tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-331151132024-02-20T08:50:04.343-08:00Take the Bunny and RunThe Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.comBlogger135125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-26689890847367009562016-01-10T09:13:00.002-08:002016-01-10T09:13:40.464-08:00It is the endless hunger
the lake eating the shore
the bitter eating into your basil leaves
because you did not, would not
pinch off the pale purple flowers
just as they appeared, their delicate heads
brushing against the kitchen window.
It is slipping the string from the back
of a snap pea, pinning it
between your fingernails, wondering
how such fine floss, such a slim little wisp,
could make The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-85028423428074726182015-08-09T10:59:00.002-07:002016-01-01T20:34:31.046-08:00Postcards from Civic CenterEvery morning when I climb out of the Civic Center BART station out into UN Plaza, if I am not too deeply sunk in whatever book or article I was reading on the train, I look around. The Plaza was built in the 1970s and named for the United Nations, whose charter was signed in San Francisco on June 26, 1945. Now the plaza is filled with pigeons who gorge themselves on abandoned lunch The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-202958572676569732013-07-06T21:56:00.003-07:002013-07-11T06:06:11.781-07:00Self-Indulgent Writing About NatureFriday afternoon hike through Heil Valley. The rough trail lay like a spine holding together two broad wings of meadow, whose upward slope to the right and downward slope to the left suggested a great bird banking. In support of this metaphor, which might seem rather overwrought for describing what was, after all, only a gentle trail through a tranquil valley, I offer a list of what The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-89145540246522295762012-11-17T16:14:00.005-08:002013-03-09T15:29:53.168-08:00Everyone likes loops but
they're rare. Most of the time
when we set out for some distant point
we must retrace our steps
to see our home again.
But coming back along the same path is not
so dull as it sounds.
The sun, for one, will have shifted, dragging
its shadows along the dry winter grasses, turning the blue river violet.
The geese that were floating on their fat breasts
will have The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-54383007149587990022012-07-04T10:35:00.001-07:002012-07-04T10:35:08.312-07:00In Honor of the AsteroidWe sang a piece last semester by Georgy Sviridov -- it is pretty, tuneful, a little schmaltzy. Its plaintive suspensions are all followed by obliging glissandos that slide guiltily into the chord that everyone knows they want to hear, the way a spoon may seem to slip gratefully into a dish of chocolate pudding. It was nice. Introducing the piece, our conductor mentioned that there is anThe Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-89852741587314321812012-07-04T10:16:00.003-07:002012-07-04T10:16:42.182-07:00Bar Exam Questions I Have Not LovedOne of the hardest things about the multiple choice questions on the bar exam is that many of them seem to have been purposefully written to remind test takers of the devastating limitations of our legal system.
For example: "An industrial city in the Midwest had approximately 300,000 inhabitants, and about half of them were members of a recognized racial minority. The latest census figures The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-55684205463232394912012-07-04T10:07:00.002-07:002012-07-04T11:37:55.973-07:00William Finnegan has a chilling piece in the July 2nd New Yorker about the drug-related violence eroding civil society in Mexico. This is the kind of climate that defies straightforward attempts at explanation, driving even journalists into the arms of a sort of magical realism: "In Mexico, it is often impossible to know who is behind something -- a massacre, a candidacy, an assassination, the The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-14037729736894564052012-05-21T15:12:00.003-07:002012-05-22T20:59:53.902-07:00We turned off the Panorama Trail in Andrew Molera State Park into a stand of stunted redwoods. They were thin trees, nothing like the redwoods you usually see, and their sparse leafy heads waved at the sky, creaking like a porch-row of rocking chairs. We looked up to see their leaves dissolving into sunlight, and listened to them lean this way and that in time to a silent song.
I had the same The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-87148577286977365192012-05-21T15:01:00.002-07:002012-05-22T21:01:03.016-07:00SecretsA secret is an object whose contents are under pressure, like carbonated liquid in a sealed container. The greater the pressure applied from one direction -- by, for example, strictly limiting the number of people who can be told or by heightening the sanctions for disclosure -- the more violent the inevitable eruption in another direction is liable to be.
A really juicy secret -- the kind that The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-62334290918827602472012-04-22T15:54:00.003-07:002012-04-22T15:54:32.893-07:00A Beginning?I wrote this on a bench at Embarcadero, facing the Bay. I don't know what it is yet.
"For almost a full year after she died, Hilman left Jean's voice on the answering machine. At first, it didn't matter because the only people who called knew Hilman and understood what he was going through, and later because the only people who called -- selling auto insurance policies or subscriptions to the The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-57052634579220918902012-04-22T15:50:00.000-07:002012-04-22T15:50:13.563-07:00The Radical Power of the Hunger GamesI am drastically under-qualified to write this post as I have read neither all of The Hunger Games books nor all of the Harry Potter books. So consider this an invitation to a conversation and feel free to tell me why I'm wrong.
The basic point I want to make is that we should be excited about The Hunger Games because of its potential to create a productive political and class-based The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-9500847607123710242012-01-14T12:09:00.000-08:002012-01-14T12:09:19.667-08:00Three Reasons Why You Should See "The Artist"In case you were wondering, you should definitely go see "The Artist," the new silent French film by Michel Hazanivicius. I know, I know -- I had you at "French."
But really.
Here's why:
1. Jokes in silent movies are funnier, the way jokes in foreign language are funnier -- because the little bit of extra effort it takes to decode them pulls you closer into the circle, makes you one of the The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-6987070918705760422012-01-14T11:50:00.000-08:002012-01-14T11:50:26.993-08:00Why I Love My ChorusMembers of IOC often rally late in a season by quoting the group wisdom that things always "come together" in performance. This is not the most vivid phrase -- for me it evokes something casual, unanticipated, like a fifteen-minute meal of pasta and sauce, so basic that it seems to constitute itself without the intervention of any outside agent. This phrase does not really describe what happens The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-56567304652993184562012-01-14T11:47:00.000-08:002012-04-22T15:33:49.033-07:00Still Looking for New Year's Resolutions?How about becoming more like this description of Thomas Cromwell in Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall"?
"His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-51012988915765031752011-07-17T21:40:00.000-07:002011-07-17T21:40:15.859-07:00Although it was only a few weeks ago that I was first introduced to the particulars of antitrust law, I am not going to let that stop me from expressing my disappointment about the recent opinion in California v. Safeway, which I find disheartening in a bitterly familiar way.
Several of the major Southern California supermarket chains (Safeway, Ralphs, Vons, and Albertsons), together The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-21213558510824564492011-07-09T12:28:00.000-07:002011-07-09T12:28:52.040-07:00Small TalkThe sense of betrayal San Franciscans feel at the hands of the weather heightens
with each whipping week of summer wind.
It doesn't matter that this happens every year.
Maybe it's because so many of us are from other parts
of the country where the summer heat soaks every layer
until there is nothing left to take off
and even the panes of glass in the windows warm foreheads laid in desperation The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-83439600395510372172011-07-09T10:35:00.000-07:002011-07-10T08:25:40.447-07:00Mind Over Matter?Taken together, several articles in the Ideas Issue of the Atlantic (July/August 2011) evidence a certain ambivalence about the relationship between our minds and our bodies. Or maybe ambivalence is not quite the right word -- maybe these stories only seem to contradict one another because they are starting from opposite ends of the spectrum, both trying to write the way back to a central point: The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-56334164165197319572011-06-30T19:07:00.000-07:002011-07-10T08:26:05.327-07:00Eat, Pray, LoveThis blog post is not actually about "Eat, Pray, Love" the book or the movie or the cultural phenomenon -- I have many things to say about all three and all of those things would fall under the heading of "vile invective" and all of them have been sad much more artfully by Stephen Metcalf (@ minute 7:10).
This is, instead, a pure joyrant about my city, San Francisco. If I were with it enough toThe Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-88039241726460678442011-06-30T18:45:00.000-07:002011-06-30T19:07:15.461-07:00Facebook FailIt is not unusual to complain that facebook profiles are disingenuous, boring, hip, preening, or vain. But what offends me about them is that they are wasteful -- in their current form, facebook profiles are a pure and effortful waste of clean, high-quality data. With scads of talented developers and more money than, if not God, certainly Saint Peter, why can't they take the information that we The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-64473158568178643202011-06-29T21:22:00.000-07:002011-06-29T21:31:20.289-07:00Which Was the Son OfOne of my favorite choral text settings ever is Which Was the Son Of, an Arvo Part (pronounced pear-t) setting of the lineage of Christ. I love it for the strangeness of the words (all those names) and the brute repetition of it and the newness of it (not just another ave maria) and the stunning simplicity of the last phrase -- which was the Son of God -- that knocks the wind out of you a little The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-32849734471210339642011-06-29T20:59:00.000-07:002011-06-29T21:31:04.773-07:00Harsher Even"That year a captain got bumped from the lineup...Bam Slokum, til then but a middling six-grade player, had grown four inches taller and ten times as dominant. He came off the bench of the JV B-team to play A-team on varsity as a starting point-guard, and went on to break, in the eight weeks following, three [school] and two conference scoring-records. The captain Bam replaced was called Gregory The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-79667188402665845912011-06-29T20:16:00.000-07:002011-06-29T21:31:49.335-07:00Failure to CommunicateI knew Blue Valentine would be hard to watch but I didn't realize why. Yes, the tang of the characters' disappointment -- in themselves, in their lives, in the world -- was sour like a mid-morning coating of early morning coffee on the tongue, and their efforts to break even each month without being broken were sobering. Yes, there were a few punches thrown and a few scenes in which a woman's The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-53994793860125894602011-05-20T09:13:00.000-07:002011-05-20T15:36:50.958-07:00I recently started reading National BestSeller "The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger (OK, so I'm a little late to the party...). I am up to page 280 -- specifically, right at the section break that follows their marriage (newsflash: they get married -- so not a spoiler, even for the characters). But I'm afraid I don't get it; that is, I don't feel compelled to read the second half of The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-71824100394300409732011-05-17T20:54:00.001-07:002011-06-04T10:17:21.123-07:00Lay awake this morning (Tuesday) Listening to the pigeons fuck on the fire escape or wherever it is on the other side of the window they rendez-vous -- I've never actually seen them but once in High School Petra told me that was the sound they made,The sound I heard this morning through the windows and the rain-soaked light and the butter colored curtains.This is the week before I start workThe The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33115113.post-70821319750120024342011-05-11T10:57:00.000-07:002011-05-11T11:00:03.351-07:00Consider ThisFrom footnote #13 in a 2006 article by Mark Danner on the ongoing war in Iraq: "The current rate of killing of one hundred Iraqis a day would be the equivalent, adjusting for population, of 1,100 Americans a day, or 33,000 dead a month. (In the decade-long Vietnam War, about 58,000 Americans died.)"The Bunnyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220398785866661875noreply@blogger.com0