Category: AIDS/HIV
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Familiar
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by
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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Writing a Story for You
[A 1991 story written in Terry Wolverton's writing group; about Reid Beitrusten, who died 2 December 1983.] You’re dead, but you wanted to write stories. You were just about to get published, just about to start making it. So I’m writing a story for you, I started it in the laundromat, I went next door…
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Ancient history
I'm in a casual, student-y restaurant in August: which means it's fairly empty. The big, friendly black cook looks at me inquiringly – I'll stick with this cider (yes, it's fruit-flavored, shut up you) and won't have dinner for another half hour or so. I'm finally working on that proposal for the shorter of the…
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Defense / critique
2:18 a.m. Zürich time: my thesis defense at the Jung-Institut is at 9 am. My phone's alarm is set for 6:20 – very early for me; and because I frequently get annoying side effects at night (headaches, itching, stomach aches) I did not take my HIV meds at dinner. It's okay – statistically 95-98% compliance…
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Finishing the year
When you read older fiction and someone refers to dragging a steel bath into the kitchen and filling it with kettles of boiling water, do you wonder… what would that be like? I don't think I could stand it. ••• I didn't quite have a Christmas to speak of this year – it was interrupted…
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Restless [Dreams]
Dark of the year. Winter solstice, full moon, close to each other: death and life. As everything gets slower, calmer, there is a lot of time – and a lot of mental space…. All my analysands seem charged: some are very present to themselves, you might say. In many sessions for the past two weeks or…
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Raise your glass
I can't easily explain it: a link between an unexpectedly named day, a song I didn't understand, and a set of unfamiliar feelings…. It's been a bit odd: I was throwing references to this stuff at my friends all day – most people seem vaguely pleased, but a bit puzzled. That is probably because the…
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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 deux
[A week in Cape Town, South Africa, at the end of July 2017… continued from part 1. Yes, I did take a long time to finish writing this!….] ••• On Tuesday morning we are good and organised tourists: or really Amanda is, and I follow her, still coughing a bit. We are going to see…
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A different three in the morning
'Three in the morning' has shown up in several of my published papers around AIDS since the mid-1990s. It generally refers to the same nexus of memory, feeling, implications: a quality of being in a hospital room, an anonymous room that could be anywhere, in the middle of the night; lights are very low but…
Paul Attinello 