In 2006 Canadian journalist Mark Steyn published his best-selling book America Alone: The End of the World as we Know It. It was widely reviewed, both positively and negatively. Simply stated, it argues that demography is destiny, that Muslim immigration and high birth rates combined with European welfare-state policies, apathetic atheism and liberal guilt (cultural masochism as Christopher Hitchens puts it) spells nighty night for the rights and freedoms us Westerners now take for granted. Soon enough, democratically elected Muslims will celebrate a bloodless victory. As Steyn puts it, Islam is an opportunist beneficiary of Western self-enfeeblement.

Supporters have compared Steyn to G.K. Chesterton for finding humor in serious issues and dancing the light of history, literature and ‘faith’ on dark predicaments. Opponent Johann Hari , sticking with the literary, likens Steyn to Jack London, who feared "that Chinese immigrants would outbreed white Americans and take over the U.S. London’s solution was extermination" Hari says, "what is Steyn’s?" Hari then fires off accusations of endless rhetorical inflation, racism and the use of fictionalized statistics. But in doing so he admits that a horrifying fascistic menace does exist "Some 37 percent of young British Muslims, for example, view British Jews as "a legitimate target", according to a Populus poll for the Times, and 7 percent believe suicide-murder can be justified within their own country. This gay-hating, women-enslaving far-right fanaticism must be honestly described, and steadily dissolved."

Steyn is an interesting bird. A challenge for the ornithologist. He was born in Canada, grew up in England, and now lives at least half time in the U.S. He started his journalism career as a disc jockey over here, then moved back to England as theatre critic for The Independent, then film critic, then apologist for Lord Black. Now he’s a celebrity political pundit and columnist for Maclean’s, Canada’s largest circulation news magazine. And just one more literary reference: today he rests uncomfortably in my mind with Thackery’s Lord Steyne.Christopher Hitchens reviewed America Alone, as did Martin Amis (unfortunately no longer available on line) who called it alarmist but pertinent. Over the past year Amis, as the world knows, has been airing his ‘unfudged’ thoughts, mind experiments, urges, and opinions on this topic. In doing so, he does us all a great favour. The fact that his opponents are shouting him down as a racist is evidence of their lack of interest in honest, open debate. But, in England at least, he remains free to speak.

Not necessarily so in Canada. Steyn, in addition to having been called an uneducated racist/fascist by the leaning left, now has to endure harassment from Canada’s Human Rights commissions. The Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) and a handful of Osgoode Hall law students have complained about an excerpt from America Alone that was published in the October 23, 2006 edition of Maclean’s. The commissions have accepted the premise that this article potentially breaches these students’ "human rights."As Steyn puts it in a recent column "The "plaintiffs" are not complaining that the article is false, or libelous, or seditious, for all of which there would be appropriate legal remedy. Their complaint is essentially emotional: it "offended" them. And as offensiveness is in the eye of the of­­fended, there’s not a lot I can do about that…Let’s take it as read that I am, as claimed, "offensive." That’s the point. It’s offensive speech that requires legal protection."

The CIC objects to articles that suggest all Muslims are jihadists and radicals. Steyn’s doesn’t, although his recognition of this fact may well be sarcastic "Time for the obligatory "of courses": of course, not all Muslims are terrorists — though enough are hot for jihad to provide an impressive support network of mosques from Vienna to Stockholm to Toronto to Seattle."

As one of Canada’s most articulate broadcasters puts it, Steyn is simply doing what a good, opinionated journalist is supposed to do, stating his position, stirring public conversation. Sure, racial issues are controversial, but, as Steyn asks, does this mean we can’t talk about them?

Not if the CIC and the Canadian and B.C. Human Rights Commissions get their way. Debate-cramping accusations of racism may be flying in Britain and the U.S, threats by Islamist extremists may send editorial cartoonists scurrying the world over, but that’s nothing. In Canada, we have the best threat of all, the looming apparatus of democratically elected government. Who needs to worry about extremist Muslim majorities, when institutions like human rights commissions are already in place to do the job.

I’ve just been farting around on Flickr and have, for your entertainment, put up a selection of photos of book shops taken during the past several years, here. For additional shots of authors, booksellers, book people in general, please go here. 

I seem to have attracted the attention of a copy editor. One J Martin suggests the following:

How about if you write, "I’ve just been farting around on Flickr and
I’ve put up a selection of photos I took of bookshops over the past few
years.  Hope you find them entertaining." 

 Hmmm. Tough call J. Awful lot of "I"s in there…

Do I want you to tell me where the dangling modifier is in my most recent post? Sure J be my guest. Undangle my modifier. 

Novels are created for Samuel Johnson’s common reader: ". . . I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours."   So it’s all very well to say you’ve got your definition of what constitutes value and I have mine, but in the end Cyril Connolly’s query, what will last? What will achieve immortality? needs to be answered.

The Internet is a wondrous place where news, even if it isn’t great literature, stays news; a place to access and interact with old facts and arguments in new, vitalizing ways. Here’s what I mean: I’ve been surfing on "literary criticism" recently. Not for Hazlett, or Coleridge, or Arnold, Woolf or Wilson, although there’s a lot of stuff available, but for a sense of what’s been going on lately in the real world. As a result I’ve been able not only to read many of the most controversial, frequently referenced essays written on the topic in the past several decades, but also to gauge response, follow the often heated/always entertaining flames of discussion, and even reignite some fires.

Early on I found James Atlas’s essayIn Praise of Dispraise (The Atlantic, 1981). In it he suggests that lively negative reviews tend to stay in the mind because the language is more vivid. "It appeals, I think, to the punitive, grudging, envious impulses we generally suppress in our daily social transactions, gives expression to hostile, aggressive instincts through a sanctioned mode of discourse. Like jokes, negative reviews can articulate forbidden wishes-for revenge, for superiority over a victim, or the subversion of authority."

In addition to Macaulay slagging a Croker edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Atlas cites Stanley Edgar Hyman’s slapdown of Edmund Wilson, Norman Mailer pissing on William Styron, John Updike, Mary McCarthy; Gore Vidal maligning Donald Barthelme, William Gass, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon; and social critic Dwight Macdonald drubbing James Gould Cozzens‘s By Love Possessed, the award-winning, number-one best seller of 1957. But these attacks are the exception, says Atlas, not the rule. He sees exultant reviews as emblematic of an American tradition. Magazines and newspapers are filled with the same words for almost every new book ("Compelling" is my favourite). "America’s reviewers love to praise; enthusiasm is a national trait. To weigh in with an unfavorable verdict is considered rude, unsporting, like not standing up for the national anthem." He laments the fact that few critics (in 1981) had the literary verve or moral conviction to produce ‘grand, lip curling sentence(s)."

Reading of dispraise brought up links to famed New Republic critic Dale (hatchet job) Peck here and here. Peck, for the uninitiated, wrote a bitchy cum snarky book review of The Black Veil in 2002, hauling off with the now infamous: "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation." Atlas wrote his essay in 1981. Fitting that he should later celebrate Peck in a lengthy NY Times profile. Here’s some pushback. Here’s Dale’s response to the piece and reasoning behind why he chose to stop doing reviews.

Mention of Peck attracted comparison and links to critic James Wood. Again, hysterically, old news came up, but hey, it’s useful background for those out of the know, who want to be in it. James Wood’s Guardian piece, written with ashes from 9/11 still in the air, exhorts US novelists to abandon social and theoretical glitter in favour of novels that tell us not "how the world works" but "how somebody felt about something." Wood also expresses the hope that 9/11 will encourage the abandonment of "hysterical realism" (a term he first coined in a review of White Teeth) in favour of the aesthetic and contemplative.

Zadie Smith, because she, among others including Rushdie, Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace, is singled out, responds here. No exegesis, no reasoned argument refuting Wood’s criticism. Just, if you don’t like it then tell me what you’d do; and, you’re wrong, these guys are great, just read them. In addition to Smith, many American lit bloggers (eNotes Bookblog, Wet Asphalt, Black Garterbelt , Return of the Reluctant, Comparative Reading ) took exception to what Wood was saying. Re-reading their objections, one has difficulty discerning much of substance. Name calling and misreading is what defines the bulk of it. This was pointed out recently and resulted in some fresh, albeit disappointing exchanges. Wood’s arguments still haven’t been persuasively countered, although a recent review of Delillo’s Underworld by online blogger Garth Risk Hallberg at least raises the level of response.

Reading essays by and about Atlas, Peck and Wood, and all the links and references it pulls up, constitutes quite an education for the aspirant literary critic, especially one who may have missed the fun first time round. Not only did it serve as a good guide to where the best bloggers hang out, this surf also enabled me to witness and participate in an important debate that warrants continuation. Prior to the Internet, none of this would have been possible, at least so freely or easily. Much more than the dry boned isolation of printed essays and reviews, the Internet gives us the raw guts of engagement which can be re-lived, and sometimes, if we’re lucky, brought back to life.

First thing every morning before you arise say out loud, "I believe," three times. Ovid

Image borrowed from a whimsical Sam Jordison Guardian blog post that places Ovid in Colorado.