I wish there was some magic way we could get people to read more, but try to jam something down peoples' throats -- kids, especially -- and they will undoubtedly reject the idea more quickly. Kipen talks at length about the number of different organizations out there designed to increase awareness of the importance of reading, but he stumbles when he gets into hyperbolic doom-and-gloom predictions. Arguments that people read less than they ever have -- I've been hearing that all my life and I just don't think it holds much water. There are lots and lots of people out there with lots of books on their shelves. Still, he's right in that as a country we need to get it back into people's heads that it's cool to be smart and well-informed about as many different topics as possible, and that it's not cool to be a lazy, dumbass moron addicted to fast food and network television.

Context is everything

• Sarah Elizabeth Richards details the unique challenge faced by creative-writing teachers in Salon.

A well-balanced look at how creative writing teachers have to judge the stability of their students, based on their classwork. This was a tricky tightrope to walk across even before the Virginia Tech shootings:

"Traditionally, [instructors] have thought of themselves as nurturing academic or creative faculties. They don't think of themselves as counselor or being warning systems for spotting mental health problems," says Rob Jones, senior vice president and general counsel for claims management and risk research for United Educators, an insurance company for more than 1,000 educational institutions. "We'd like them to think of whether they could be gatekeepers for identifying students at risk."

The company currently is making the rounds at colleges to present and discuss this training scenario: An English professor comes across the worrisome writing of a suicidal student. What should she do? The correct answer, according to Jones, is for the instructor to contact the student affairs office or campus counseling center. "You can't expect an English professor to make those kinds of determinations based on someone's writings," he says. "But they are the ones who have a window into someone's soul."

People seem to be fascinated by the line that separates fact and fiction. Anytime a writer stands up in front of a group of people, the same questions are always asked: "Is this based on your life?" "Who were the characters inspired by?" And so on and so forth. It's true that you reveal yourself through your work -- it's inevitable. Especially if you're really good -- the best writers always seem to have pet themes, obsessions that pop up everywhere. English teachers aren't therapists, no, nor are they necessarily qualified to make an informed call about someone's mental state.

But if I'd ever brought a piece to the workshop table that in any way resembled Cho Seung-Hui's, questions would be asked immediately. Which leads me to:

While writing instructors can't ignore alarming screeds, a better barometer may be to see if a student's behavior matches. "It's one thing when [a student] hands in a disturbing story, and he's friendly and nice," explains Tamas Dobozy, a visiting scholar who teaches a fiction writing workshop at NYU. "He's just trying to create a horrific story. Then you get a student who hands in normal work, but is strange. Is there a connection between the work and student? Sometimes yes and sometimes no."

Landau, creative writing director at NYU, adds that a lot of students deal with troubling topics in their writing, from date rape to incest to mental illness. "Students are often bringing their lives to class in the form of their work," she says. Teachers should worry, she says, when students also act troubled in the classroom. If a student seems dangerous, Landau immediately reports him or her to a dean. Otherwise, her first strategy is to call students into her office, ask if they need help, and remind them of counseling services.

At her new job, Richman tries to assess the level of horror at the outset. If students bring in disturbing work, she's much quicker to tell them, "I think you put this in for shock value. There's no literary merit." She adds: "I don't want to squelch anyone's creativity. But there's a tendency for young people to say, 'I'm going to be as gross and twisted as I can be.' [The goal] isn't just to push limits. There are skills to be learned."

Good point. Context is everything. Writers are thin-skinned by nature. Writing is personal expression and it's very, very important. Put something out in front of others and you get all parental and protective: This is my child, don't hurt my child. Lots of times you'll see the intent of a writer -- they're trying to show you how funny they are, or how smart they are, or how intense they can be -- without seeing work that actually relays those intents. Workshop anything and you'll definitely get the guy who's grandstanding, trying to shock people or outrage them, and nine times out of ten it's transparent posturing.

An authentic whiff of madness shouldn't necessarily be taboo, though. Great art is very often a daredevil highwire act -- pushing the envelope is the reason that most of us crack our knuckles and get down to it. But those 99.9% of us who understand that a dramatic device like an act of violence is meaningless if it has no context. You do structure a work around its most piercing moments, so that it makes sense in the world that you've created -- it has no real impact otherwise. You don't fill up pages with bile and cruelty and hatred and get away with it clean just because it's shocking. There's shocking in the sense that a well-timed and -structured plot bomb can have, and then there's just madness spewed out onto the page.

To be perfectly honest I'm still trying to sort all this out for myself. But I do think that the signs were there. The writing was quite literally on the wall. Yeah, it's easy to see all this in hindsight. But when you come up against something like real evil, you always know it, and more -- much, much more -- should have been done about it.

Relaxing with Lessing

• Doris Lessing is interviewed by the AP.
  

Through literature, and politics, she came to know some of the leading thinkers and artists of her time. Her encounters include a warm visit with Betty Friedan ("a good Jewish mother, we got on like anything"), a contentious meeting with a young Henry Kissinger ("a harsh, abrasive aggressive force") and an amused get together with Allen Ginsberg and some fellow Beats.

"They turned up in London, a whole lot of them, and I went to meet them," she recalls. "I thought they were extremely likable, but this isn't how they wanted to be seen. I thought then, and I think I was right, that they weren't as frightening and as shocking as they wanted to be. They were mostly middle-class people trying to be annoying."

Plus, a choice tidbit from a Salon interview, circa 1997:

Q: You write about all of these interesting, caring, passionate people who put so much work into their belief in communism, and what they got in return was Stalin. It was a cruel kind of a joke.

A: Well, that's why socialism is, for our time, dead. Because young people say, "Right, all you Reds -- look what you were supporting. China and the Soviet Union." The interesting thing is to ask yourself this question: Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all -- in one way or another -- obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster. What people were supporting was failure. And continually justifying it. That had a disastrous effect on -- this is another cliché, forgive me -- progressive thinking of every kind.

Q: You compare that kind of progressive thinking to today's political correctness, to use another cliché. How true is that?

A: I think it is true. I think the attitudes of mind behind it are the same.

Q: What are those attitudes?

A: A need to oversimplify. To control. And an enormous distrust of the innovative, of new ideas. All political movements are like this -- we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility. This characterizes political correctness.

The wounded black-and-white elephant in the living room

• Jack Shafer might be serious about suggesting the CIA buy Knight-Ridder.

Sooner or later, the print industry is going to arrive at an impasse. With divisions like the Chicago Tribune’s City News Service closing, and Knight-Ridder on the block, news companies are going to have to face the fact that the business has gone digital. Printed editions of newspapers and magazines already seem prehistoric, especially in an age when anyone with access to a computer can read the newspaper online for free... and any newspaper from anywhere in the world, for that matter. Whether or not the bovine masses will actually do so is another topic entirely.

I wonder when the day will come when print editions of newspapers and magazines are viewed as a higher-end prop for the cultural intelligista. Consider that cover prices for most magazines worth their salt start at around $5; subscription rates make them a bit more affordable, but it’s still a waste of money when you can read an article online, print off your own copy and buy gas and food instead. Even if you factor in the printing costs, it’s still an awfully large margin. You’re not really paying for the writing anymore so much as you’re paying for the packaging and, more importantly, the ads, and frankly, I’d rather spend my money elsewhere than bankroll a perfume-ad photoshoot.

Short of a madman detonating an EMP in the Earth’s atmosphere (don’t think someone won’t try), digital technology, for all its shortcomings, is here to stay, and it would be in the print industry’s best interests to realize this and cut their losses while they can. I’m not into gloom-and-doom prognostications but I guarantee that a generation that grows up with instantaneous news delivery that’s cheap, if not free, will not really give much thought to printed editions, which, frankly, work better as doorstops. Online publications like Slate and Salon are the first step in the right direction, but print, with all its history and gravitas and importance, will trundle around like a wounded elephant until one well-placed shot brings it down.

The problem with Proust (and Tolstoy too)

• Salon's "Summer School" series wraps up with Jane Smiley's take on In Search of Lost Time.

I don't know what it is about Proust and Tolstoy, but they make other writers lose their minds, either out of exasperation or jealousy (probably a combination of both). Proust's digressive style, packed with sentences that loop and curl and flow and never quit, seems like it does something to people with an interest in, and love of, language. It's like they put down Swann's Way and run straight to the keyboard to write about what they've just experienced, to hammer out an explorative essay about Proust's style/themes/whatever, just to hang on to that feeling. It's next to impossible to recommend Proust to anyone because you have to preface your recommendation with something along the lines of, "Well, he's not really a storyteller per se, but he's an amazing writer," which makes most people's eyes roll back into their heads before the sentence has even left your tongue. Nonetheless, he's worth your time. (I've heard it said that Proust can't be truly appreciated unless you read the original French, but if you're an ignorant monoglot Yank like me, a halfway decent translation is about all you can hope for.)

• Orlando Figes gets a lot right about War and Peace at the Times Online.

Tolstoy is a similar matter, despite the fact that War and Peace is hardly the unwieldly behemoth it's at times made out to be. A high-concept, fast-food culture like ours doesn't know what to do with a novel that's 1500 pages long and appears not to have any one central character or storyline. And yet you pick up the thing and grimace at the weight and tell yourself, well, if it's a drag, then I'll try again in another decade or so, and before you know it Tolstoy's hooked you, the bastard, and you find yourself awake at 3am, ink-stained thumbs sore from flipping pages, screaming, "What's gonna happen to Natasha?!?" The many characters are vivid and memorable, the philosophical ideology of fate is endlessly fruitful and the dissection of the chaos and calamity of warfare is enlightening (particularly these days). Filter out all those scholarly exhorations and you're still left with a ripping good story, told with incredible clarity and confidence and nary a dull moment. When you do, in fact, put it down, you feel like you've just been reintroduced to the world.