Paul Attinello

Category: Writings: Prose

  • Valentine’s Day

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    [Los Angeles, 1991] I met Gary about a week ago, we’ve only seen each other twice, but I’m surprised at how happy I am around him – beautiful, sharp-edged features, a strong soldier’s face and warm Southern voice, and of course his fierce enthusiasm in bed. And he seems to like me so much. I’m…

  • The Photograph

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    I register the details almost instantly, looking away before I can realize what I’ve seen. Turning my head, too quickly, snapping a look of innocence over my eyes. Have they noticed anything? I try to fit the details into a coherent image: the flat, glossy print, the mustache, a flash of teeth, what is that…

  • AIDS and Memory

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    [Speech for the second World AIDS Day vigil in Newcastle, UK, on December 1, 2005. My speech for the 2004 vigil is here.] It’s a difficult thing, to lose someone… but we still have the stories, the memories. A couple of weeks ago, I received a fairly large package from an obscure address in the…

  • [a] Lear

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    [A performance text I wrote in 1985 in Los Angeles, under the influence of having played Cornwall in Robert Wilson’s strange but beautiful workshop/performance art version of Lear at UCLA.] Cast consists of three men (M 1, 2, 3) and two women (F 1, 2), on microphones. The piece can be heard as a recording,…

  • The Process

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    [Los Angeles, 1991] I’m not dying. I’m sitting on the couch next to the windows with my feet up, feeling the breath of the afternoon air; the sun slants away across the grass and its sprinklers. I’m wearing my gray robe, the heavy warm one, and waiting stoically for another coughing fit. I’m sick again…

  • Dark history

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    [Still rather sleepy, still trying to get some editing done – but I realized it’s Halloween, so I thought I should have something slightly macabre. At our lunchtime writing workshop the other day, a woman brought in a souvenir book from the late 1930s that was full of pictures of the Royal Family; our exercise…

  • AIDS in the World

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    [Speech for the first World AIDS Day vigil in Newcastle, UK, December 1, 2004.] Tonight I’m thinking about some of the places I’ve lived and visited, and some the people I’ve seen and known, over the last twenty years. Many of those people have been touched by, or concerned about, AIDS, and a lot of…

  • Seeing You

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    [Los Angeles, 1992] Hi. — your voice, always full of dark colors and roughnesses I hadn’t remembered enough, accurately enough, the grain of your voice that speaks so intensely of your body, and the way that body always stands for me, solid at the edges of my awareness, holding the safe space of feeling and…

  • Old Songs

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    [Los Angeles, 1991] Late again, and the woman at the desk is pleasant about it, but I will lose time from my appointment.  The tanning salon is an increasingly important convenience for me, it clears up, however temporarily, the waves of red lesions across my arms and torso.  And I look rather dashing with a…

  • The Shape of What It Means

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    [Los Angeles, 1991] I am in the waiting room, going through my outline and list of readings for the degree exam in musical aesthetics. First is Cooke: naïve, but he made a good shot at figuring out the basic problems. If only he weren’t such a dilettante – he works his arguments right up to…