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V.
Last night I got to hold V.’s hand for a long time – about an hour and a half, I guess. The experience is reassuring – her hands are clean and soft, and pleasant to hold, and there is movement from breathing (or perhaps from the respirator, but the effect is the same); the immediate…
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In hospital
The last few days: explaining V.’s condition (clearly serious, but who knows the future?) to a variety of people, interfacing between her husband and the university. An hour and a half sitting with her, by her husband, in the ICU tonight – we talked, and talked to her, etc. Actually it was nice to see…
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Real trouble
V. is extremely ill – a cardiac arrest in fact; she is unconscious in the ICU unit, and we don’t know whether she will recover. She has been, as it happens, ready for this – in fact she has had the most direct and unflinching ability to look at her condition and possible problems of…
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Signs
[Los Angeles, 1992] The session chair is standing, the first paper is over, and through a long wave of applause intended for someone else I move through a labyrinth of aisles towards the stage. I’m wearing khakis, emblematic of the Eastern aristocracy, the conservative controllers who went to school with me; shoes beige and just…
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Memory
Do other people get as confused over the implicit values of their memories?… maybe it’s because I’ve moved around so much, and am so dissatisfied. When something reminds me of certain angles of life in LA: the Santa Monica bus as it passes that big, difficult-to-negotiate intersection near Rodeo Drive; the cheesiness of Santa Monica…
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334
It is dangerous to read books that have certain moods – especially when they are well written. Your own mood distorts and shifts to match them…. Tom Disch’s masterpiece is certainly 334, his intricate exploration of various denizens of an overcrowded, rather listless, declining but realistic New York in 2021-26. It’s really a series of…
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Paul Attinello 