Author: paulattinello
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A bit dim
After all that travel, as the days get short, my days are not sharply defined – my body seems a bit off to me: as though my liver, my body's processing systems, are slightly out of whack. Some work gets done, fragmentarily: I am in focus for an hour or less, then tired for an…
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Italians and circuses
Reading a Fellini biography; and watching many Fellini movies, plus other bits of Italian neorealism – it's avoidant, I know (still fallow after that long trip, must get back to work). I've always loved a few things of Fellini – notably Satyricon – but I didn't know any of the early work; it's addictive –…
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James!
It’s interesting to notice that James’ The Aspern Papers actually works off the same mechanism as The Turn of the Screw – the obsessive narrator and literary detective, who thinks he is so valiantly pursuing truth and the papers themselves, hears what he wants to hear, distorts and twists everything, pushes every conversation away from…
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A vanity of musicologists
The American Musicologists Society annual meeting, in a city that has its own characteristic reputation – Nashville – but which doesn’t really have all that strong a character, really: a large collection of people who have devoted careers, lives actually, to something that is perhaps not terribly important. A collection of mostly rather dull people,…
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Spaces
So: somewhere between Newcastle, London, Philadelphia, Washington, New York and Nashville; somewhere among the planes, trains and cars, and between various family members and old friends; and somewhere among a 'historic' election (but aren't they all historic?) and my luggage getting lost for a day and a half, and my credit card falling afoul of…
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Off, off, off… we are off
Leaving early tomorrow: two days with my brother and brother-in-law in Washington, a day with my sister's family in New York, back to Washington, then to a conference in Nashville. Apologies for the relative brief and sparse blogging lately: my writing mind has needed to work on other things. Perhaps I'll have intermittent Internet while…
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Psychologists
Over the past two or three months, since having the idea of studying to become an analyst, I read certain things differently – writings that include some reference to therapy, psychology, dreams, etc. have become much denser and more interesting. Because, I suppose, I am no longer interested only when those writings seem to directly…
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I open my eyes in the nightSee a great dark shape in the skyI think: that is the shape of my death.Watching – and it vanishes: it was sky behind the clouds.
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Hearth and home
The chimney sweep came this afternoon… a pleasant man in his fifties, indeed covered with soot, indeed with black brushes of various kinds. And even a blackened, grimy cloth to protect the carpet – although it didn't look as though it would protect much, he's clearly been doing this for years, as the room looked…
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Phantasmata
A day of haze: last night my guts were grinding and exploding, from what I don't know, so I took a tiny pill of codeine phosphate – it worked, but as always it made me hazy, put me to sleep, and then this morning I was still groggy until afternoon. A day of confusion and…
Paul Attinello 