Category: Memory
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Spring bits
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…
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Netsuke
I'm not generally very conscious of, or in, museums – I overload quickly, my attention wanders, and crowds of people throw me off a bit. The visual is generally not my strong point – I was reminded of this in teaching a course in performance art this year, as I started to notice that although…
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Brief friends
I have a small black canister of Mariage Frères' Marco Polo tea – a secret blend by classy London tea-makers, one of their most famous, and one of the most delicious and curious blends of flavors… too complex and subtle for me to describe, though a skilled cook could probably identify many of its elements.…
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Cornell
[By which I don't mean the upstate New York university, where my nephew – hi, Ben, how are you? – is finishing his freshman year…. Which brings us to a peripheral tale, before I even get into the point of this blog entry: I told my sister, and have joked to several friends (sorry, Ben)…
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Time/lines
The snow muffles everything, but reflects some light, so that though it is long after midnight I keep moving restlessly around the apartment in a sort of glowing silence, without lights. My sister bought me some Heian literature for Christmas, among other books; it is giving everything a strange resonance – there are three time frames:…
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Bum roll
As I unpack the groceries, delivered to my doorstep, I discover that instead of nine rolls of toilet paper I have received twelve, three of them emblazoned with a yellow stripe as Bargain Extras. And I remember the old woman in San Francisco: when I was living in the ratty, drug-dealer-infested apartment house on Market…
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Distance
A television commercial with rather gentle falling chord sequences on orchestral instruments, in long held notes: very like the wistful Northern California minimalism of the 1980s. I wonder sometimes why it was so necessary for me to leave San Francisco, with no apparent way of getting back. I know why everyone died, of course –…
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Christos anesti!
Greek – whether ancient or modern, two wildly different languages – is beautiful but so intricate, so incomprehensible: for someone like me who considers himself fairly familiar with a variety of Western European languages, it seems alien, unrelated. And yes, of course it's Indo-European – but from such a distant branch…. My mother's family, and…
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bring back the seventies
The end of the second of three long days: long, at least, by my current standards – I have become, over the past very quiet year, rather unaccustomed to following other people's schedules, so three or four days of appointments, meetings, classes, seems like a great deal. Very tired, thus: fairly winded. Didn't have a…
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Framing the past
Having finished watching Parting Glances, I can see – yes, it is a good movie; but I don’t think I missed so much, walking out on it twenty-odd years ago. An interesting and touching slice of a certain kind of life, and the party scene is indeed great fun; of course from my current point…
Paul Attinello 