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Spring
It is very late, or very early, depending on your preference – just after six a.m. Sleep is for some reason impossible, I don’t know why. The other day an IKEA catalogue came in the mail, with ‘SPRING’ on the cover. I laughed, hollowly – all right, I didn’t do that, I don’t engage in…
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Framing the past
Having finished watching Parting Glances, I can see – yes, it is a good movie; but I don’t think I missed so much, walking out on it twenty-odd years ago. An interesting and touching slice of a certain kind of life, and the party scene is indeed great fun; of course from my current point…
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The tough stuff
I am watching AIDS films, while working on the book about music and AIDS: this may be the toughest material to pay attention to – most of the songs I will write about later are much shorter than the films, except of course the musicals, which are in their turn more artificial and therefore (mostly)…
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Wind, rising
Here in northeastern England, a few miles from the North Sea, the winds of March – and of course of a number of other months, depending – can go on for days, even for weeks… at night gusts constantly tear at the chimney, and the faintly white clouds of the night sky, broken by a…
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Ringing
Charlemagne Palestine’s Strumming Music for piano (1975?) is playing. It’s one of those vast, ringing minimalist works that makes the piano sound like an endless carillon: or not exactly – it’s difficult to describe, because you’d want to show how it is different from Reich’s Six Pianos (a favorite piece of mine, but very much…
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Judgement
Encouragement that I can get work done. Discouragement that I can’t get work done. Discouraged that the AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council, the rather incompetently run bottleneck that the British government employs to give lecturers and students funding, or actually mostly not to give it to them) did not give me additional research leave,…
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Paul Attinello 