Author: paulattinello
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Augusts
[Los Angeles, 1991] My father’s birthday is in August, near the month’s beginning. This fact tends to establish the month’s meaning, its varied characteristics and echoes – aside from the obvious ones such as vacations and unbearable heat. My quiet, gentle father, with his rooms of shelves of memories on film, of papers in disarray.…
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Nothing
What are our friends doing, when we don’t see them? What are our favorite short story writers doing in the long periods when they aren’t polishing the paragraphs we finally love so much? Or novelists when they aren’t hewing away at the massive structure of their newest Bildungsroman? Or actors when they aren’t getting deep…
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The dark mirror of the skin
It is strange, and trivial, and serious, and ambiguously embarrassing: to write about my own skin, about my psoriasis. The factual: I’ve had psoriasis since I was eighteen (I was devastated when the doctor told me, as though I could already foresee what it would mean throughout my life, or perhaps what I would make…
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Fragments of the day
Acquisition and maintenance One of the somewhat pathetic aspects of my life – not just in the past five years of English exile, but since I was started to lose faith in my creative abilities and future career, at the age of seventeen – is my tendency to spend much (and I mean: much) of…
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Handing it Over: Living in Hong Kong Now [1997]
[Original version of an article published as ‘Hand it Over’, Frontiers San Francisco 16/7 (7/31/97) and Frontiers Los Angeles/National 16/7 (8/8/97).] Flying into Hong Kong’s famous airport, which lies practically between rows of apartment buildings, I thought: Why didn’t anyone ever tell me that Hong Kong was beautiful? Because it is beautiful: behind the crowds…
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Sitges XI
That last afternoon: a major lunch, utterly Catalan food, in a fascinating but frankly rather bizarre restaurant. No wonder, maybe, that Dalí was Catalan – this was indeed surreal at many points – from the sausage tree (actually a grapevine, shellacked, with a selection of local sausages hanging from the branches) to the garlic soup,…
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Sitges X
Words Hmm. Over 6,000 words in the past ten posts, since coming to Sitges on vacation. That’s the equivalent, or nearly, of an academic article… okay let’s say one a bit on the short side, 7,000 is perhaps more normal. And only about 300 words of musicology written in that time. Now I know that…
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Sitges IX (Girona)
Today, cloudy, gray, a sprinkle of rain on the balcony. What a relief, frankly – much cooler (somewhat like a normal summer day in northern England!) – I feel as though I’m recovering from wilting, like a plant at the height of summer. ••• A Girona Yesterday, Girona. Much to do, lots of it tourist-style,…
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Sitges VIII
Selling it I suspect I’m not exactly selling my readers on Sitges this year. Well, obviously that doesn’t matter to Sitges itself – it can take the blow, I think – and most readers will have already decided, quite rightly, that the problems lie with me rather than with the town. But I’m thinking particularly…
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Sitges VII
Tomorrow I shall go to Girona for the day – a good idea, as I clearly need to get out of my funk here (for which pardon me – here I am blogging about a lovely vacation spot and just handing you a lot of neurotic miseries; chalk it up to the heat, and reading…
Paul Attinello 