Author: paulattinello
-
In the night
Amidst all this dim worrying and occasional working, and as the nights draw in, and everything transforms to winter – I keep thinking: I’m much more interested in my dreaming life, and sleeping, than I am in my waking life. This isn’t because I remember many of my dreams, nor because those have some powerful…
-
Dark history
[Still rather sleepy, still trying to get some editing done – but I realized it’s Halloween, so I thought I should have something slightly macabre. At our lunchtime writing workshop the other day, a woman brought in a souvenir book from the late 1930s that was full of pictures of the Royal Family; our exercise…
-
Edits
Editing academic papers… maddened with boredom, procrastinating absurdly. I was reassured when David said to me last week, Yes, editing other people’s work is so boring – given how hard-working and efficient he is, it made me feel better that he would acknowledge the annoyance of this really rather simple and supposedly stress-free task. The…
-
In bed
[Los Angeles, 1990] Float in white, not touching earth.Hide quietly. Blurred moments, sense of shifting consciousness and dreams, a time that goes in starts and fragments, processes and gaps, reversals – I hear the mail crash through the door, the sound of panic: ancient bills, requests to steam clean unreal carpets, and most frightening: friendly…
-
Being-in-the-world
Still been a bit groggy, and dismayed by the grogginess (though grateful for that extra hour today). Finally forced myself out of the house in midafternoon; walked through the neighborhood, among people doing the things people do (students in couples shopping, a guy with a big smile riding a bike, various children). Mild envy of…
-
Fall back
I love getting that hour back in the fall, when the clocks return to ‘real’ time. It’s silly, I suppose – living up here in the north, where by late October the night has eaten more than half the day anyway (official dawn-to-dusk is now eleven hours, and in December that will go down to…
-
Against junk; and a small panic
I’m bothered by the amount of junk in my life – by which I don’t mean anything that Bukowski or Burroughs would talk about – but more like what’s meant by junk mail, junk television… junk yard dogs. Well not exactly that last one, but you know what I’m saying. Over the years my reading…
-
That weird humming
Every year my neighbors change – this is an area with lots of students, some of whom are a bit unpredictable. I’ve never had a real disaster (as V– seems to have this year, with loud music from upstairs), but some of the changes are a bit, well, peculiar. For instance: I keep being awake…
-
Olympian
Having finally done some work today, I watched CSI – and it’s my favorite episode, ‘4×4’, an intricate puzzle of four overlapping segments that intersect in unexpected ways. Although the episode initially seems to run along the normal patterns for the show, the overlaps start amplifying the watcher’s awareness of the people involved, without them…
-
Workshopping
Today I co-presented a workshop on writing about AIDS for the local gay and lesbian writer’s festival. During the months of arranging for this workshop, I’d worried that the overlap between the HIV and writing communities here was small or nonexistent – which is probably true; but we managed to guilt some of our friends…
Paul Attinello 