Author: paulattinello
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Weight
I apologize, again, that the entries for the past month or so have been so distinctly unhappy. Of course that is in a general context of me as a depressed, disappointed, angry person who has been especially upset by my life circumstances over the past five years (even more than in the other dark stretches…
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Small broken things
The weather is beautiful, the past three days. Clear, sunny – not at all hot of course, it’s barely 70 or so, but ideal. For the locals they think this is hot – one said to me yesterday that it was tropical: I just rolled my eyes and said, no, this is not tropical. It’s…
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How to save a life
It is perhaps less than impressive that I should be so enamored with The Fray’s ‘How to Save a Life’. It is, after all, a current big quasi-alternative hit, by a Coldplay clone; and Rolling Stone considered it yet another expression of rather self-indulgent teen angst (the truth is, I did hear it for the…
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Perfect fantasy
The Girl from Rio: an utter fantasy of a movie. London bank clerk fantasizes about the samba and a beautiful girl who appears on all the Carnival videotapes; when his wife goes away with his boss, he steals a fortune, goes to Rio and meets The Girl. A few pathetically simple, mildly amusing plot twists;…
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Curses
Although I’m supposed to be working this weekend on the papers for a new degree program, and the woman I’m working with wants to know when we’ll be finished, I’m having an avoidant day – not disastrous, there’s a whole three-day weekend to figure out all this stuff. I still feel a bit guilty and…
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Focus
These two days I am doing a couple of presentations about art and AIDS, around a new production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Though they are not in themselves difficult, or terribly important, nor do I expect substantial attention or audience involvement, I find myself fussing a lot over them – and not only…
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Constantinople
[Fragments of an unfinished poem, including two false starts – or perhaps middles] Lost is lost, no griefs could bring it back. Blood, blood, those faces, broken walls and burning towers, Jewels scattered in the alley, a wailing mother, the bearded merchant skewered, … Jeweled women flee down alleys, A bearded shopkeeper skewered, his shouting…
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As if
Going back to bed, still fuzzy with a cold that has lasted several days, and which keeps returning, unwelcome – I am imagining my life differently, as I do so often: what if that had happened, what if I could intervene here, what if I had chosen to do this instead, what would have been…
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The City
Stepping along the steel edges of intersections, people in precisely cut suits walk quickly through the icy air past elongated glass windows protecting neat arrays of crystal, ebony-handled carving sets, and thin, pale diamonds. The edges of all these things extend out in a net of lines infinitely narrow, infinitely sharp, a labyrinth of slashing…
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Happy…
anniversary. This blog is a year old today. I’m rather pleased with where it has taken me – 262 posts, or a hair more than five per week, or one every working day – not too bad for productivity, which is such a bugbear for me (one recalls Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, quoted…
Paul Attinello 