Author: paulattinello
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Far
I will admit: I’m not completely happy with the Christmas Alone thing. It’s not bad; I’m not depressed. And I will have a leisurely lunch-and-afternoon with V. and her family; and if only I’d gotten organized I could have gone to see my family this week (they’re all gathering in Washington this year – actually…
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Holiday
Holiday stuff…. Pandoro from an Italian student, M. (although I can’t imagine why he shipped it all the way from Austin, Texas, where he’s on a year abroad – after all they sell them around here). Already put the powdered sugar on it, going to have a couple of slices as a snack. A very…
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Upanishad
Reading a passing reference to the Upanishads, by the shimmering lights of my small, comfortable, living Xmas tree (I’ll post a picture on Xmas Eve), I think: I would like to spend time studying them, reading them… of course they’re coming up obliquely, at a sort of angle, in the paper I’m writing; but I’m…
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Shortest Day
The winter solstice was 12:22 a.m. GST – this morning. It didn’t feel like the shortest day. I’m sleeping too much the past several weeks, because I’ve been careless about my thyroid medicine (as well as missing not one but two antiretroviral doses when I went to Liverpool, which, in AIDS medicines is really going…
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On ‘Her Face’
I should explain…. Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati is spiritual leader of Kashi Ashram, in central Florida. She is also an important AIDS activist – which is how I met her in the late 1980s (I think it was 1989). One of her followers in Los Angeles was also my AIDS Project Los Angeles phone buddy…
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Her Face
for Ma Jaya 1. Arc and klieg lights, endless fusion: the spark leaps from one to the next, a barely, fiercely controlled explosion. Paintings melt in profusion, pouring fire down the walls, flaring acrylics shimmer through the alarmed, the seduced lens: the walls melt into us – 2. Sheer visual density of the figure: the…
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High Spirits
So, in this rather weird transition between the semester and its end (a few meetings left), and also between working hard on the Liverpool presentation and working on the next paper, and having made myself a bit sick in doing so (gastro mostly), and trying to get a list of things done around the house,…
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A slice of orange
A slice of orange floating in the bath oils…. There is peace in my heart these days: or, to be less religious-sounding, there is a certain peacefulness in my heart lately. I almost hesitate to mention in it; not because I think that saying it will make it go away, but because I have claimed…
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In praise of Joan Didion
I have always loved Joan Didion’s books, especially the essays. In some cases, such as Slouching towards Bethlehem, or The White Album, I care about the subject of the essay; but in Miami, or Salvador, I don’t – yet it’s the sentences that are always so amazing, so eerily short and blunt, yet so utterly…
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Stumbling [and] Rhetorician [and] Aftermath [and] Ready
Writing this paper: pleased at a sentence, frustrated at a page; gratified when a point comes clear, dismayed when it blows up into something aggressive and nonsensical. Read what I had for V–, and was surprised at how mad and rambling and repetitive and polemical and… well, you get the idea – how overdone, how…
Paul Attinello 