Author: paulattinello
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Looking for a Place
[1991] This is the third apartment I’ve seen today; it doesn’t look too bad, the rent is only mildly outrageous. The paper with the landlord’s number is damp and crumpled in my hand, and the backs of my thighs are so tired; it’s clear that I’ll have to give up on my Los Angeles hamstrings…
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Good things
(a) A second meeting with Melinda, the psychologist from the HIV clinic and my friend. (There was a long delay between our first and second meetings this time, because her mother died; when we were walking out we paused in the summer sunshine and she told me, tears in her eyes but calm, about her…
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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…
Paul Attinello 