Category: Academia
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Augusts
[The previous post is actually based on a piece I wrote about a dark August in 1991 – one of those painful prose pieces I wrote in the late 80s and early 90s, all under the shadow of AIDS and death.] My father’s birthday is in August, near the month’s beginning. This fact tends to…
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Crossing
Crossing from one year to the next…. This year has been one of separations and endings. In fact, more than ever in my life, I've made many breaks – but without having to do so, and at my own speed. As I am someone who has, many times, suddenly leapt or been driven from one…
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A bit vague, not lost
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Anniversary of this blog… sixteen years. A few days ago, really, on Saturday, but this is close enough. No, the blog doesn't feel dead to me, I'm still here for it, and it for me. I retired from the university in February; moved the books of my office to storage; and now keep talking about…
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Last day of….
It is, approximately, the last warm day (or, the "last," "warm" day). Which means that today was in the low 70s – warm for the North Sea – and tomorrow is a fading version of the same, without sun. Then we drop to fall temperatures. Sometimes we have a burst of late summer at the…
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Familiar
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in Academia, AIDS/HIV, Death, Illness, Imagined, Memory, Music, On writing, Personal, Psychology, TelevisionThe image seems clear, even obvious, to me – it could be from one of the better-written fantasies, or from a film about some medieval saga… an old man living alone in the woods; there is a shift in the wind, or the light – he looks up, creases his forehead slightly, sniffs the air…
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Rebuilds
It has felt like a rather heavy month at points…. Or no, it hasn't, or perhaps it has intermittently. Cheerful bits, lively bits, confidence and – and a disappointed sense of stuckness (a partial stuckness, admittedly) around the thesis, around moving into large things, as opposed to falling back from them. Which has admittedly been a…
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Key
Fall… University is starting; I'm in better shape than last year – not energetic, but cheerful, calm. Frequently my body falls into a haze of slow-motion quasi-weakness – not like a sickness, just drained of energy; but it doesn't feel like a problem. I suppose it's only a problem when other people are expecting me…
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Sky in evening
The sky is a mixture of dim golds and blues…. ••• Last week, we had four beautiful days of summer. Early May; those four days were strictly delimited – the weather was forecast to change on the fifth day to an ongoing 58-62 for the indefinite future, and it did exactly that. But those summer…
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Comfortable on the precipice
I think: there's a smell of doom, and power, in the room… ••• I am working on my thesis for the Jung-Institut, which is on the verge of being late, or too late; is methodologically not yet solid; is built from fragments of the familiar and the new; is put together rather quickly. And yet,…
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Fifth Continent (part 1)
And so, with various fussing and excitement and minor anxiety, and bringing a lot of medications related to digestive and allergic side effects, I boarded an airplane… and journeyed to the Fifth Continent. ••• Not the world's fifth continent, but my fifth continent: I have lived and worked on North America, Asia, Oceania (if we define…
Paul Attinello 