Category: Psychology
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Dark pasts
A couple of weeks ago – Saturday – D. and I went to see Matthew Bourne's The Midnight Bell. Based on books by Patrick Hamilton, who wrote a lot about being down and out and drunk in London in the 1930s (and died in his fifties, predictably of deterioration after a life of drinking), it's…
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Zürich in winter: 2025
Monday The first night in Zürich. The flight wasn’t bad; was thinking about small things going wrong while traveling, after reading someone who claims that such things are ruinous but one forgets them. I don’t really agree: for some people, at some times, yes, but… And, finally in my hotel room, I break a glass…
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Zürich 2.24
NCL-AMS-ZUR A brief trip to Zürich, just five days, to teach a seminar at the Institut. I really don’t travel much these days, do I?… dusting a suitcase, running through the list I made years ago when I was studying so I wouldn’t forget important things… First of all, airport security in Newcastle has been…
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Crossing
Crossing from one year to the next…. This year has been one of separations and endings. In fact, more than ever in my life, I've made many breaks – but without having to do so, and at my own speed. As I am someone who has, many times, suddenly leapt or been driven from one…
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A bit vague, not lost
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Anniversary of this blog… sixteen years. A few days ago, really, on Saturday, but this is close enough. No, the blog doesn't feel dead to me, I'm still here for it, and it for me. I retired from the university in February; moved the books of my office to storage; and now keep talking about…
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[Essaying] Bloggisization
Brian Dillon, Essayism. He writes beautifully, and has become famous by doing it. Actually I'd never heard of him until I started noticing those Fitzcarraldo Editions – are they named for somebody involved, or for Herzog's strange movie, and the man the movie is about, played by the mad Kinski? – it's probably about the…
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Mood [partly reconstituted]
[A post drafted in late November 2020; I have moved on from these things, a bit… and incidentally am now firmly of age, at 64. I apologize for the fragmentation: unfinished work, with later attempts to recapture some of the original content, and then some scraps of things I wanted to talk about – two…
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Last day of….
It is, approximately, the last warm day (or, the "last," "warm" day). Which means that today was in the low 70s – warm for the North Sea – and tomorrow is a fading version of the same, without sun. Then we drop to fall temperatures. Sometimes we have a burst of late summer at the…
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Summer’s day
I am a bit tired today – a mistake in minor medications, a mildly bad night… and, as so often, I only realized at about five or six a.m. what the obvious mistake must have been, and why my guts were churning as a result. Not terrible. A bit exasperating. And two different friends, eager…
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Familiar
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in Academia, AIDS/HIV, Death, Illness, Imagined, Memory, Music, On writing, Personal, Psychology, TelevisionThe image seems clear, even obvious, to me – it could be from one of the better-written fantasies, or from a film about some medieval saga… an old man living alone in the woods; there is a shift in the wind, or the light – he looks up, creases his forehead slightly, sniffs the air…
Paul Attinello 