Some strains of environmentalism seem a little too much like fads, rife with inconsistency and hypocrisy. In “Greener Than Thou,” from the July issue of Boston magazine, Joe Keohane sets his crosshairs on his city’s sillier green initiatives and the smug satisfaction accompanying them. It’s a piece worth reading not just for his commenary on Boston’s environmental concerns, but for the wry manner in which he roasts his self-righteous subjects.

The tone is playful at first: Keohane gets off some irreverent shots at the culture surrounding an all-raw vegan restaurant—“all around me people talked earnestly about what they were eating, save for a troika of lesbians who talked about lesbianism for a while”—and pokes fun at the mayor’s repurposing of the city’s nickname, from Beantown to Greentown.

But Keohane also makes a good point about the guilt trips and competition that can infect green initiatives, with people striving to outdo each other’s ostentatious displays of eco-consciousness, then chastising those who fall short. “This is a city widely known (and reviled) for possessing an unapologetically liberal worldview generously varnished with moral vanity, so it stands to reason that an  issue like this—which hits on politics, the environment, and social justice, and allows us to brag—would be like catnip here.”

Keohane also draws a clever analogy between the Puritans and this wave of environmental zealots hectoring their fellow citizens into Total Green Compliance. Faced with such a shrill brand of environmentalism, it’s tempting to throw one’s hands up in defeat and toss that recyclable bottle into the trash. Which brings us to Keohane’s final words of advice: “Do what’s right, go green to the fullest, sure, but at least try to avoid doing it in a way that makes people hate you and, out of sheer spite, do the opposite of what you do.”

Image by Paul Keleher, licensed by Creative Commons.

Fan fiction, in which DIY writers lift characters from books, films, TV shows, and other creative works and insert them into their own story lines, is booming—but its legality is murky, writes Canadian copyright lawyer Grace Westcott in the Literary Review of Canada.

U.S. law offers “significant copyright protection to distinctive fictional characters” and “derivative works,” reports Westcott, and in her view this would include most fan fiction. But she gives air time to an alternative argument put forth by Rebecca Tushnet, a Georgetown University law professor and a fanfic writer who argues that the form constitutes fair use. Tushnet founded the Organization for Transformative Works to push the view that fanfic is a “new expression of transformed ideas” and thus protected.

“It may be that [fan fiction’s] shadowy status—largely tolerated, but legally vulnerable—leaves it just where it ought to be, in a healthy state of tension between fans and authors,” Westcott concludes. “Because the fact is that fan fiction has so far been able to operate as a tolerated use, if not a fair use.”

Her lawyerly advice? Keep it out of the courts by establishing “an online code of respect that recognizes and addresses authors’ rights and legitimate concerns.”

Westcott doesn’t even consider the thornier question of fan fiction based on real and often living people, for instance, the “bandslash” or “bandfic” phenomenon (see the Utne Reader’s recent “Slasher Girls”) built around rock-star characters and often homoerotic subplots.

Her hope for some sort of handshake agreement seems at once practical and unrealistic: practical because fanfic might lose ground in court, but unrealistic because the very sort of independent creative spirit that created fanfic will bristle against any sort of conduct code. And because any day now, Sting will Google himself, find an account of himself blowing Stewart Copeland, and phone his lawyers.

Thanks, Arts & Letters Daily.

Anyone who’s tried to conquer a foreign language at a certain age is familiar with the requisite textbook formula: You follow a few characters on adventures that somehow expose you to the vocabulary for fruits, polite greetings, and how to get medical help all within a simple, tidy storyline. (“Excuse me,” said Heidi, “I don’t mean to bother you, but I ate a poisonous apple and require emergency care.”) 

In a recent Washington Post opinion piece, Harvard Law student Joel B. Pollak rails against the narratives available for the 24,000 students of Arabic in the United States. His main gripe is a political one—there’s too much Gamal Abdel Nasser-loving and too much Israel/America-bashing in his class materials—but it’s his description of the forlorn protagonist of his textbook that struck me:

We learn in Chapter 1 that Maha is desperately lonely. In later chapters, we are told that she hates New York, has no boyfriend, and resents her mother.

Soon we encounter her equally depressing relatives in Egypt—such as her first cousin Khalid, whose mother died in a car accident and who was forced to study business administration after his father told him literature "has no future."

The characterization jogged my memory to one of my favorite readings in the last year, a piece by Anand Balakrishnan in the Summer 2007 issue of Bidoun. In it, Balakrishnan recalls the primary theme of his Arabic studies in Cairo: failure (or fashil).

The Arabic word for failure is built from the tripartite root of f-sh-l to become fashil, the harshest, most damaging word in the language, at least the way my Arabic teacher pronounced it. The word often twisted his dyspeptic mouth, spattering our lessons like ordnance from a cluster bomb. Everything was fashil. Me as a student, himself as a teacher, Cairo as a city, Egypt as a state, the Middle East as a region, Asia as a continent, communism as a theory, democracy as an ideal, Islam as it was practiced, humanity as a species, and, in the summer when the smog congealed, the sun as a source of light.

Balakrishnan’s is a beautiful meditation on the theme of failure throughout Arab literature and Arab society. Pollak may or may not have a legitimate beef regarding his own lessons, but his polemical demand for a language neutered of politics and feeling rings hollow after reading Balakrishnan’s “Muse of Failure.” More important than the sterile reformulation of one language into another is the transcendent project of cultural translation.

Image by “Dr. Yuri Andreievich Zhivago,” licensed under Creative Commons.