Paul Attinello

Category: AIDS/HIV

  • Dallas

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    paulattinello
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    Today was World AIDS Day; a brief radio interview, then a panel after a film – and the film was Dallas Buyers Club. Now, as it happens, I'd never seen Dallas Buyers Club before tonight. I have discs and downloads of lots and lots of AIDS movies, and television and other media – but quite…

  • Insight

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    paulattinello
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    How unexpected – some of the events and understandings of the past two months – with those of the past five or six years, with those of the past thirty-one years, and even with those of the past fifty-seven years – seem to have turned a narrowly configured corner, one that leads from the the…

  • Amidst

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    Three psychoanalysis clients!… uh, patients? Analysands? And those terms: clients is too business-y of course; and after all the arguments in the 1980s in the AIDS community (the ones that created the term 'PWA'), I'm not comfortable calling anyone a 'patient'. Analysand… an exact and respectable term. Unfortunately a rather long one, and one most…

  • Recovering

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    paulattinello
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    Today's two-hour lecture was probably the last AIDs activity for a while… except of course for catching up with some counseling. Framed with a great deal of self-clarification – I felt the need to explain to my students that I was tired out by the subject… And then did parts of the 'AIDS Rage' lecture,…

  • Backwash

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    paulattinello
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    So, as the events and discussion around AIDS gradually dwindle… even after World AIDS Day, there are still backwashes (or perhaps: backdrafts?) from all these memories and feelings. Monday was the patient group discussion with graduate students in clinical psychology – which is always both easier and deeper than our more usual presentations for medical…

  • Eve

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    paulattinello
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    Tomorrow is December 1 – World AIDS Day – so… today is World AIDS Eve. Or something like that. (And December 2, an even more privately important day: the day Reid died of AIDS in 1983.) Last week I took a less cleaned-up, less – public version of my previous blog post to analysis. Discussion…

  • Ten years

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    paulattinello
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    In the midst of a busy period – about ten weeks when everything seems to be happening at once – our HIV patient group celebrated its ten-year anniversary… which is kind of amazing, really. No offices, no paid staff – so there's no way we can be defunded, even in a time when the world…

  • Beautiful men

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    paulattinello
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    After a couple of weeks with a lot of teaching and students; and after a lot of promises to continue editing the anthology, and studying for my Jung-Institut exams – about half of those promises broken, but I do try to keep going; and after somewhat warmer (though not actually warm) weather; and after a…

  • Brodkey

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    paulattinello
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    In an odd reflection of my blog entry a week or so ago, about Stefan Brecht… last night I was reading through John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists, an enjoyable collection of sharply drawn capsule careers of writers; and I tripped over Harold Brodkey. Who, of course, whatever else he had been, eventually became a…

  • If we really…

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    paulattinello
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    At some point in the last couple of months, the often tangled clouds of dream and fantasy – the things that go on in the back of my mind, when I'm washing the dishes or walking to the bus, or… – those clouds have moved into something unexpected… If, when we die, there is some…