Paul Attinello

Category: Books

  • Sturgeon’s Law

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    paulattinello
    in ,

    Various versions of this law appear in different places, including different final words… Ted Sturgeon's version was something like, "nine-tenths of everything is crap". Or crud, or inessential, or… well you pick. Having lately bought some books online, without seeing them first, I am feeling the sting of this tragically universal law. And if you…

  • The Manticore

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    paulattinello
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    So… during a time of relative quiet – home a lot, mulling around various work, making lists, and doing bits of it – last night a novel caught me: Agota Kristof's trilogy The Notebook / The Proof / The Third Lie; and caught me so definitely that I read it from about midnight to ten…

  • … various

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    paulattinello
    in

    Three in the morning. It's a painful night – periodically for the past month or two I seem to have some new kind of digestive pains, they were wondering if my pancreas is in trouble or something like that. (Perhaps it's just a matter of endlessly taking mildly toxic medications for decades on end.) At…

  • Spring bits

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    paulattinello
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    So, oddly enough, it has apparently been the warmest April on record in the UK. I keep wondering – does that include this area of the Northeast or not? – in other words: even though April had great weather, it appeared in short patches between remarkably cold weather – is this just part of my…

  • City, city!

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    paulattinello
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    A trip to London: good – the weather was unusually pleasant, I saw wonderful people (Chris, Alfred, Sophie), hung around in bookstores and bought books. Not so good: the usual – transportation (waiting half an hour for an underground train that never came because practically the entire line is cancelled on weekends – London is…

  • Magus

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    paulattinello
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    Avram Davidson, in mid-career, wrote The Phoenix and the Mirror, a beautiful fantasy novel of a complicated, wheels-within-wheels task laid on his character Vergil Magus in the middle of his life. There is a sense that Vergil, the hero of one of Davidson's largest projects that was never finished, was someone with whom he deeply…

  • Erasure / release

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    paulattinello
    in ,

    I have a large, well-organized personal library. [Pause and drum roll.] Many academics and intellectuals do so, of course, but I am a Collector – certainly in my department I have the largest and most strictly organized library, both in my office and at home, of books, CDs, DVDs, videotapes, LPS, and other media (although…

  • The dull world

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    paulattinello
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    So: the news from the doctor – the medication doesn't seem to be doing much; a final decision in another month or so, but probably this was all useless. Which was kind of expected anyway. Annoyingly, since early December, and more so since Christmas Day (which was, itself, fun, at Michael and Andrew's), I am…

  • Nietzschean

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    paulattinello
    in ,

    (Hmm, when would I last have had to check the spelling of that word, two or three times just to make sure – even though I am now sure it always frets at me a bit. But not as much as it used to.) Full moon, lunar eclipse, solar equinox, near Christmas. After a few…

  • First Books

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    paulattinello
    in

    Another thing I picked up today in Blackwell's… Susan Hill, Howard's End is On the Landing. One of those books about reading that seem to be going around the past few years; a nice, classy, personal, terse, realistic one by an experienced writer with a brain. She speaks at one point of the first books…