Author: paulattinello
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Midnight
In my small hotel room at the top of a guest house in Küsnacht, on Sunday night; the nearby church bell has just struck twelve. Studying again at the Jung-Institut – busy, exciting, sometimes embarrassing or ridiculous, often wonderful – did I really take thirty-six pages of notes for a week's seminars? Single-spaced, mind you.…
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Citizen
And today I am a British citizen. A pleasant ceremony, a bit long but the mayoress and city administrators were attentive to detail and acted as though they enjoyed it – well done, as it's already their tenth such ceremony this year. A bagpiper played the Northumbrian pipes – my colleagues who play folk music…
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The house, far from the city
Among large plans and changes: British citizenship, Zürich training, a big financial transfer – and small: a new jacket and shoes, a trip to northern Italy paid for by the the university, and most startling a re-engagement with two research projects that had dropped off the radar (just as though I were as productive as…
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Anniversary 4
Four years of this blog – and you'll pardon me for writing so few entries over the past four months; I promise I haven't stopped writing completely. In fact, next week I'm in Milan and Parma for a trip to our exchange partners; I was naturally a bit intimidated by going to northern Italy wearing…
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Writing and hearing
Working on a presentation about Derek Jarman's last films, for Wednesday. After much procrastination, aided by the calm, dull backwaters of the Easter holiday. And, amid brief frustrations as to exact dates, processes unrecorded, I realize I am enjoying myself: while making dinner in the kitchen, I say aloud to no one: But this is…
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Spring
And finally, here it is, what we've been waiting for. Nearly a week after Easter (and apparently this year Roman Easter and Greek Easter were the same day, which is in itself a fairly weird result of changing calendars and seasons). A young father, slightly anxious-looking but in a light t-shirt, walks with a child…
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Cornell
[By which I don't mean the upstate New York university, where my nephew – hi, Ben, how are you? – is finishing his freshman year…. Which brings us to a peripheral tale, before I even get into the point of this blog entry: I told my sister, and have joked to several friends (sorry, Ben)…
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Making
A tutorial with a smart but thus far undisciplined masters student, where I was quite definite about the draft paper he'd sent me – I thought it was chaotic and touched on an unmanageable array of topics, and said so. Fortunately he didn't seem to mind, and went home to rewrite the whole thing (not…
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Through the gate
The last section of Ravel's Ma mére l'oye (Mother Goose – it is also at the end of the suite) is 'Le jardin féerique', the fairy garden. This finale is built on strange, quasi-archaic contrapuntal lines, which have a sort of hieratic grandeur in the way they don't match neatly. About halfway through, everything evaporates…
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Light, air
About six weeks since my last post. No serious reason for this – not especially in stasis, not down, not depressed; busy but not immensely so, just many things to do in a long row. There are changes – new plans, changing plans, changing dreams – most of which bode well in one way or…
Paul Attinello 