Author: paulattinello
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The tough stuff
I am watching AIDS films, while working on the book about music and AIDS: this may be the toughest material to pay attention to – most of the songs I will write about later are much shorter than the films, except of course the musicals, which are in their turn more artificial and therefore (mostly)…
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Wind, rising
Here in northeastern England, a few miles from the North Sea, the winds of March – and of course of a number of other months, depending – can go on for days, even for weeks… at night gusts constantly tear at the chimney, and the faintly white clouds of the night sky, broken by a…
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Ringing
Charlemagne Palestine’s Strumming Music for piano (1975?) is playing. It’s one of those vast, ringing minimalist works that makes the piano sound like an endless carillon: or not exactly – it’s difficult to describe, because you’d want to show how it is different from Reich’s Six Pianos (a favorite piece of mine, but very much…
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Judgement
Encouragement that I can get work done. Discouragement that I can’t get work done. Discouraged that the AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council, the rather incompetently run bottleneck that the British government employs to give lecturers and students funding, or actually mostly not to give it to them) did not give me additional research leave,…
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Boxes
I have continued, unfortunately, to be of no use to anyone; last Thursday, now six days ago, I had done many things for many people, and for myself, for about two weeks; then at that point I stopped utterly. I’m helped in this by being finally on research leave: a state both wonderful and, for…
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Search for meaning
After a startlingly busy week, about half oriented towards other peoples’ needs (although I was supposed to start research leave a week ago, of course some people did not keep up with normal schedules and requests to help me do so; especially exasperating, given how much of my own past month has been oriented towards…
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Oltrano
Having noticed that James McCourt has written seven books, years after I (and possibly most others?) had assumed he would never be a prolific author; and realizing that, after an Amazon order of three of the newer ones, I now have them all; and starting to think of his career as almost backwards from the…
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Density
With Strauss’ Metamorphosen playing: a long, dense contrapuntal work, complex and final – one of his last. Coward used to complain that critics called his work ‘thin’ – he would make fun of them, as though the adjective was meaningless; but of course in most of his work one can easily understand the criticism –…
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Focused
Fragments of busyness, many of them – as I move through the overlapping needs of our exam period, various scattered administrative tasks, applying for a promotion, applying for a job elsewhere – and move towards research leave. Reading unusually alert books (though still not books about AIDS, which I probably need to be reading right…
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Vexed
Satie’s Vexations is a famous piano piece, posthumously discovered and frequently mentioned, but rarely actually performed. It’s a small piece, less than two minutes long if played slowly – except that, as everyone knows, it has instructions to be played 840 times, thus making it the first example of minimalism. I’ve seen the score, even…
Paul Attinello 