Category: Writings: Prose
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Exercises
The Newcastle writers' group meets every other week or so; we try, during lunch time between teaching, meetings, and various demands, to just write for an hour, share it, and recover a little bit of ourselves. *** October 5, 2006 – write a poem. Postcard from Newcastle The blackened rusted red of these buildings, dark…
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The Voyage to Europe
[Fragments for an unfinished novel, 1992-4] Venice by Gondola The sophisticated traveler will develop a passion for the dramatic curves of the great black gondolas, which seem to cut into the stone façades of this ancient city. But be ready for the high prices which, when transformed from millions, from billions of lira – lira…
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Augusts
[Los Angeles, 1991] My father’s birthday is in August, near the month’s beginning. This fact tends to establish the month’s meaning, its varied characteristics and echoes – aside from the obvious ones such as vacations and unbearable heat. My quiet, gentle father, with his rooms of shelves of memories on film, of papers in disarray.…
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Looking for a Place
[1991] This is the third apartment I’ve seen today; it doesn’t look too bad, the rent is only mildly outrageous. The paper with the landlord’s number is damp and crumpled in my hand, and the backs of my thighs are so tired; it’s clear that I’ll have to give up on my Los Angeles hamstrings…
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The City
Stepping along the steel edges of intersections, people in precisely cut suits walk quickly through the icy air past elongated glass windows protecting neat arrays of crystal, ebony-handled carving sets, and thin, pale diamonds. The edges of all these things extend out in a net of lines infinitely narrow, infinitely sharp, a labyrinth of slashing…
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LA ’89
He pulls back the brake, turning his head. Pressure of the gear shift. Bare arm and vinyl. Warm, bright air, a slight glare. Can’t see. Growl of the engine. He backs towards the red Porsche… Hand on the brake, he pulls. Up. Feet on the clutch and brake, his head turns, he feels the breeze…
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Signs
[Los Angeles, 1992] The session chair is standing, the first paper is over, and through a long wave of applause intended for someone else I move through a labyrinth of aisles towards the stage. I’m wearing khakis, emblematic of the Eastern aristocracy, the conservative controllers who went to school with me; shoes beige and just…
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The Long Weekend
[San Francisco & Los Angeles, 1991] I Saturday What was he like – you mean before, don’t you? Wait, move, my arm’s going to sleep. Oh, it’s not so bad for a foldout couch. Hey, it’s free, right? Okay, it was sort of – no, it’s fine, they always shut their bedroom door. Okay, first.…
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L.A. Story
[The first sentence of the worst gay novel ever written.] As the bus station locker slammed shut with a clang, I reflected blissfully on having escaped from the bitter, windswept plains of Montana and on Muffy’s predictably overjoyed reaction which I could virtually see (although of course she was not present at the time, being,…
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Writing a Story for You
[Los Angeles, 1991. For me this story is always paired with Valentine’s Day (below), because I started writing them the same night, in that laundromat – but it is about a different man, a different time, a different city.] You’re dead, but you wanted to write stories. You were just about to get published, just…
Paul Attinello 