Paul Attinello

Author: paulattinello

  • Renovation

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    paulattinello
    in

    [We started a writing group, Rumana and I and a couple of friends… modeled on Terry Wolverton's approach in the late 80s and early 90s. Two meetings so far; and we're all writing. This poem, blunt though it is, came to me clearly – that sense of making something:…]   Nowhere to move, so work…

  • Anxiety-confidence-fear-pride-resignation-…

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    paulattinello
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    So: a bit too many appointments, too much teaching (though it is not going badly); editing the book; studying for four Jung-Institut exams, with two papers; taking over the HIV group's peer counseling… I have been thrown from worry to a more steely determination, and through everything between, in more and more erratic and rapidly…

  • Beautiful men

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    paulattinello
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    After a couple of weeks with a lot of teaching and students; and after a lot of promises to continue editing the anthology, and studying for my Jung-Institut exams – about half of those promises broken, but I do try to keep going; and after somewhat warmer (though not actually warm) weather; and after a…

  • Brodkey

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    paulattinello
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    In an odd reflection of my blog entry a week or so ago, about Stefan Brecht… last night I was reading through John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists, an enjoyable collection of sharply drawn capsule careers of writers; and I tripped over Harold Brodkey. Who, of course, whatever else he had been, eventually became a…

  • Visceral

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    paulattinello
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    And so: since the chilly equilibrium reached at the end of my previous post, there has been a feeling of negotating the curves in existence, but with certain blinkers, or speed governors, removed from the engines, from the windshields… (Hmm, I wonder if my brother would appreciate the car metaphors. He'd probably manage them better.)…

  • Brecht (no, I mean the other one)

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    paulattinello
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    Today I went to York for the second time, to my new analyst, S. I like her a great deal – and this might be a very good change for me: it feels as though my two major analysts, John and Mitch, have both been people who were fairly similar to me – which seemed…

  • In-the-midst-of

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    paulattinello
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    A day that had one-thing-after-another in it: some are familiar, even long-repeated actions, some are new; there are pleasures, there are boring bits: and that quailty that has appeared in several (no: in a number) of my posts lately, of being transitional, of being sort of in-between. Liminal, perhaps. With students, cheerful or as though…

  • Pieces

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    paulattinello
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    Experiences lately seem to come in defined, outlined, characterized pieces: like bits of a mosaic. But since the mosaic isn't seen whole (at least not by me), I am constantly surprised by huge shifts in the ground underfoot…. * A couple of weeks ago, at the acupuncturist, while lying pierced: a really astounding ecstatic experience,…

  • Flash

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    paulattinello
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    Reading in bed, electronic on an iPad, Tove Jansson's story collection Traveling Light. I was very happy when it, with the other recent ones – especially Fair Play – were translated by a small London publisher; my intense attachment to the Moomin books, especially the eerie late ones, and to my old, beaten-up copy of…

  • If we really…

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    paulattinello
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    At some point in the last couple of months, the often tangled clouds of dream and fantasy – the things that go on in the back of my mind, when I'm washing the dishes or walking to the bus, or… – those clouds have moved into something unexpected… If, when we die, there is some…