Category: Books
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14:23 10-3-18
14:23 = 2:23 pm 10 March 2018 = Saturday … Having left M. with a hug at the station (one of those hugs between men that always make me wonder, in a flash, whether non-gay locals find this unusual, but then I always decide not to care), I turn and walk – not, as I…
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Links
The six-hour essay exam is about to end: I am in the small, coolly organised office at the top of the building, looking down across the garden to the lake. I have eaten my lunch at the table to my left, gone through my bottle of tea and had a bit of coffee, dozed at…
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Sunlight
[From about a month ago, in late May – a sketch with no particular punch line.] A lovely day… very warm by local standards, but relatively normal by my own, and those of Californian (and Australian and Italian and Spanish) friends…. Good things happened. Not the Dionysian spectacles of a few weeks ago, but a…
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Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire
If you think about it all: rot, chaos, aggression. Disintegration. But my desk remains, my job remains, my friends and colleagues remain… I buy food, talk to students, plan trips. There are no problems. To be honest, there have been some fairly disastrous periods even during my lifetime when one couldn't depend on governments for simple…
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The best lines
"One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it…
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At this point
A sudden bringing-into-awareness, and perhaps into words, of some of what has been going on for me in the past couple of years… in a time of political chaos and anxiety, where one thinks of the 1930s: including the bit where intellectuals were attacked for not being militant enough, not standing up to aggressively dark forces. Attacks that…
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Three women
A few days after the Brexit vote, I am talking to N. over the phone: an intelligent, skilled businesswoman – in fact someone much more skilled at managing the world and its demands, laws and finances than I am (which isn't setting the bar very high, I admit). She is, however, upset, also as I am – concerned about…
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Easter
On the one hand, longer days, sunlight, a still-chilly and intermittent promise of spring. On the other HCV medications, confusions, changing demands, papers to write – Behind it all is still a greater calm, dreams that tend to move through anxiety to relief and resolution. Not an imagined change, clearly a real one… But no,…
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Wandering the stacks
So: I am finally going through all the books, and then the papers, in my office. My office is being moved soon – rather sooner than I'd expected: repeated insistence on a clear date on my part gave rise to a flurry of emails assuring me that it wouldn't happen until mid-September; but now of…
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The Sorting Hat
So, while I was supposed to be doing something else, Eve Forrest generated some ideas on Facebook… and that made me do this. (Ha! 'made' – like she forced me into it…) Which house did the Sorting Hat put various philosophers and cultural thinkers into? *** The List. GriffendorHegelFoucaultJungSocratesCiceroAquinasNewtonGoetheMartin Luther KingBarthesSenecaUmberto EcoKoestlerGiordano BrunoMcLuhan SlytherinAdornoZizekFreudBaudrillardEagletonLacanF R…
Paul Attinello 