Category: AIDS/HIV
-
Dementia Poets
From 1987 to 1992, I was part of an HIV+ writing workshop in Los Angeles run by the wonderful Terry Wolverton. My main partners in crime were Gil Cuadros (the most successful of the lot, who published his powerful poetry collection City of God with City Lights before he died in 1996), Kevin Martin, and…
-
Explaining Nachiketas
I probably need to explain the previous poem, and the story of Nachiketas, and my own connection with it. I’ll tell all this from my point of view… which might seem a bit roundabout, but if you’re patient I’ll get to it. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were three powerful forces keeping…
-
[untitled]
Ravel glides through my fingers into air. My touch is shaky, robe falling loose, aches span my ribs, so tired. Not tired of thinking of you: dark, broad chords spin out past the lamp’s circle. Conjuring you into the room behind me: would you turn away if I made a mistake, would you leave the…
-
Persona
Last Tuesday, I was in a pub with a colleague from another university, and was eventually joined by a circle of friends from my own university (most of whom have blogs, by the way). We had fun, I was rather giddy (saying some tacky things, but I have friends all over the world who are…
-
Old Songs
[Los Angeles, 1991] Late again, and the woman at the desk is pleasant about it, but I will lose time from my appointment. The tanning salon is an increasingly important convenience for me, it clears up, however temporarily, the waves of red lesions across my arms and torso. And I look rather dashing with a…
-
Two places at once
The past few days of depression: it might be worth acknowledging something that might not be evident from this blog – that I have been here before, and for long periods of time. In fact the blog is not only about recording/reflecting that anomie, that hopelessness, which has become so normative over the years; but…
-
The Shape of What It Means
[Los Angeles, 1991] I am in the waiting room, going through my outline and list of readings for the degree exam in musical aesthetics. First is Cooke: naïve, but he made a good shot at figuring out the basic problems. If only he weren’t such a dilettante – he works his arguments right up to…
-
Dim / reflections
Positions… different ways of viewing life – my life, my life as it is now, my life in my imagination, or if you prefer, life generally…. (a) Resistance to writing is a neurotic symptom, related to being a rigid and immature judgmental personality, constellated with various feelings/strategies of fear/laziness/self-justification, etc. My anxious reactions to the…
-
Solaris
Continued light-headed, or perhaps woozy, all afternoon. Didn’t go to Catherine’s birthday dinner. Did go in for interview with prospective postgraduate – and I’m sorry if it sounds heartless, but what a waste of time that was. Well I suppose that in the larger sense, as I gave her advice about where she should consider…
-
vertigo
After taking my pills a few hours ago, started to feel strange – tingling, disoriented. An acute sense of feeling my internal organs (possibly illusory – there aren’t any nerves in there, are there?) and a shimmer of minor aches. (This after being pleased that my gums stopped aching after I took some echinacea….) I…
Paul Attinello 