Author: paulattinello
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Others
And the memory of Ted brings me back to memories of others, I don't know why… First should be Paul P., partly because he would have put himself first. A brilliant composer who hadn't written many pieces, an especially intelligent student who intended to have a great future – I still have his complex, beautiful…
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Hiccups
This evening, for some reason, I had the hiccups for a while – too much salt on the salmon for dinner, I don't know; something. A bit bothersome; they took a while to go away – and while I had them I flashed back on a strange, affectionate but excruciating memory. Ted used to have…
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Sweats
A recurrent annoyance for the HIV+ is the 'night sweat' – it's a sort of peculiar demi-symptom of nothing in particular, where you suddenly wake up in the middle of the night soaked in a cold sweat. I can't remember the details, but I think it happens literally over about ten to fifteen minutes –…
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Baked goods
A surprisingly intricate, but entirely pleasant, encounter in the bakery area of Marks & Sparks, near the bus station… I was wandering around rather haplessly, my usual graying-academic look, with the relaxed but indecisive style I evidently have when presented with a huge array of possible meals. Although I don't eat much bread, I thought…
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In between
Trying to catch – somewhere between the things I did in town today, and the many things I didn't do – the list is long at the moment of research and marking and administration – and sleeping and waking and working on the sofa, and the light, as the days are long – which might…
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A Dozen Roses for John
In the spring of 2001, I was planning to move from Hong Kong to Australia. At some point in the previous months – John will remember more exactly, he knows my memories are never very clearly date-stamped – John and I had met at an Australian musicology conference. This astoundingly beautiful, very shy and earnest,…
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Responsorial
Intermittently, over the past couple of years, I hear of the severe illness, loss of mental control, or death of a contemporary – not from HIV or related problems, but from, well, anything else, as it happens. As I am now in my mid-50s, this is becoming more and more a normal occurrence. Unfortunately, at…
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Anniversary 5
Five years of this blog, today… yes, of course entries are occasional, and they scatter themselves across oblique moods and memories, more than direct experiences – well, that's kind of how my life runs these days. But I'm generally pleased with it – the reflections are perhaps not as fragmented, as decentered, as the Swedish…
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Spring bits
So, oddly enough, it has apparently been the warmest April on record in the UK. I keep wondering – does that include this area of the Northeast or not? – in other words: even though April had great weather, it appeared in short patches between remarkably cold weather – is this just part of my…
Paul Attinello 