Category: Exile
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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…
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Closing doors
So: in a burst of extraordinarily blinkered and sociopolitically aggressive pettiness, the UK government pulls us out of the EU. I've been joking for months that I have two passports, but unfortunately they're the ones nobody wants… but just try to trade them for something more respectable, better. Slovenia? Great, flat trade, or shall I give…
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Allegiance
Last night, a wonderfully pleasant evening for my sixtieth: eight people at table in a Persian restaurant, then back to mine for ice wine and sweets. ••• (And, as I am thinking now of England, and my English friends, many of whom were around me at that table, I am also suddenly aware that the three grammatical/idiomatic…
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Detach
The past ten days… At first entirely chilly, detached: the election as shock, a worse shock than Brexit of course, but similarly a stupid move towards danger and chaos engendered by incoherent desperation and an extraordinary amount of sheer lying. The US is on the other side of the ocean, and I don't live there… I have…
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Negative capability
Analysis, a couple of weeks ago. For some months, I rarely bring dreams in: I know that I am dreaming but can't remember anything. The previous week's single dream: a teenager who was stubborn, wouldn't speak, was angry at everything: the adults talk around him, being social and polite, but he throws off all our timing, our…
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Saṃsāra
So: massive stupidity, an inchoate, unthinking drive to flee into some imagined, nonexistent past, and an extraordinary amount of manipulation and intimidation that finally imploded on itself. It no longer even seems interesting to me to pretend that everyone has a reasonable opinion – it's clear that many who voted for Britain leaving the EU were confused, deceived, or simply…
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Solstice
In the dark of the year, I had the task of introducing one of our series of movie musicals at a local café. We'd chosen Meet Me in St. Louis – always an odd one: sentimental, structured – but at the same time there are strange, dark eruptions into the story: the youngest daughter in…
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Temporal anomalies
(… you know… as in Star Trek, I suppose.) So, several weeks of the stress but not really misery, chaos but not really feeling frantic, the Stäbler book – working on it but not fast enough – and many smaller demands, extra classes coming out of nowhere, paperwork, and so on and so on. With…
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Citizen
And today I am a British citizen. A pleasant ceremony, a bit long but the mayoress and city administrators were attentive to detail and acted as though they enjoyed it – well done, as it's already their tenth such ceremony this year. A bagpiper played the Northumbrian pipes – my colleagues who play folk music…
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Stuck
… and therefore what I object to most strenuously about the New Depression, about the lack of new jobs and money and general hunkering down, is that if I'd been lucky – ha! as if! – if I'd been lucky, when everyone hunkered down, I'd be in Hawaii. Or California. Or Palermo… not here. Stuck…
Paul Attinello 