Author: paulattinello
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… sleepy… [and] *click*
Sleepy today. Since in addition to problems with HIV and its medication and HCV, I also have an auto-immune thyroid problem, I’ve been taking medicines for a while now – one year, two years? – that keep my weakened thyroid from allowing me to sleep all the time. Unfortunately, I’ve been a bit careless about…
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Conversations
I neglected to mention the best part about the past week: two sets of casual conversations with wonderful, calm, sensible friends – neither of whom unfortunately live anywhere near me. Such a valuable thing, really the most wonderful thing, and something I miss a great deal: in Hong Kong, Australia, and northern England (that is…
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Wind and rain
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…
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Us and Them
[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,…
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A bit wound up
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…
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Dialectic of Enlightenment
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.…
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AIDS and Memory
[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…
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[a] Lear
[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,…
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Drive the cold winter away
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,…
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He is just going to wake up
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…
Paul Attinello 