Author: paulattinello
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Trick reflections
Today all of the postgraduates had work due (and I am the Cerberus, or perhaps more accurately Rhadamanthys, of this whole structure). I received several frantic calls and e-mails starting from about 8:30 am, from students who had hit some sort of wall, intellectual or physical – one battling with an incoherent conclusion, another with…
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Signal to noise
Awakened by the bass from that rather inane dance track that the girl downstairs has suddenly taken a liking to… or more probably it’s her ungracious Glaswegian boyfriend who likes, and plays, it. Good thing he’s rarely around. I know enough of apartment life in a variety of contexts to know that I’m lucky here;…
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When the saints begin to speak
Every whisper sounds like thunder Everybody stares in wonder When the saints begin to speak [Manhattan Transfer, ‘Brasil’] Yesterday was the usual AIDS/HIV patient group presentation to medical students. (“Usual” – this is one of the things I do here, in this otherwise rather isolated place – it is both my claim to actually do…
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The Tale
Once upon a time, she said. As he ran, the iron crown began to burn in his hands with a dull red heat. The king’s daughter leaped to her feet to stare at the golden key hanging in midair, inches from her eyes. As he dug at the oak’s roots, breathless for fear of the…
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Sunshine and queasiness
Frankly, I’m worried. The past couple of years, my experiences of free time – including those lovely, long Easter breaks we get here in the UK, and summers, with their long high-latitude days – have been characterized by mild illness, by an inertia that is ultimately frightening. Frightening because that inertia is the demon that…
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Difficult poetries
Ha, well, then! – two days after writing about poetry that might seem too difficult (Language Poets, Temblor), I got a copy of Dylan Thomas’ Death of the King’s Canary, his bizarre murder mystery pastiche, complete with parodies of individual ‘difficult’ poets/poems. Very fun, very obnoxious, fairly silly… Admittedly most of the poets parodied have…
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Abruptness
Wakened by the phone. The doctor wants blood tests redone – liver functions awry, apparently; no surprise. And an argument over the many vitamins I take: we already had a rather boring and inconclusive squabble over this last week – it’s not exactly that he disapproves, but clearly he has latched on to them as…
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The Book of the Sun
My room grows larger, and daily there is less in it, but it only becomes more beautiful: when small rugs fade and vanish one by one, the bright bare wood floor can be seen, echoing the differently grained walls of the many bookcases. The various small light sources, floor lamps, swiveling and jointed, vanish gradually,…
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Correcting blogs
Spurious has made a small error on his May 14 post, where he mentions coming by and looking through Temblor (the Language Poet anthology/journals I keep at the very end of the Poetry bookcase), Milosz, Xenakis, etc. – he says I copied Berio for him; it was in fact Henze, but the most radical and…
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Consequences
A Monday morning, and a gray one: appropriate for these vague feelings of not being caught up, of not being ready, of not having done what needs to be done. Several administrative e-mails arrived Friday, and I haven’t done anything about them; my digestion is unhappy, the back of my mind is turning over whether…
Paul Attinello 