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Ruined by a book
It is fascinating but slightly disturbing to look through the e-books available for free through hacker websites. The offerings are linked to what is available on respectably capitalist sales sites, of course – the most popular are rarely well-written, generally non-fiction, books that purport to tell the ambitious and the desperate how to change their…
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Good government
I tend to avoid politics, at least in its concrete form; gender politics, identity politics, and such are comfortable for me, but perhaps because I was a teenager during Watergate, and then watched my life and career disintegrate in the 1980s under Reagan, I tend to distrust the entire discussion. Not that I am willing…
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One day
Overlapping experiences, overlapping responses to them: last night’s relaxed social dinner with colleagues and friends, today’s anxious management of some administration in a frantically brief time before going to the hospital to do another HIV presentation, then went to the nearby Indian grocery, then off to a festive department dinner, then a brief visit to…
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The white wall
(a folk song translated from an unknown language) He came out of the dry east with a leather bag He stood in the square, and I know he smiled at me Stroked his mustache, boasted to the village men No one knows who told his secret The leather bag was left empty against the wall…
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Going Dutch
A few weeks ago I went to Amsterdam by myself for six days. A conference – frankly a slightly silly one: a few interesting papers dotted here and there among a great deal of fluff and repetition – but that was really just the excuse, to get away and go somewhere fun. Took many pictures,…
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The quality of the light
There are a number of stock phrases for it – familiar from Vesaas, Hamsun, Jansson, Nabokov, many Scandinavian and Russian writers. Here, we are far enough in the north (far north of any of the major Canadian cities, for instance) that we have the same light that they do – sometimes, at least, including this…
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Paul Attinello 