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Spacious
Detachment, coolness, space: long sunny days. There’s a lot of work – this is the week when we spend hours deciding and negotiating final marks, sitting in judgment over undergraduate and postgraduate – and there is plenty of administration waiting, not to mention research, demanding attention at every corner. But I am somehow calmer than…
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Stimulus / Response
[Los Angeles, 1991] You are still in your bathrobe. You’ve been tired, irritable all morning, avoiding thinking or thinking about thinking, wandering around staring at the undone dishes in the sink, the hairs in the bathtub. Wishing it would all go away, picking up a sponge and putting it down again, trying to force yourself…
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Airports
(Rilke’s Last Flight) We walk inside huge jewels, ropes of white tourmalines, square-faceted; we straggle, silent, lonely, lost – The varied forms of faces thaw from fears or sudden loves, melt with unwelcome passions, freeze again; Then, waiting in black fields of chairs, we dream of those we nearly knew: we breathe the sun, we…
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Controlled spaces
I have always (at least since I was very young, and sharing a room with my rather controlling, sometimes combative older brother) been meticulous about my home. Given the vast number of books this involves, and the huge number of moves between 1992 and 2002 (about fourteen, if I have counted right – some of…
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Homes
Had it all gone differently: places I might live, might have lived. Places where I would grow old, or live with someone, or be enmeshed in a different pattern of people and behavior. Some are pretty obvious: the upper floor of a Victorian in the hills south of 18th around Castro, in San Francisco. Gentle,…
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Postcards
Flying, flying, endless air. Half asleep, we watch clouds For evidence of a plan, For our real destination. ••• My arms sleep in white sand. Palm trees relax, stretch, flow easily. I’m sitting by the ocean for days. I don’t know where I am. Find me. ••• The wind explodes, Fires lake-ice into my eyes.…
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Paul Attinello 