Category: Writings: Prose
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Augusts
[The previous post is actually based on a piece I wrote about a dark August in 1991 – one of those painful prose pieces I wrote in the late 80s and early 90s, all under the shadow of AIDS and death.] My father’s birthday is in August, near the month’s beginning. This fact tends to…
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Stats
June 5 is HIV Long-Term Survivors Day – it's actually a fairly recent phenomenon, with varied definitions. It's 5 June because that's when an article talking about five cases first appeared in the press, so – as in the work I'm writing (or supposed to be writing) now, it's not about the existence of the…
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Writing a Story for You
[A 1991 story written in Terry Wolverton's writing group; about Reid Beitrusten, who died 2 December 1983.] You’re dead, but you wanted to write stories. You were just about to get published, just about to start making it. So I’m writing a story for you, I started it in the laundromat, I went next door…
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Island
[From a workshop, where we created things – almost everyone else painting or clay or drawing, but I swerved over to my comfort zone: writing. With, yes, one small picture drawn in the corner of the original….] When I came to the island, it was late afternoon. Houses rose up from the water, from the…
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An unfinished fairy tale…
[My analyst told me about a brilliant exercise they did at the Jung-Institut in the 1980s – something we should do again, I think: write a fairy tale. I started this one last fall: it aims for some sort of journey or change… I haven't written more on this one; I may put it aside…
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Chaos, visions, flights: Adventures
[A program essay I wrote – on a typewriter, during lunch hours at Mariedi Anders Artists Management, or perhaps when I was supposed to be working for her – about György Ligeti's Aventures/Nouvelles aventures when they were performed by the Berkeley Stage in California sometime between 1980 and 1984. I wrote a lot of program notes…
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Enrage
[It's some months since I showed up at meetings of the University writing group; most of my classes and seminars this semester have ended at 1 p.m., and then of course people have questions, etc.; so crossing the University to be fifteen or twenty minutes late for a meeting that last less than an hour…
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From Berlin
[Something I wrote in 1989… and now it is the twentieth anniversary of these events.] Amazed, sitting in a restaurant and reading of the collapse of the Wall, that vast shift in the meaning of our world’s past. The bizarre responses of people, Easterners who stay up all night and see real, free capitalist stores…
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Questionnaire
In trying to recover from the dismay and depression that resulted from yesterday's meeting; and the sense that my work is going to be taken even more out of my control; and that as a result I'll never, ever get out of here… perhaps it's worth copying in yet another writing exercise, this one from…
Paul Attinello 