I went home two weeks ago for winter break with half my suitcase full of books. They had been acquired over the course of the semester, from various stores, friends, and libraries, but all had the dubious distinction of being interesting enough to obtain but not to finish.

Not surprisingly, top of the list were course readings. Quantum mechanics for Chemistry. Intro to the Theory of Computation. Justice. The last two were actually interesting, and would make good reading if you were locked up with nothing else to do.

Speaking of locked up, I did manage to pick up a copy of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, a non-fictional (and yet finely wrought) account of a quadruple murder in Kansas in the late 60’s. This–along with the other books on my list, Age of Iron by Coetzee, Four Screenplays by Ingmar Bergman, and Watchmen, the graphic novel by Alan Moore about washed-up, depressed, and depressing superheroes–is probably the most pessimistic and misanthropic mélange possible I could have assembled for my exhausted, overworked, and already seasonal-affective-disorder-addled self. Did I mention I went home to Maine for break?

Conclusion: don’t read Watchmen, and ignore the misguided editors at TIME who dubbed it one of the “top 100 novels” of all time. Do read In Cold Blood, regardless of how depressing it sounds, and watch the movie Capote afterward. Oh, and read it during the summer.

I like anime. Didn’t used to, but now I do. Before you stop being — or rule out the possibility of becoming — friends with me, let me explain why.

Actually, I can’t explain why. Any evocation of the, er, evocativeness of anime I could muster up would sound very lame. Just see this list of movies instead. Do it in this order, and you’ll be sort of recreating my life. The recent, anime-watching parts of it at least. And who doesn’t want to live my life? I almost wish I had a second one. Right now.

Start with Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. See it with a little sibling or a sweetheart. It’s not exactly romantic, but magical for sure. Like a Disney movie, but less annoying singing and more awesome Japanese weirdness. The same weirdness (only it’s different now–philosophical, sci-fi, and weirder) pervades Ghost in the Shell. Don’t watch this with a sweetheart. Invite your Buddhism-obsessed, sexually frustrated, Descartian friend over instead. Or you know, your inner friend.

Then prepare to be astounded by the originality, intricacy, and audacity of Death Note. This is a TV series, but it won’t take too long to finish, since the episodes are 20 minutes each. After that, relax, and invite back your friend (the real one) for another Miyazaki classic, My Neighbor Totoro. Then put on some nice 80’s clothes and do a dance routine to the Totoro song.

Now watch The Animatrix. (You might want to see The Matrix first.) There are 9 short films in total–you can watch them all in order or just the last three. The seventh one, “Beyond”, is the least violent and most interesting, almost as if Miyazaki directed it himself.

Finally, if you want to see what Japanese middle-schoolers watch, check out Cowboy Bebop. Otherwise, save some time and spend it on another Miyazaki film instead, perhaps Howl’s Moving Castle. By the way, if you haven’t noticed, this post is really just about how much I love Miyazaki’s films.

This is my friend CJ. I did my best to impose an aura of existential despair on her. You can’t tell from looking at the picture, but the darkness of the collective unconscious (er, black blackground) is actually a blue fleece blanket which I thumbtacked to the wall behind. There are some hanging edges, and a label that says “L.L. Bean,” which I’ve cropped out of the frame.

Lucas (thumbnail on the far right) and Pedro also gave their best shot at an expression “purged of all mirthful expression,” which I admit was not the most straightforward instruction to have given to my hapless roommates / portrait models. Thankfully they knew what I was going for, and I’m pleased with the results.

I’m hoping this shot inspires CJ to become a character in a Japanese No drama.

The article draws a surprising (and possibly slightly facetious) parallel between “derivatives,” a type of financial product whose value is “derived” from another transaction of an actual product, and deconstructionism, a literary theory that denies any straightforward interpretation of the written language.

An example of the simplest derivative, the article points out, is a farmer selling the right to buy his harvest later on in the year. Since what he is selling isn’t the harvest itself, but the ability to participate in a transaction for something of tangible value, this “product” he is selling has no intrinsic value, but is instead “derived” from the presumed value of the future harvest.

The farmer example seems to be pretty harmless, since whoever buys the derivative has a pretty clear idea of the risks (maybe the harvest won’t be as big as expected) and of the value (at the very least the buyer will end up owning SOME amount of crop) of the transaction. But you can imagine more complicated derivatives being set up that DON’T have obvious connections to the original good upon which their value is based. It turns out that much of the difficulty of fixing the current mess (and why there is a mess in the first place) is because of how much of the world’s investment dollars is tied up in derivatives:

The trade in derivatives took off, to the extent that the total market in derivative products around the world is counted in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. Nobody knows the exact figure, but the notional amount certainly exceeds the total value of all the world’s economic output, roughly sixty-six trillion dollars, by a huge factor—perhaps tenfold.

And all because

finance, like other forms of human behavior, underwent a change in the twentieth century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts—a break with common sense, a turn toward self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn’t be explained in workaday English. In poetry, this moment took place with the publication of “The Waste Land.” In classical music, it was, perhaps, the première of “The Rite of Spring.” Jazz, dance, architecture, painting—all had comparable moments. The moment in finance came in 1973, with the publication of a paper in the Journal of Political Economy titled “The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities,” by Fischer Black and Myron Scholes.

This is why Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism theory is strangely appropriate for describing what is happening with derivatives today:

meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always “deferred,” moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings—a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an “aporia,” from a Greek term meaning “impasse.” There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect.

Looks like reading all those incomprehensible papers in Junior Honors English paid off–now we can sit back in our chairs in the Ivory Tower and relish the literary beauty (literally!) of the chaos that surrounds us. What’s next? Imagist poetry embedded in Sarah Palin’s interviews?

Collins English Dictionary is adding an entry for meh (”an interjection to suggest indifference or boredom”) to next year’s 30th anniversary edition. It was the winner of a campaign launched by Collins seeking public nominations for new words, and it beat out such competition as jargonaut (a fan of jargon), frenemy (an enemy disguised as a friend) and huggles (a hybrid of hugs and snuggles). This follows on the heels of another Collins competition that we discussed last month, where the public was invited to vote for which old, infrequently used words should be saved from deletion.

[Ben Zimmer via Ideas]

Apparently this announcement has caused a certain amount of support and disapproval from the blogosphere, centered around whether onomatopoeias and interjections are worthy of inclusion in dictionaries.

Zimmer, the linguist who wrote the column I linked to above, also describes a bit of the surprising etymology behind “meh”:

An additional problem with meh is that it still feels like a bit of a novelty, since it owes much of its current popularity to online discourse. But meh has a fascinating story to tell. As I learned when I researched the word for a 2006 Language Log post, the onomatopoetic roots of meh, along with its slightly more disapproving sibling feh, go back to Yiddish.

The word was then popularized of the Simpsons and spread “as an all-purpose lukewarm reaction in online communication, particularly in fan forums, chatrooms, and the like.” Now it’s even made its way onto American Idol in noun form as “meh-ness.”

Thank goodness. Meh is probably one of my favorite words, and I fully support the idea of dictionaries tracking innovations in the use of language — even if it’s through transparent publicity stunts. Now I was going to write a little bit on the purpose of dictionaries, but meh, maybe I’ll save that for another day…

[via The Rest is Noise]

[via My Photostream]

My friends and I made an unexpected find yesterday at the video store, thanks to a “free documentary with any rental” deal at Quickflix. We grabbed Grizzly Man, a documentary by Werner Herzog about the conservationist-filmmaker Tim Treadwell.

The story is pretty simple, and uncannily similar to the plot of Into The Wild, another movie (based on a book) based on real events. Tim Treadwell is a troubled, aspiring actor in California who finds the answer to his life crisis in filming and advocating for the preservation of grizzly bears in Alaska. He goes on summer-long expeditions alone in the wilderness, only rarely accompanied by his girlfriend, and delivers rambling expositions on nature, conservation, and the meaning of life in front of a tripod-mounted camera. Treadwell’s offbeat, exuberant, and frequently profane manner belies how impeccably composed and crystal clear each shot really is — Herzog seems to match this style in the interviews he shoots with Treadwell’s friends and family. Each interview is established by a few seconds of silence, and often progresses with a barely imperceptible zoom into the subject or a sideways pan, as if to mirror the inexorable, fateful unwinding of Treadwell’s own life.

The filming sometimes has such a quiet quality that the dimensionality of what is being filmed seems to disappear. The lush grass and picture-perfect mountains become a photograph, and Tim’s larger-than-reality persona a digital artifact or a trick of the blue screen gesticulating wildly on top of the flatness of the wilderness. After all, as Herzog himself confesses, he is less interested in nature than he is in the story of Treadwell as a person, and in the story of every person as told indirectly through him.

The punchline is tragedy. After more than a decade out in the Alaskan wilderness, Tim is attacked in his tent by a grizzly bear in an audio-recorded sequence that is alluded to and described in terrifying detail but never directly replayed in the film. His girlfriend, who is actually afraid of bears, stays with him, and both are killed and eaten. The end is baffling and gruesome, and forms the basis for Herzog’s own appraisal of nature: “He seemed to ignore the fact that in nature there are predators. I believe that the common denominator in nature is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.”

Why, then, did Tim seem to have so much faith in and love for these creatures? Was he simply too naive or impassioned to see the chaos and hostility that the filmmaker saw in nature? Or did Tim understand something that even Herzog couldn’t? Maybe that’s why Herzog chose Tim as his subject, and why we are so gripped by a story that seems on the surface to be so absurd and disturbing, but ultimately enlightening, and even cathartic to watch.

National Geographic has a feature article on light pollution, and the social, environmental, and biological effects that the loss of darkness has exacted on humans and non-humans alike. Among the many unforeseen consequences of light pollution: increased incidence of certain types of cancer, birds dying from disorientation in the urban light-jungle, frogs’ and toads’ circadian rhythms.

The highlight of the report, though, is an incredible photo slideshow, which almost tells the story just by itself. Familiar places are transformed into strange, luminous mazes and the wildest corners of the countryside are shown in the glowing penumbra of far off sodium lamps. Another reason I love night photography.