Paul Attinello

Author: paulattinello

  • Wind and rain

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    paulattinello
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    Wind down the chimney, pushing against the house, rain on the windows. Next to the two-dimensional, virtual, commercialized world of the computer screen, downloading South Park episodes; and the more three-dimensional, slightly more real, but still rather predictable world of my apartment, with its IKEA furniture, books, foodstuffs; is this passionate, truly real world of…

  • Us and Them

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    paulattinello
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    [Speech for the third World AIDS Day vigil in Newcastle, UK, on December 1, 2006. The speech for the 2004 vigil is here, and for the 2005 vigil here.] I’m a member of the Newcastle HIV patient group. One of the things we do fairly often is talk to medical students, most of whom look,…

  • A bit wound up

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    paulattinello
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    Today is World AIDS Day; after the past few chaotic, often fun but occasionally fairly awful days, I need to get my brain around a BBC interview in the morning, and then I have the afternoon to somehow get my thoughts in order to find something to say at tonight’s vigil. It’s a bit like…

  • Dialectic of Enlightenment

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    paulattinello
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    I open the door, turn on the light and smile in your direction. Fog burns away, the morning glows. Fractured reflection, light from your arms. I touch them often. Much later, in the hospital,spots like acid burnson your bloated torso. Sea-waves in your eyes; the waitress loves your jokes. I lean back into golden haze.…

  • AIDS and Memory

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    paulattinello
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    [Speech for the second World AIDS Day vigil in Newcastle, UK, on December 1, 2005. My speech for the 2004 vigil is here.] It’s a difficult thing, to lose someone… but we still have the stories, the memories. A couple of weeks ago, I received a fairly large package from an obscure address in the…

  • [a] Lear

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    paulattinello
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    [A performance text I wrote in 1985 in Los Angeles, under the influence of having played Cornwall in Robert Wilson’s strange but beautiful workshop/performance art version of Lear at UCLA.] Cast consists of three men (M 1, 2, 3) and two women (F 1, 2), on microphones. The piece can be heard as a recording,…

  • Drive the cold winter away

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    paulattinello
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    Remarkable how often I’ve seen complaints about ‘November’ bandied about lately – a sort of automatic disparagement, comments made that assume we all hate this month. Although I don’t enjoy winter weather, I always thought of November as a somehow noble (ennobled, ennobling?), rather dignified, austere kind of month; there is a seriousness about it,…

  • He is just going to wake up

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    paulattinello
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    I’ve spoken elsewhere about Nachiketas (his story, my name, a poem) – whose name means ‘he is just going to wake up.’ I always tend to concentrate on his name/story/meaning as that of the boy who makes friends with Death; it occurs to me tonight, as I reflect on how unawake I have been for…

  • White night

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    paulattinello
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    It never feels ‘white’ – though that’s what they call it (what Dorothy Parker called it, anyway). I hate, hate, hate, sleepless or fragmentary or uncomfortable nights – that misery, especially at 4:40 am when you get up to go to the bathroom, hoping that when you get back to bed everything will change and…

  • variability grand piano

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    paulattinello
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    Does anyone else find the current trend in spam e-mails rather, well, peculiar? The title of this entry was the subject heading for an e-mail I got today…. When did surrealism come back into our culture – and from such an unexpected angle? And what do spammers hope to achieve from such messages – this…