Author: paulattinello
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Dark pasts
A couple of weeks ago – Saturday – D. and I went to see Matthew Bourne's The Midnight Bell. Based on books by Patrick Hamilton, who wrote a lot about being down and out and drunk in London in the 1930s (and died in his fifties, predictably of deterioration after a life of drinking), it's…
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Sea, sea
Reading David Hinton's Existence, which is, among other things, Hinton looking at a Chinese painting that leads him into the world of Chinese thinking – that thinking which developed across Taoism, Zen Buddhism, etc. He speaks for a while of mountains, and the Chinese sense that the awareness of existence, emptiness, and a lot of…
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Zürich in winter: 2025
Monday The first night in Zürich. The flight wasn’t bad; was thinking about small things going wrong while traveling, after reading someone who claims that such things are ruinous but one forgets them. I don’t really agree: for some people, at some times, yes, but… And, finally in my hotel room, I break a glass…
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Year
A strange year. Or, an expectable year. A year that was opaque for much of its length, but which now seems transparent as glass…. A sense that thoughts and emotions, and in fact much of what I call myself, has settled into something more… well, integrated, simpler. The awfulnesses on the horizon – two wars,…
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A letter to a younger self
A few days ago, I was reading The Letter Q: Queer Writers' Notes to their Younger Selves. It's a collection of, well, exactly what it says – which suggests 'it gets better' messages, and many of them are. But it was interesting that they also do different things, take different tones… I thought I should…
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Augusts
[The previous post is actually based on a piece I wrote about a dark August in 1991 – one of those painful prose pieces I wrote in the late 80s and early 90s, all under the shadow of AIDS and death.] My father’s birthday is in August, near the month’s beginning. This fact tends to…
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Another August
Yet another interesting time… In mid-June I saw my HIV doctor, the kind, meticulous Scottish one, the one who managed our large teaching hospital's COVID care through much of the pandemic. (The department is Infectious Diseases, so, there you go.) I was surprisingly tired and weak – I'd asked to see him out of the…
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All of Us Strangers: a comment
All of Us Strangers (2023), a film that I found absolutely amazing… Alexander Haigh is the cute-bearish writer and director of Weekend (2011), which was also amazing, in a way that had some parallels – layered, complexly real dialogue, a love of men who are in love, bodies and feelings and memory and loss, and…
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Zürich 2.24
NCL-AMS-ZUR A brief trip to Zürich, just five days, to teach a seminar at the Institut. I really don’t travel much these days, do I?… dusting a suitcase, running through the list I made years ago when I was studying so I wouldn’t forget important things… First of all, airport security in Newcastle has been…
Paul Attinello 