Take the Bunny and Run

Three Reasons Why You Should See "The Artist"

2012-01-14T12:09:00.000-08:00

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

Why I Love My Chorus

2012-01-14T11:50:00.000-08:00

Members 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

Still Looking for New Year's Resolutions?

2012-01-14T11:47:00.000-08:00

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

2011-07-17T21:40:00.000-07:00

Although 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 accounting

Small Talk

2011-07-09T12:28:00.000-07:00

The 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

Mind Over Matter?

2011-07-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

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:

Eat, Pray, Love

2011-06-30T19:07:00.000-07:00

This 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 to

Facebook Fail

2011-06-30T18:45:00.000-07:00

It 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

Which Was the Son Of

2011-06-29T21:22:00.000-07:00

One 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

Harsher Even

2011-06-29T20:59:00.000-07:00

"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

Failure to Communicate

2011-06-29T20:16:00.000-07:00

I 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

2011-05-20T09:13:00.000-07:00

I 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

2011-05-17T20:54:00.001-07:00

Lay 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

Consider This

2011-05-11T10:57:00.000-07:00

From 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.)"

Still Life with Sound

2011-05-11T10:50:00.001-07:00

One of my favorite modern composers, Knut Nystedt, wrote the piece "Immortal Bach." It is a Bach chorale, sung once straight, and then the second time around in several parts all at different tempos and all radically decelerated. What I love about this piece is that it takes the quintessence -- the paradigmatic example -- of a phrase, a moving line, a living arch of sound and breaks it into a

2011-05-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

The novel about the Russian spies caught in 2010 in Montclair, New Jersey, would open in the same way as practically every article about them: with a glossy still of life in a leafy suburb. The first chapter would be short, its lacquered narrative remarkable only for the impenetrability of its slick shell -- until the last paragraph of the last page when the finest fragment of the truth about

wondering

2011-04-10T07:59:00.000-07:00

how do you think the new nytimes paywall will affect their headlines? will they be flashier? grabbier? and how will it affect reader behavior? will people end up reading fewer than their allotted articles because they are hoarding their reads? will they read trashier pieces? more serious ones? will they forward them around less? i would love to hear your thoughts on this evolving legal economy of

Creativity

2011-01-09T14:28:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, the WSJ (one of my new favorite publications...it's a long story) ran a piece about measuring and enhancing creativity in children (see: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704694004576019462107929014.html). Less interesting than the typical sounding of the death-knell of the American psyche are the examples of creative thinking in the form of samples and questions and

2010-12-21T05:55:00.000-08:00

The pace of youth is so dazzlingly hurtlingly accelerated it can render the background of youth -- the world and all the people in it -- seemingly static. This is an illusion, like the gentle list backward of the platform when the train starts. I don't know when the air around me became so viscous -- sometime in the past few years, I think. But now, back home, I perceive -- as if by means of a

Get Rich Quicker

2010-12-21T05:52:00.000-08:00

Officially open for business, my new carding venture: for a small fee, I will select, design, and/or write your cards for holidays, birthdays, special occasions, or just to let that special someone know you're thinking of them. Prices may vary. Void where prohibited.

Sentences I have loved

2010-12-14T20:23:00.000-08:00

A few doozies from the past few months:"I like women from countries that have sustained political turmoil. Western culture seems to forge women that are valueless and inane."That's from what is alleged to be Julian Assange's okcupid profile which now you need to sign in to be able to see. If it really is his profile, this seems a wee bit hypocritical to me. Isn't he supposed to be all about

Commuting

2010-12-02T21:26:00.001-08:00

6:50 amLast night I rode the bus home and thought --so dark and yetso early, only 4:47 pm and already someone has pricked the skinof the balloon of the sky and the lighthas gone rushing out like air and the cityof San Francisco, Coit Tower, the TransAmerica pyramid, the Embarcadero Centerand all the blocky fortresses of capital with bay views are zipping up their suits of silhouette. But now the

On Internal Tension and the Word "About"

2010-11-17T22:47:00.000-08:00

"About" means "concerned with" as in "this article is about the war in Iraq." Used in this way it refers to the central point of something, its gist, its core. Whatever meaning beats at its heart. But "about" also means "near," "close to," "approximately," as in "it was about 6:30 am when the sun rose on one side of the Bay Bridge."And it means "all around" as in "there were flowers planted all

Stop Apologizing: A Manifesto to the Women in My Life

2010-11-05T12:20:00.000-07:00

Dear All the Women in My Life: Please stop apologizing, at least to me. You have done nothing wrong, you are lovely: you are talented, radiant, smart. You read articles and make tarts from scratch and ride bicycles, sometimes down mountains. I admire your courage and grace and insight. But lately, I have been troubled not only by specific acts of self-deprecation but by the

More on Annie Dillard

2010-09-23T10:47:00.001-07:00

Just something to think about: "Nor presumably does baitfish consider itself baitfish."

2010-09-23T10:29:00.001-07:00

I am about to spoil a big part of Annie Dillard's "The Maytrees," so if that book is on your list, read no further!About a third of the way into the book, which is thick with rhyme, assonance, and alliteration (see, e.g., "He saw the tide line -- shell bits and turnip parings, paper, fish racks, shark cartilage, culch" or "Even the mudflat was matte"), Toby Maytree leaves his wife Lou. They had

The Garden & The Window

2010-09-12T09:48:00.000-07:00

L started teaching last week, which I am tremendously excited about. The first topic he tackled was close reading and he introduced it with a metaphor: imagine that the text you are reading is a garden you are looking at through a window. You can look through the window at the flowers and notice their colors, their crowns of petals, the sunlight tracing each blade of grass. Maybe there is a bench

2010-08-30T21:54:00.000-07:00

After God, there is no more skilled practitioner of parataxis than Joan Didion. "Miami" opens by juxtaposing two short lists of the possessions with which recently deposed presidents have fled Cuba. Didion does not use parataxis merely for effect, though effective it is at evoking both dislocation and intimacy -- dislocation because the austere use of coordinating conjunctions tends to leave the

i have now read all the words in "infinite jest"

2010-08-27T09:11:00.000-07:00

but the term "finished" in no way applies to my relationship with the book.

talking about "infinite jest" while reading it

2010-07-28T15:41:00.001-07:00

is like giving a weather report from inside a storm. all you can say is that right now it's pretty wet and more rain is falling...

DFW

2010-07-23T05:33:00.001-07:00

I have fallen hard, again, for David Foster Wallace. In high school I was intrigued by Brief Interviews and Girl with the Curious and liked both but was never tempted to dip into the novels. In college I exploded through A Supposedly Fun Thing and have never doubted that it's one of the all-time great and wonderful works of creative non-fiction. And I've stumbled across some of the scattered

Full Circle

2010-07-23T05:19:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago I saw David M*tchell read from his new book at a bookstore in the West Village. The book, reviewed extensively in pretty much every major literary publication currently on my coffee table, is about Dutch traders on the Japanese island of Dejima in the 1800s, the closest that the closed nation would allow foreigners to approach. At the reading, he said many beautiful things. This

2010-07-11T17:15:00.000-07:00

metaphor: from Gk. metaphora "a transfer," "a carrying over," from metapherein "transfer, carry over," from meta- "over, across" + pherein "to carry, bear"translate: from L. translatus "carried over," serving as pp. of transfere "to bring over, carry over," from trans + latus "borne, carried"http://www.etymonline.com/index.php

2010-07-07T19:35:00.000-07:00

When we think about languages existing and persisting over time, we tend to focus on how they change -- new words being coined, others going stale, rules we no longer follow. The other day, a friend of a friend treated to me on a short disquisition on words that didn't make it into the new volume of the dictionary. But this article by Frank Kermode in the New York Review of Books about a new

And also...

2010-07-03T05:28:00.001-07:00

How come an amnesiac is someone suffering from amnesia but an aphrodisiac is something inducing aphrodesia? What is with these suffixes??

Things I Am Wondering About

2010-07-01T15:58:00.000-07:00

How come you can be heart-broken but not heart-warmed?

French Burqa Ban

2010-06-24T05:17:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about it and have decided that maybe when I first read the NY Times Op-Ed on why France wants to ban the wearing of burqas and niqabs in public, I judged it too harshly. After all, I forgot to consider the environmental perspective. Back in the old days, when fuel was cheap, France had the luxury of journeying across many oceans in order to subjugate people who were not

Elegy

2010-06-23T18:31:00.000-07:00

"Because our conversations were few (he phoned me maybe 5 times in 22 years) I study his sentences the ones I remember as if I'd been asked to translate them."--Anne Carson, NoxAnne Carson's Nox -- an elegy and memorial for her brother, who passed away recently -- is a hybrid between a scrapbook and a translation, an elegantly folded exploration of how grief works its way through a psyche for

Borderline

2010-06-16T19:58:00.001-07:00

This is about translation. I want to expand this into a full essay, but right now I only have time to get the bare idea out; forgive me if you've heard it before. One of the things that interests me most about Language writ large is the way that it is at once immensely personal -- a tool for self-expression, for creativity, for art, a vehicle for inside jokes and catch phrases and dialect -- and

What do you do with the Visual Thesaurus? No, really. What do you do with it?

2010-05-19T10:40:00.001-07:00

When I first stumbled upon the Visual Thesaurus, I was so engrossed that I watched the whole demo -- a flower of synonyms bloomed onscreen, each prose petal linked with a colorful filament indicating hyponyms, hypernyms -- basically all the -nyms you could ever want were on display. I watched, mesmerized, as the words shifted around each other, as if in a cool garden breeze. And then, slightly

Why Law School is Stressful

2010-05-10T17:25:00.000-07:00

There are of course many reasons that law school is stressful: it's difficult; it's competitive; it's expensive. But what I find most stressful -- and most disheartening -- is the way it fuels ritual self-deprecation. Some days I am reminded of discussions that, as a woman, I learned to have in my teens where you go around the table and each woman castigates herself for having eaten a cupcake or

Procrastinating

2010-05-08T10:47:00.000-07:00

Richard Betts, paraphrased in a New Yorker piece about wartime intelligence, says that there is an inverse relationship between the accuracy and significance of information. In other words (and only in some situations), the more precisely we know something, the less sure we are of its value to us. Or maybe, the only things we know for sure are those things that don't really matter. The more

Semi-colon

2010-05-04T11:27:00.000-07:00

I decided recently that if I ever get a tattoo, it will be a semi-colon. It is my most favorite and expressive punctuation mark. It suggests two thoughts are connected without up and telling you how they are connected, forcing you to suss out the relationship for yourself. It is subtle and pleasing to the eye, the delicious fusion of a comma and a colon. What more could you want?I am not the only

Crim Law 101

2010-05-04T11:22:00.001-07:00

My first-year criminal law course is not quite what I expected. Instead of Law & Order, it's maybe more like...Deadwood. All the stuff that everyone was excited about -- the right to an attorney, Miranda, unreasonable search & seizure, habeas, the 5th Amendment -- all the good stuff that lends that particular glint to Sam Waterston's eye is Criminal Procedure. Crim (as opposed to Crim Pro) is

Categories & Cooking

2010-04-22T11:19:00.000-07:00

From last week's New Yorker article about a Turkish chef -- "His monograph on keskek -- defined in the dictionary as "a dish made by slowly boiling well-beaten wheat, together with meat" -- is less about boiled wheat than about a process unfolding over a certain geography. Musa has identified twenty-four regional names for keskek, which may be eaten at funerals or weddings, on New Year's,

2010-04-22T11:16:00.000-07:00

Living as I do in the palace of the Victorian novel, I have started to see narratives everywhere. For example, last night the three volumes of Paul Ricoeur's "Time and Narrative" arrived in the mail. The first two were translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer -- the third by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. There you have it: some event, a marriage or a divorce, slipped in between

Another gloss on "gloss"

2010-04-16T18:00:00.000-07:00

Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer is a landmark Supreme Court case dealing with executive power. 343 U.S. 579 (1952). You may know it from such recent scandals as John Y*o failing to cite it in his infamous memo. We just read it in class, and one of the concurring opinions, by Justice Jackson, has some really fascinating language about how life adds meaning to words: “Deeply embedded

Translation Project

2010-03-28T09:39:00.000-07:00

I started a new translation project yesterday. I won't tell you what it is and I won't post it here, not to be coy, but because I'm not sure what the rules about such things are (law school has infected my mind already)...I will tell you that my goal is to finish the first chapter by the end of the summer, and then stay up really late one night and make a huge mistake by sending it to the

Question

2010-03-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

Why does "discernible" mean something that can be discerned (the object of discernment) but "sensible" means something that can sense (the subject of sensing)?Will anyone ever figure this crazy language out?

An Argument for Guilt

2010-03-28T09:05:00.000-07:00

When taken in moderation, anxiety can be a productive emotion. Pick the motivational metaphor that appeals most -- it could be a type of fire, or fuel, or motor. When everything else is in balance, a small dose of anxiety gets me up early in the morning, helps me focus in class and on tests, keeps me going through long afternoons of reading, reminds me to study my music, and provides a backdrop

I heart the federalists

2010-01-12T09:26:00.000-08:00

How about that James Madison! What a writer, huh? Full disclosure: I haven't read the Federalist Papers before, so taking Constitutional Law this semester promises to be a MAJOR thrill from start to finish. An initial taste of mind-destroying eloquence: "As far as laws are necessary to mark with precision the duties of those who are to obey them, and to take from those who are to administer them

On Being Philip Larkin

2010-01-07T19:08:00.000-08:00

Does anyone know what happened to Philip Larkin in his mid-twenties to sour him to such an extent on the age-bracket? His poem "On Being Twenty-Six" uses both "putrescently" (an adverb so obscure that blogspot declines to recognize it) and "putrid." I remember the moment when I realized, with a sensation of falling swiftly, that I could no longer say I had "just graduated" from college. The very

Did Anyone Else Know that Dickens is Funny?

2009-12-18T10:23:00.001-08:00

I was turned off to Dickens early. I read "Great Expectations" in 8th or 9th grade and frankly I didn't get it. I mean, I got it -- class differences, abandonment, unrequited love, old wedding cake...I saw the movie when it came out and I got Ethan Hawke & Gwyneth Paltrow and all those lovely green subway seats...but I didn't get it. I thought it was dull. And besides, I was busy worrying about

Why Didn't Ian McEwan Just Become a Scientist?

2009-12-18T10:05:00.000-08:00

Ian McEwan's recent New Yorker story, "The Use of Poetry," is all about a British physics major in the 1960s who seduces his first wife after a week-long crash course in Milton. That it only takes him 7 days of reading before he can seductively quote and converse about the poet fills him with a certain disdain for the humanities. (In case you're wondering, the "use" of poetry is that it helps you

My Favorite (Legal) Words

2009-11-04T22:49:00.000-08:00

Just a smattering:feoffmentescheatsuntenantabilityconsanguinitytortfeasorIt doesn't even matter what these words mean. They are just fun to say.And on that note, there are some phrases I like because by virtue of word order they just sound so old and dusty, and you can almost hear the quill pen scratching in the background:subject to a condition subsequentwithin 21 years of a life in beingan

The Article I Wish I had Time to Write

2009-11-04T22:42:00.000-08:00

This might be the first of a whole series of posts that could be subtitled "if I had time." It goes like this:If I had time, I would love to write a law review article about asylum & narrative. This is because the central piece of an asylee's application is a declaration describing the persecution they suffered in their home country. This might seem to be a reasonable request on the part of the

I hope you weren't expecting too much...

2009-11-04T22:36:00.001-08:00

...from my first post in almost 7 months, which also happens to my first post-law school post...because here's what I have to say: the other night I dreamed that I slept through my contracts class two days in a row. not that I went to class and fell asleep, but that I took a nap before class and just slept right through it.this sounds like a typical anxiety dream except that a) my anxiety dreams

Mad, Mad World

2009-04-25T08:27:00.001-07:00

The AMC series "Mad Men" seems to have gotten lodged in our collective simile gland -- or at least that of the New Yorker writers. Two separate and unrelated articles in the April 27th issue (wow, I am way behind in posting this) make reference to the world of pencil skirts and martini lunches.First, in a piece on the rising use of "neuroenhancers" -- drugs like Ritalin or Aderall that were

2009-04-12T18:44:00.000-07:00

"Light is constant, we just turn over in it." That is from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Maybe it's a platitude but I think it's tremendously comforting to imagine all our restlessness, our tossing & turning, is just that: ours; and not some darkness descended upon the land. See, the sun is even now shining outside, just beyond the curtain.

Easter

2009-04-12T18:41:00.000-07:00

Most of the time I don't think much about flowers. I am pleased with the daffodils we've been given lately, they seem happy. And the various specimens we've potted around the house are lovely, especially when we remember to water them. But otherwise, they just don't occur to me much.Except after a run. Then they start to seem truly alarming. I saw a hosta near Buena Vista park the other day whose

It's just a little crush

2009-03-22T15:07:00.001-07:00

I used to worry that maybe I liked books more than they liked me. That they were just flirting while I was falling hard, allowing me no more than a glimpse of the odd beauty coiled in an unexpected phrase, enough to keep me panting behind, while secretly going all the way with the hipster girl up the block, the one with the polka head band and the yellow lunch box.It felt like I needed to read

There are many times when I wish I could do Job's voice

2009-03-18T07:09:00.000-07:00

on Arrested Development when he says "Come on!" I've tried but I just sound squeaky and silly in a stupid way, not a funny way.Like for example, there were several individuals using snorkling masks and breathing tubes at the public pool the other day. I mean really, folks, it's not the Great Barrier Reef. In fact, I think the decreased visibility provided by my fogged up goggles usually makes

The newest installment of The Book Club, in which The Bunny trashes Twilight...

2009-03-12T10:54:00.000-07:00

I did not do a great job of packing books to bring with me on a two-week trip to Israel. Distributed between my backpack and my duffle bag so as to cause minimum damage to the back muscles I have already destroyed by carrying bags of groceries up 16th street were:one book of short stories by Dave Eggers (contemporary, cold)two books by Ian McEwan (who, boy, if you thought he was just a nice

Taste Test

2009-03-07T09:41:00.000-08:00

A few months ago I participated in a beer-tasting at a friend's house. In spite of my general proximity to beer -- what with the carboys in the closet that hang out and ferment and sometimes spit up on my jacket -- you'd think I'd know a lot more about how it's supposed to taste and the proper terminology used to describe said taste. But the technical language -- the top notes and bottom notes,

Edward Ashburnham is soooooooooooooo dreamy

2009-02-27T17:33:00.001-08:00

I'd like to leave off the week with this lovely bit of description from Ford Madox Ford. Although I wouldn't normally be so bold as to write about a book I haven't finished yet, I am feeling very strongly about "The Good Soldier" right now so I think I'll make it through. Plus, this is too delicious to resist.Let me just say that I think for me these two short lines somehow sum up what's great

A Writer's Guide to New Year's Resolutions

2009-02-21T08:42:00.000-08:00

New Year's resolutions are a species of list which is why I love them. Many people don't, I think because they view them as actual things they're supposed to accomplish instead of just a writing exercise. But, like the facebook status update, I think making resolutions is a kind of Trojan horse that can be used to smuggle scraps of poetry into everyday life.The perfect number of resolutions is

If my blog were a character in a John Hughes movie...

2009-02-17T19:01:00.001-08:00

...it would totally be the Ally Sheedy character who shakes out her own dandruff over the picture she's drawing in order to represent snow. I don't even remember the name of her character even though I majored in The Breakfast Club in college, probably because I've been standing too close to the microwave all these years even though it's one of the many things on my to-not-do list...What is Ally

I actually may be too old to still be writing poems

2009-02-16T18:13:00.001-08:00

"We should be a statue somewhere"I said, long ago, at the beginning,in the year of the kisswhen my eyes saw so quicklythat the wave of a handseemed as slow as moss swallowing stone.Now I see that a couple is an outpost,a crop of purple between the rocks,a bloom beneath the heat,bright against the sandy hills,and we are no monumentbut quick shimmering things,tattered, clinging to the side of the

Glamor

2008-12-24T10:00:00.000-08:00

Elle's glamor derived, first, from her complete, almost pathological, self-possession. Although we were young enough then, still in college, that any act of self-invention could have been framed instead as self-discovery, she never presented her life as anything other than a canvas and herself as anyone other than its painter. This was a distinctly unromantic notion, that there was no authentic

Open Book

2008-12-18T18:55:00.001-08:00

I have the figure of someone who loves to read. And I do, folded like a chair, wedged into the crook of the sofa's embrace, for hours. When I read, I forget I have limbs, I forget I have ribs, there is nothing of me below my neck, I am a sofa and a blanket and the empty length between my eyes and the page where electrons skitter and lurch and splay.I write best in my head, when I am walking, and

Something I Wrote a While Ago that has no Title, or Waiting for the Apocalypse

2008-09-17T21:19:00.000-07:00

"What did you do while you were waiting for the apocalypse?" is a question I imagine children -- mine, maybe, someone else's -- asking."Oh," I might say, "I knitted. I hummed a little to myself. I raked the skins of vegetables, potatoes and carrots, and boiled them sweet. I wrote down everything I did each day and tore the paper into strips and the strips into squares and saved the squares in a

What's in a Name?

2008-08-17T20:40:00.001-07:00

Names stand at the frontline of change: sacked capitals, first-born children, uncovered stars, three-winged flies plucked from the air. In few places is this more evident than in the titles we bestow on the people we like and love. From the relatively bland friend suggesting a generic sense of amiability to the more pointed girlfriend or boyfriend which invite gender to the party along with its

A self-indulgent paragraph

2008-07-02T16:23:00.001-07:00

Language is the axis along which the self encounters the world. The seam flames. Many of us spend our lives captivated by that slow burn. Some long to pass through the fire, imagining they will arrive on the other side of themselves scorched pure, welcomed, free forever from misunderstanding and explanation. Others are content just to study the charcoal remnants, the serrated shadows cast, the

Some Factz About Powerset

2008-06-10T20:50:00.000-07:00

Powerset is a new search engine that uses natural language processing (nlp) to return results that are both more varied and more accurate than google's. NLP technology extracts and integrates meaning from linguistic structures and the relationships between words, instead of treating all text as strings of unrelated key terms. It's pretty rockin'.For example, the queries "What did Hillary say

Robot Love

2008-06-06T08:39:00.000-07:00

In the San Francisco BART stations, the regular arrival and departure of the southbound trains are announced in the prerecorded, carefully inflected glint of a machine's voice pitched to that of a human woman. The north- and eastbound trains are hailed by the equally smooth tones of an electronic man.From 4:00 am to about 1:00 am the two voices take turns reading the following haiku to each

Lily Bart and I

2008-05-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth is torn. She doesn't have much money but she does have class and charm and beauty, and a strong sense that she belongs in the only world she has ever known: the capital-S Society of calling cards and country estates and professional leisure.Unable to sustain this lifestyle on the strength of her own means, she has two options. The

The Godot of Sitcoms

2008-05-08T12:39:00.000-07:00

"Mais, à cet endroit, en ce moment, l’humanité c’est nous, que ça nous plaise ou non."But in this place, in this moment, mankind is us, whether we like it or not.-Vladimir to Estragon, En Attendant GodotAlthough David Brent, the boss on the BBC series The Office, does not start off Season One with much that could objectively grant him bragging rights -- a low-level management

Losing the Literal

2008-05-08T12:13:00.000-07:00

It is not rare to hear plaints of the sort "I waited for a table at Boogaloo's for literally five million hours until I was so hungry I had to go to WeBe instead!!" or endorsements such as "This bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats with Real Chocolate Clusters is literally the most delicious thing I have ever tasted." These statements do not read as flip or caustic, and I don't even think they're

Watches without Faces

2008-03-26T17:32:00.000-07:00

Il prétend que Dieu, c'est-à-dire l'auteur de nous et de nos alentours, est mort avant d'avoir fini son ouvrage; qu'il avait les plus beaux et vastes projets du monde et les plus grands moyens; qu'il avait déjà mis en oeuvre plusieurs de ces derniers, comme on élève des échafauds pour bâtir, et qu'au milieu de son ouvrage il est mort; que tout à présent se trouve fait dans un but qui n'existe

Por que?

2008-03-14T08:18:00.000-07:00

If there's anything I've learned from reading my own blog over the years it's that prepositions are treacherous. So when I decided a few weeks ago that I wanted to teach myself Spanish (also treacherous), I wasn't surprised to encounter a new subtlety in a word I thought I knew.My Spanish grammar reference book explains the difference between por and para spatially, since the common dream of all

Girls Really Do Rock!

2008-03-14T07:59:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't heard, my friend made this movie: Girls Rock! It's already playing in a number of major cities (San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles) and will be opening in 30+ more over the next few weeks. Instead of quoting the press materials or explaining the premise, I will just say that it's about empowering girls and women and that it's a must-see.Here are

Missed Connections and the Modern Novel

2008-02-20T20:27:00.000-08:00

I lied, this isn't really about the Modern Novel. But have you read any missed connections lately? They're for real. Some read like the fiercest, most elliptical short stories, some reach in and rattle you with the power of pure epic. They remind me of a point made in a recent New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik: that sometimes a mediocre movie can take on the weight of a serious novel when

Push and Pull

2008-02-03T21:40:00.001-08:00

I am knitting a scarf like a net. The dark blue yarn is pale in places as light streaking the underside of a lake; it is only by turning it that you notice the change is not an effect but the dye of the wool itself.The pattern is simple: purl-two-together, yarn over, repeat; the result is a mesh of slants and gaps. If you picture knitted fabric as an enormous matrix, then the simplest formula for

The Truth of Human Experience

2008-02-03T21:05:00.000-08:00

It has recently come to my attention that I'm not really much of a blogger. "Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty," writes Sarah Boxer in an article in the NY Review of Books. Almost none of these adjectives could be used to describe my blog, but then again I've never been much for id. My own is a bit like this dog: put-upon,

I brought my teddy bear and my lip gloss

2008-01-26T20:27:00.001-08:00

We saw the Kronos Quartet perform this morning at a family matinée in the strangely void neighborhood banked with stone walkways and blunted trees near City Hall. The civic heart of San Francisco is cold and impersonal; the bodies of the tired are draped over benches. Occasionally a skate-boarder skids by. And then it is flooded for brief but frequent intervals with ladies holding up handfuls of

Tragedy and Identity

2008-01-05T17:09:00.000-08:00

I first became interested in tragedy in 2004, studying abroad in Paris. I signed up for a course called "La Littérature de la Tragédie" or something to that effect, under the mistaken impression that "tragédie" was being used in the colloquial sense of "something really really bad/sad that happens," which is often used to describe things like natural disasters, fatal accidents, young people

The Limits of Experimental Science

2007-12-24T05:42:00.000-08:00

There are two main obstacles to considering one's own life from a rational or scientific point of view: it is nearly impossible to isolate the variables and there is no control group.For example, right now, at 3:30 in the morning on Christmas Eve Eve, I may have woken up after falling asleep at 10:00 last night because I am still jet-lagged after returning from Paris 3 days ago; because I ate a

Le Couple

2007-12-24T05:37:00.000-08:00

Des arbres froids portent des vestes de feuilleset le couple dans la voiture discutece que tous les couples partout discutent :c'est quelle route il faut prendre pour arriver, enfin, au but.

A Moment's Notes

2007-12-03T21:02:00.000-08:00

Eternity is not an experience of endless duration, it is the absence of duration and should take no endurance to bear.Many people believe they brush up against it while altered by those special chemicals that inflame the senses until even the most mundane (fog beading on a windowpane, steam curling off a pot of water) swell and soak you up instead of the other way around. So a phrase like "the

Best Publisher EVER

2007-10-28T17:57:00.000-07:00

In 1989, J.B. ("Jibé") Pontalis started the imprint "L'Un et l'autre" at the French publishing house Gallimard.It's a conceit only the French could think profitable, but, for a translation junkie and adaptation fetishist, also a thrilling enterprise: a collection of books dedicated to stories told at an angle by narrators whose subjects are famous works or famous people and whose object is to

In Which the Bunny Rants About Why Free-Market Capitalism is Not the Answer to Everything

2007-10-16T20:16:00.000-07:00

Exchange at a weekly meeting of libertarians, as reported by The New Yorker:At one point, Niederhoffer interrupted him and asked, “What are the general principles?” DiLorenzo replied, “Markets work and government-run monopolies don’t.”[...]Don’t you agree that the government does some things well? the man asked. “No,” DiLorenzo replied. “The government has screwed up the national parks. I think

A Day at the Beach

2007-10-06T16:25:00.000-07:00

ropes of whip kelpdug from the sea's damp flanklash ankle to hip to wrist,stalk to joint, catchthe errant limb in their knotted wrack.which wayis the other waywhich turn the unbinding turnto turn loosesuch an accidental coil?

Vegetables or Sex?

2007-09-16T19:25:00.000-07:00

Why choose, you might say? Because our choices make us who we are.In this short scene, I play a girl in a bookstore. The bookstore will be represented by Green Apple Books on Clement Street, a haven of narrow aisles and tall shelves for the lit-addicted and cash-poor. With only $7 in her wallet, my character is torn between two novels by Emile Zola, Nana and Le Ventre de Paris. Narrator: Nana

The Boil: A Fictional Account of Worry

2007-09-03T10:18:00.000-07:00

I have a boil. It is small -- the size of a jellybean, I told the nurse on the phone -- reddish blue, and irritated. She told me to wait it out. "It may come to a head on its own," she said.Now I am waiting for it to come to a head. I don't know what this means, quite, or how I will know it has happened. I picture the foamy head of a beer, frothing up to but over the smooth side of a glass, or a

Selfless

2007-08-11T20:02:00.000-07:00

Since it was published in 1954, Histoire d'O (Story of O), has vividly represented certain extremes of domination and submission. Through that empty vowel snake forked whips, corset lacing, and amber lashes of whiskey. No one imagined that a woman had written it until the journalist and editor Dominique Aury announced to The New Yorker, four years before her death, that she had composed the work

Extinguished Languages

2007-06-23T10:24:00.000-07:00

Globalization and LanguageIn addition to animals, plants, ecosystems, clean water, clean air, and fossil fuels, globalization and industrialization threaten languages. Linguists and anthropologists predict that between 50% and 90% of the world’s ~6000 languages will be extinct by the end of this century. Not surprisingly, it is the marginal that are most in danger—languages spoken by small

Prepositions: Excerpt from a Personal Dictionary

2007-06-05T20:46:00.000-07:00

Marion: prep.;1. the shape one word takes when it approaches another 2. a character in "The Wings of Desire" by Wim Wenders3. a trapeze artist who loses her job when the circus closes and falls in love with an angel who has become a man4. narrative arcing over the heads of the crowd5. the rung seized6. the hand that seizes the rung7. a French woman living in a German city8. a nasty fall taken

Performing

2007-03-28T12:17:00.000-07:00

"Performance" is a word at odds with itself.This word and its inner out-of-joint-ness became tangible for me when, a month ago, I started singing with a Catholic choir. I have sung in choruses for years and years and years, and thought I was completely used to the routine of rehearsals and concerts and, especially, perfectly comfortable singing religious music in churches, even though I am not

2007-03-26T08:22:00.000-07:00

A language, most will agree, is not just a static body of abstract relationships between concepts and signs, but also a manifestation, a realization, of a given culture. Within that culture, it functions as both map and city. To speak two languages, well, means being able to navigate (at least) two cultures at will. Translating or interpreting necessitates doing so at the same time. In most

Tragedy and Pathology

2007-03-17T10:45:00.000-07:00

One of the central questions posed by scholars of tragedy is whether or not one can write a modern tragedy. Is it a living genre that could nourish itself on our current crises of war, nationalism, and inequality, and could in turn sustain us with its inescapable, compelling contradictions? Or is it fixed, like a photograph of someone turning away from us: an image we can return to again and