Paul Attinello

Category: AIDS/HIV

  • For Jarman

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    paulattinello
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    In April 2010, I gave a presentation about Derek Jarman, where I worked through The Garden, Edward II, and Blue, showing the closeness to death in each film. Or maybe: not just showing. When I polished the presentation to give in New Orleans, I felt close to something…. I promised, last year, to turn the…

  • Nadir; and the problem of small talk

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    paulattinello
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    At the lowest point of light, time, and the year: that dark still point before the cycle turns back upward. It was interesting to see some people get upset over the entire Mayan-end-of-the-world meme – furious that people would dare discuss something not scientifically proven. But of course part of its attraction for many –…

  • A late entry

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    So, Stop AIDS Newcastle – the student-run political organization, which includes some of my own music students, and a lot of medical students among others – had a jazz concert tonight, on a night when a bit of snow completely stopped the buses and made a fair mess of the town. Joe, one of the…

  • 2 December

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    The first of December is of course World AIDS Day, a definite part of my calendar – there was a parade, speeches, 'lanterns' made of paper and glow sticks; and I had appearances on radio and television (the television studios were up to date and startlingly high-tech – in my four minutes of being in…

  • A leaf falls

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    paulattinello
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    While I was in Zürich, back in Newcastle a friend died, basically of a heart attack. David H. was one of the old-timers in our HIV patient group – one of the six men (five gay, one straight) who appeared in a meeting room in the middle of Newcastle on June 30, 2003. We spent…

  • Dislocation

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    paulattinello
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    I have had about a day and a half of being really enraged – by an e-mail that felt like a dismissive insult, and from someone that matters to me… and at the same time still getting work done: finishing off that paper on figures of death and transcendence. Today we met for our usual…

  • … double vision…

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    It is years since I've seen this… A few days ago I got the DVD of the 1993 film Fearless, with its brilliant combination of the easy-going, handsome yet immensely skilled Jeff Bridges, and endlessly eerie/existentialist Australian director Peter Weir… and of course Rosie Perez and Isabella Rossellini, who also become very important to you…

  • Biochem IIa

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    paulattinello
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    [PREREQUISITE: BIOCHEM I; or permission of instructor] I am noticing some other aspects of changing body chemistry, after the new HIV medications…. For several years, I have tended to get frequent bleeding, and clotting, in my sinuses. This has been worse since my 2009 stroke, and a subsequent three months of the dreadful medication Warfarin…

  • Biochem

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    paulattinello
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    I have been negotiating a large turn of the great wheel of my HIV care… after twelve years on the same regime (Kaletra – which includes a daily dose of that hideous, damned, nasty Ritonavir, that everyone hated so much in the late 1990s; Efavirenz/Sustiva, and Abacavir/Ziagen) – a regime that has become archaically dusty:…

  • Database

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    paulattinello
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    Finally getting organized to go to New York and Washington next week, for my mother's memorial service at Arlington Cemetary; and staying with my sister in New York, plus catching up with a few old friends. I went through my old addresses database – now increasingly supplanted by the data shared between my phone and…