BookBlog

I sprained my ankle last weekend, and this week I viscerally understand a perspective that I’ve heard in discussions about planning for the local downtown.

As soon as I was able walk to the driveway with crutches, I arranged to swap my stick-shift car for an automatic (since the clutch requires a working ankle). The car provides welcome mobility. I can get to Peets or Starbucks for coffee, a quarter-mile trip that I usually bike. I can’t move fast or go far, so I need a parking spot very close to I’m going. If I have two errands a few blocks away, I need to get back in the car and drive. A business is more appealing if it has immediate parking. I’m using a car as a large, gasoline-powered wheelchair, and it’s marvelous.

The thing is, I hear this perspective about the need for adjacent parking from people who do not have obvious mobility impairments. Perhaps some have nonvisible disabilities, and if so I hope they have medical placards or plates that allow them to park a car right in front of the places they are going. The ADA requires access for people with mobility impairments, and that access should be protected with vigilance and used by those who need it.

But there are clearly otherwise healthy individuals who use their automobile as a large, gasoline-powered wheelchair as a matter of course. Trips that are a half-mile, or a mile or two. If there are two or three errands a few blocks away, they prefer to get back in the car and drive. If car parking is a block away, that is intolerable, and it is better to drive 30 minutes to find free parking than to walk for a block or two.

Do people have a level of physical fitness so low that walking a block or two feels like running a marathon? Or is moving for a practical purpose horribly unwelcome, because it takes time away from time spend exercising indoors jogging on a treadmill or taking a spin class?

I have a lot of respect for people who use cars and parking for mobility assistance because of need. I have a lot less respect for people who use their car as a wheelchair by choice, and to protect that personal choice want to control land use in our cities for everyone, taking valuable space away from greenery, walking and bike, to provide enough car parking so healthy people don’t need to walk.

Recently I watched the first two seasons of “Srugim” the surprise hit Israeli tv drama that follows the lives of five thirty-something single men and women in the modern orthodox community of Katamon in Jerusalem. Sometimes referred to as the Israeli “Friends”, it’s been popular among secular folk in Israel and has a following in the states (it’s available on DVD with subtitles).

Although the creators of the show are men, the most interesting and compelling characters are the 3 female central characters; a woman whose high-powered financial services job scares off some men, the daughter of a rabbi who struggles with her religious identity, and a warm-hearted graphic artist who is stuck on a commitment-phobic surgeon. Though the plot in the first season centers on heterosexual relationships, the show passes the Bechdel test.

In Season 1, the female characters in Srugim face more conflict and character development than the men, who are rather passive and unadventurous; the sexism of religious society pushes the women to evolve. In Season 2, the gay male character also faces social pressure; the show has not yet shown whether and how the character will change.

But I get the impression that the the creators of the show are torn in portraying the tensions generated by female power. On the one hand, they are sympathetic to the struggles of women making their own way. On the other hand, images of bossy or neurotic women are played somewhat unflatteringly; and yet back on the other hand, the show handles narcissism and neurosis as equal-gender-opportunity character flaws.

The finance professional dumps a fiance when he proposes only after getting a raise that makes his salary closer to hers, and with persistence negotiates her way into getting lessons in reading torah for a women’s minyan. Her character has some traits in common with the weaselly Pete Campbell of Mad Men; she can scheme and manipulate to get what she wants; she has a yiddish sharp tongue and can be a bully. Does she choose the sweet yeshiva student over the fellow professional because she experiences the unfamiliar with him; or because she can boss him around, or both; does she eventually dump him because she was never serious or realizes she doesn’t love him or both?

Toward the end of the first season the character makes some choices that seem to show increasing honesty and tact; a bit of growing up? In Season 2, she shows more ethical compass by standing up for her gay sweetie; but is her attraction to a gay man a sign in the show creators’ minds of the inability to relate to more macho “normal” heterosexual men? I dislike the scheming but like her assertiveness, negotiation skills, motorcycle, torah-reading, and the sharp tongue that gets her into trouble, but does the filmmaker?

An even more exaggerated and unattractive picture of the manipulative bossy woman is the wealthy girlfriend of the narcissistic surgery intern. She schemes to have him invited to a party thrown by her father who is a major donor of the hospital, and arranges to have her beau offered a prestigious residency at Mount Sinai hospital in NYC. She can even get her boyfriend’s absentee landlord to fix a broken sink. When her boyfriend gets upset with her assertive ways, she fakes terror of cockroaches to make him feel confident in his manhood, but smashes bugs with her high-heeled shoes when he isn’t looking. Her boyfriend doesn’t appreciate her controlling ways, but he also doesn’t appreciate the loving companionship of his long-suffering female best buddy who’s in love with him; or for that matter neither does he show consideration for anybody else in Season 1.

The bible grad student, the daughter of a rabbi, doubts her religious identity, but keeps her dilemmas a secret in Season 1. She doesn’t tell the witty and solicitous archaeology professor that she is religious though they are falling in love with each other; she doesn’t tell her friends she’s dating a secular guy. At one point she fails to stop her elderly grandmother who has wandered away from the senior center because she will be seen wearing pants; then repents and goes looking for her through the streets of Jerusalem (the grandmother is found safe).

The show makes clear why the character would be so cagey; her friends talk openly about how they dump friends who become secular; one of the male characters discovers that people on the street don’t say hello to him when he accidentally loses his kippah. The community polices boundaries, and making a choice is (or seems) definitive. Once upon a time I was like that character; I was similarly confused and in the closet about religious struggles; and caused some similar havoc. Interestingly, the show parallels the closet experiences of characters struggling with religious identity and characters struggling with sexual identity. In both cases, characters who are outside the community norms feel the need to keep secrets, struggle with disclosing their identity, and face the risk of social ostracism.

Interestingly, with the struggling religious characters in Srugim the issue is explicitly and primarily about g-d and faith. Is this different from American Judaism, where Jews talk about holidays and halachah and concepts of good and evil, and less about g-d? Personally, I’ve been pretty humanist about religion since bat mitzvah age; for me the choices about religious afflliation were more about human authority and sociology that about belief or unbelief; but the social boundaries and identity dilemmas were very similar.

The warm-hearted and emotional graphic designer is the least conflicted of the three major female characters in Season 1. She is competent at her craft without being ambitious, she is a great cook, she is sincerely religious. At the beginning of the season she is something of a doormat, and develops more of a spine as she learns from experience. Her religiosity is portrayed as somewhat of a flaw when she focuses on rules over people, but her good heart overcomes her initial impulse to rigidity.

Hers is a kind of character that I tend to loathe on the printed page, but the script and the actress redeem the character for me in Season 1; she is shown as intelligently and actively empathetic, and grows by making her own decisions. Is her fundamental meekness and domesticity seen by the filmmakers as superior womanhood? Or is she, like the good-hearted, somewhat passive and geeky fellow she eventually connects with, something of a shlemiel. In Season 2, she turns to developing her career when she is disappointed by the inability to quickly get pregnant, her emotionality turns into volatility, and overrides her sense of compassion. Where are the film-makers with this evolution? Is assertiveness and professional development being cast once again as the opposite of femininity? Or do the show’s creators also see the rift between the character and her husband as a lack of courage and honesty on both their parts, where neither can communicate about the pain of infertility and the tensions between personal and day to day tradeoffs between professional and family priorities?

I know what I think – I always liked the adventurous women characters better, in works where a male author favored the good women. I’m not sure where the show’s creators come down. I suspect they are empathetic with the character and struggles of the female characters; and not quite comfortable with female power; and able to depict flaws of selfishness, dishonesty, and cowardice in both genders.

One thing that’s interesting to me is the way the show depicts the characters moral struggles about how to interact with other people, including making mistakes, repenting and forgiving each other. Every once in a while there is a parable; the surgeon reports the hospital’s cafe kiosk for having a forged kashrut certificate and then is chagrined when the kindly kiosk employee loses his job when the contractor is replaced; and it is a bit surprising that the self-involved surgeon shows a glimmer of moral awareness and compassion. Most of the time the choices are more subtle than that parable. Religious observance, belief, and sex are red herrings, the important thing is how to treat others and oneself. The show is sociologically interesting in the way it portrays the various segments of Israeli Jewish society; but this moral psychology may be the most Jewish aspect of the show.

What do you think? I would love to bounce ideas and questions off others who watched the show.

In the context of the geek feminism community, Liz Henry shared a link to an intriguing journal article that provides a feminist rationale for open access academic publishing: What is Feminist About Open Access?: A Relational Approach to Copyright in the Academy by Carys Craig, Joseph Turcotte, Rosemary Coombe

The strong part of the paper’s argument is the critique of the idea of self that is embedded in modern conceptions of copyright. Enlightenment and romantic thinkers conceived of the self as an autonomous individual and viewed the value of content as its originality. Postmodern theorists questioned the enlightenment and romantic ideas of authorial originality, putting authors in the context of the materials they rework and the discourses a work participates in. The article extends this questioning, using feminist theory to reframe the idea of the self as always in relation, and to reframe cultural production as created in relationship with others.

These ideas draws on the work of scholars including co-author Rosemary Coombe, Shelly Wright, Johanna Gibson, and Jennifer Nedelsky; There is a very interesting-sounding book by Nedelsky in the queue for publication that promises to develop these ideas in depth, entitled Law’s Relations: A Relational Theory of Self, Autonomy, and Law.

This feminist critique of the individualistic assumptions embedded in the concept of authorship is complementary and congenial to other aspects of the cultural critique of intellectual property. Critics including Larry Lessig, Siva Vaidhanathan, and Cory Doctorow write about “remix culture”, the idea that culture is and always has been created by reassembling and modifying existing materials. Proponents of ideas about peer production (Benkler, Bauwens, Shirky) talk about the cultural surplus that is generated from commons production. Free/Open Source software proponents (Linus Torvalds, Dan Wallach) critique the idea that quality is created by proprietary contributions, and argue that software has improved quality and security when the software creation process is transparent – with enough eyes all bugs are shallow. (The core of the Free Software argument is freedom itself, which I will get to in a bit).

However, there are a number of limitations in the feminist argument. The article attributes the idea of individual authority to a masculine conception of identity and cultural creation. But this is not inherently the case. The Rabbinic Jewish tradition conceives of cultural creation through canonical forms of re-interpretation. Rather than hailing individual creativity, this process subordinates new voices to the tradition, while using interpretive power to create new layers of tradition. The creative process was still patriarchal, though; the people with the power to create were almost all male until quite recently.

The article also advocates for the benefit of open access publishing in providing access to excluded and marginalized people. But the article is focusing on open access publishing of academic journal articles. A lay professional may be able to read the articles but almost surely isn’t going to have access to publish; let alone a working class person or nomadic woman who is a leader and arbiter for her group. The social structure and meritocracy of this particular form of publishing is the context of professional academia.

Richard Stallman and other free software proponents advocate free software with a completely open and meritocratic idea of freedom – the freedom to study a program, modify it, distribute it to help your neighbor, and give the community the benefits of your code changes. (This is meritocratic since not all changes will help a neighbor or the community at large; a developer is free to modify free software to make it unusable, buggy and insecure, also, and the community is free to review it and conclude it worse not better).

But even in contemporary peer cultures, there is still governance over who can contribute. Open source software projects have various processes for code review and determining who can commit. Licenses give coders the ability to fork, but forking is often less powerful than the ability to extend, and that is subject to governance. Wikipedia has editing standards and a tradition in a complex culture that is a challenge for outsiders to learn. Fan fiction communities define their own boundaries around canon and practice and style. The boundaries to collaborative cultural communities are created and enforced somehow, and these power and boundary structures need critique.

So, in advocating for open access academic publishing, the paper does not critique the boundary-creation process of collaborative cultural communities, accepts as a given the structure of academic authority and poses no radical alternatives. This is not a bad thing; the focus of the paper is good as it is, and this particular article has no obligation to be any more radical than it is. Advocating for open access academic publishing contributes to improving the world in an important way. But there is also room for other more radical critiques and alternative structures.

Also, by focusing on academic open access, the article refrains from grappling with other economic and legal issues relating to open access. In academia, open access reduces the economic power of traditional publishers that make large profits incommensurate with the value they add, since the peer review is contributed by fellow academics for free. But the scholars themselves are already paid a salary by the university system. In other areas of cultural production, such as nonacademic writing and free software, practitioners do not automatically have a salary paying for their cultural production. These types of collaborative production depend on different economic structures for support, and the article is silent on these challenges and changes.

As for legal analysis, the article suggests that this feminist concept of cultural production might help foster other changes in copyright law. There may well be opportunities to improve copyright law using these concepts, but this article does not explore what they might be.

That said, the article’s core argument – relating weaknesses in copyright law and practice to a critique of the notion of the individual, and reframing cultural creation in terms of relationship – is a strong and important contribution of the critique of copyright. When I saw the title and abstract, I wondered about the tactical politics of it. Having read through it, the article is primarily persuasive for fellow scholars who already understand and support feminist critique, but who may have other reasons to resist alternatives to proprietary academic publishing. And, in combination with other arguments, this argument strengthens the broader philosophical case for open access publishing and collaborative production.

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg sits in the modernist tradition of turning villains and minor characters into antiheros; sympathy for the devil goes back to Milton. Our demon is Baba Yaga, the hag witch of Slavic folklore, who eats small children for lunch and gives gifts of wisdom to wandering young heroes after an ordeal or two.

The book’s first two sections are narratives focusing on old women. In the first section, the protagonist is a writer caring for her elderly mother who strives to maintain dignity with dementia. Where Baba Yaga is an infamous slob, the writer’s mother is obsessively neat; cleaning serves as or substitutes for affection. Where Baba Yaga is demonically clever, the writer’s mother is losing words to a slowly growing brain tumor, and even when she had her faculties was partial to aphorisms and cliches. While she shows the horrors of age in inverse fashion to Baba Yaga, she gives her daughter a gift; cranky and cold in her prime, she enables her daughter to show love, in a stilted and inarticulate fashion, in her decline.

In the second half of the first section, the writer travels to her hometown in Bulgaria accompanied by a younger woman, a scholar of folklore who is an obsequious fangirl bordering on stalker. The writer is taking the trip as a surrogate for her mom, hoping to recapture some feeling, but the post-iron curtain seaside town is grim and tawdry.

I’m not sure what to make of the anomie of this section; something about the anti-romance of the past in post-Soviet Central Europe. Maybe something about the disconnect of generations imposed by history and politics; the writer’s mom dealt with cataclysm by being relentlessly ordinary; the writer character is somewhat embittered by her dissidence and exile; the younger academic is left with a pale simulacrum of nationalism and alienation from biological and adopted families.

The anti-romance of the past takes a comic and ribald turn in the second section of the book, which migrates the Weird Sisters to a postwar resort in the Czech Republic. To the hotel clerk, the three elderly unmarried ladies look alike; as the story progresses, the characters reveal individual personality and individual history, each with her own tragedies, losses and secrets. Far from controlling fate, the three women’s lives have been shaped by history’s events and their own mistakes.

In the Baba Yaga legend, an old female character is isolated and alien; these three women take care of each other. Baba Yaga eats small children with her iron teeth; these old women take care of children after lifetimes of parenting failures and misadventures. The stereotype of old age is of stasis and decline, but the tale in this chapter shows older people continuing to change while they can.

Where the Baba Yaga legend mocks female old age, this chapter ridicules older men, portraying a series of pompous, egoistic schemers. Baba Yaga is old and hideous; but modern society is obsessed with trying to preserve female youth and beauty. Dubravka Ugresic sees the spa as an emblem of the vapidity of post-Soviet Central Europe. “In the absence of all ideologies, the only refuge that remains for the human imagination is the body.”

This chapter comes the closest to feminist antihero fan fictions about characters such as Lilith and Vashti, taking bit-character villains and turning them into main characters. But it doesn’t adopt the feminist cliche of turning the villain into a hero. Buba, the character whose consciousness the narrative follows, is ridiculous; she is not very bright or articulate, she has a good heart but is clumsy and insecure. Dubravka Ugresic inverts villains into characters that are ordinary and imperfect.

The third section of the book is in the voice of the fangirl academic who expatiates on Baba Yaga folklore at tedious length. This is postmodern conceptual art; it’s mocking the dry irrelevance of the academic cataloging species of premodern horrors and resisting the temptations of scholarly explication. At the same time, it is Ugresic’s sly chance to caption the photographs in case the reader missed the meanings; the hag as icon for female old age; as projection of mysogynist fears; as the degraded image of the Goddess defeated by Patriarchy (Here’s a writeup of a book group discussion focusing on these themes with Timmi Duchamp, editor of Aqueduct Press, a publishing house for feminist science fiction.

The thing is, while Ugresic pre-emptively incorporates and mocks her interpreter, she also invokes her own interpretation in the narrative sections, repeating and self-consciously questioning figures of eggs, birds, and flowers; beauty and tawdriness; eloquence and dumbness, magic and prose. She’s warning us off of interpretation but herself can’t stay away.

In the age of the internet, the traditional form of the book review is dead; but people still haven’t gotten the memo. In Goodreads, there are 28 “reviews” of the book, taking the form of a brief outline and summary, perhaps a quote, and then the author’s declaration of opinion. The form assumes that the reader hasn’t read the book, needs an introduction, but wants to avoid spoilers. The obsolete form is particularly annoying with this book which invites and resists its own explication.

In Google+, internet celebrities are again competing based on the size of their follower count. But I wonder whether there’s going to be a different criterion by which posters compete for attention on G+ as people get used to the service.

Recently, Anil Dash wrote an excellent post about the responsibility of site owners to moderate the comments on their sites – If your website’s full of assholes , it’s your fault. Anil takes to task publishers of online news sites who allow their comments sections to fill with hostility and abuse. A year ago, Robert Niles made a similar point – sites need to take responsibility for their comments, and those that don’t want to invest in their comments should turn them off. The Tummelvision crew have been evangelizing the need and value of “tummelling, a word adapted from a Yiddish word for someone hired to MC a party, applied to facilitating conversation and engagement online.

In Google+, like blogs and unlike Twitter, each post becomes the anchor for a comment stream. A poster’s followers can chime in and discuss. Currently, G+ posters have a few basic tools to moderate their stream – they can remove comments, and report users who are adding spam or abuse.

Some high-profile posters have the hang of facilitating a conversation. They participate, interact with others, respond to points in the discussion, and to the tone of contributions. The participants in some threads are good conversationalists – they respond to each other. When they disagree, they’re polite. In other posters’ discussions, participants race to state their own opinion, and don’t interact with each other. Comments aren’t a conversation but a serial monolog. In some posters’ discussions, hostile comments such as personal attacks and sexist remarks are met with disapproval and warning, in other discussions they go by unremarked and continue.

Many have observed that one of the distinctive aspects of Google+ compared to other social media is engagement – participants share, +1, and comment more actively than on other sites. Will the quality of moderation and community become one of the factors that distinguishes posters to Google+? Will posters with better discussions gather more and better engagement over time?

The quality of engagement certainly makes a difference to my online choices. I love Ta Nehisi Coates blog partly because of his fantastic writing and engagement with the topics he takes on, and in part because he’s attracted maybe the best comments section I’ve seen on the internet. As a moderator, he is not shy about using the ban hammer, and also holds high standards for posters on the site to respond to each other, not to straw man arguments, and to interact with respect. On Google+, I make choices about which threads to enter because of the style of the community I expect from the poster.

Will the quality of discussion become a more important factor for posters in Google+?