Author: paulattinello
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Allegiance
Last night, a wonderfully pleasant evening for my sixtieth: eight people at table in a Persian restaurant, then back to mine for ice wine and sweets. ••• (And, as I am thinking now of England, and my English friends, many of whom were around me at that table, I am also suddenly aware that the three grammatical/idiomatic…
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The Experience of Emotion in the Age of Digital Reproduction
So, Benjamin's late work!… well, not really. Listening to Tippett string quartets on earphones (earbuds, headphones, headbutts, whatever). Easy access to music of various times and moods, of high quality, doesn't really have such a long history: even in the 1970s LPs, and then cassettes and eventually CDs, represented only a small part of the musics that…
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At this point
A sudden bringing-into-awareness, and perhaps into words, of some of what has been going on for me in the past couple of years… in a time of political chaos and anxiety, where one thinks of the 1930s: including the bit where intellectuals were attacked for not being militant enough, not standing up to aggressively dark forces. Attacks that…
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Glory, glory
Putting aside a few things, to take the train to Sheffield tomorrow – I am only seeing my analyst live once a month, at the moment – I recall that on my last trip I was looking through all the pockets for a pair of earphones, which had somehow gotten misplaced… Look, here: tangled with older sets of earphones,…
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Detach
The past ten days… At first entirely chilly, detached: the election as shock, a worse shock than Brexit of course, but similarly a stupid move towards danger and chaos engendered by incoherent desperation and an extraordinary amount of sheer lying. The US is on the other side of the ocean, and I don't live there… I have…
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Drawing-in
From crisp to cold… The past couple of days when I've left the house, it is chilly; I think each time, I need a scarf. A brief hospital visit, the doctor is late, I don't need the x-ray any time soon so I take the request for it with me and walk quickly out and grab the next bus.…
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What is it to…
What is it to 'go on', to 'leave behind', to 'finish with'? I don't quite mean moving on to doing something else, which is often coloured with the anticipation and energy of whatever it is that is new. ••• Over the past few weeks, my cable company has been running episodes of The Closer back…
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A Hollywood ending
So: although it has been a bad year – illness, anxiety, possible collapse of plans, disconnected from a culturally suicidal Britain, feeling cornered by the future – hospital, new medications, side effects – that year is now having a big Hollywood ending: after three or four days of some of the worst side effects I remember ever having, they are suddenly…
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At the moment…
things aren't bad today. My chest, stomach feel a bit heavy, a shadow of a headache, a sort of – can I say a fuzzy version of tingling, a bit like when you focus on parts of the body in meditations and body processes, except in this case not temporary? Don't know what you'd call that. I…
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Negative capability
Analysis, a couple of weeks ago. For some months, I rarely bring dreams in: I know that I am dreaming but can't remember anything. The previous week's single dream: a teenager who was stubborn, wouldn't speak, was angry at everything: the adults talk around him, being social and polite, but he throws off all our timing, our…
Paul Attinello 