(Three printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.) IT BEGAN WITH AN ALMOST automatic kindness, and led to an inevitable but gracious end. Prosatio Silban was tidying up after a somewhat slow morning…
Author: Neal Ross Attinson
Neal Ross Attinson is one of those compulsive writers who feels naked without a keyboard, or at least a a pad and pencil. He lives with two animal companions and library in Sonoma, California.
5 Thoughts: Seminal v. Derivative
1. ONE OF THE CHICKEN-OR-egg challenges of modern media (social and traditional) is their pervasive sense of nonlinear immediacy, by which I mean the everything-at-once flattening of the artistic landscape.
A Prosatio Silban Amuse-Bouche: Utensils
“ALMOST AS MUCH THOUGHT AND effort goes into the choosing of eating implements as for the selection of food for which they are meant,” said Prosatio Silban, reaching for the sea salt container next to his fatberry-oil stove. “Silver, gold,…
RED SUN AT MORNING,
CLIMATE change warning.”
Of Heroes, Waterbeds, and The Black Shield of Falworth
THERE IS A MOVIE THAT follows the struggles inherent in the so-called Hero’s Journey: a high-born child is raised in secret by commoners, and eventually groomed by a wise elder to overcome obstacles and fulfill his destiny by taking his…
Prosatio Silban and the Twice-Cooked Eggs
(Two-and-a-half printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.) ONE OF THE NICER THINGS about traveling in a buopoth-drawn galleywagon down a smooth dirt road is the slow pleasure of the unfolding scenery. Prosatio…
Boulevard of Broken Animals
FIRST, THERE WAS THE ONE-legged California towhee. She didn’t actually start out as one-legged. But when we first noticed her in the backyard, one of her legs was badly withered. It eventually dropped off. We named her “Tikvah” — Hebrew…
Prosatio Silban and the Escorter of the Dead
(Two printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.) FROM HIS GALLEYWAGON AT THE edge of epicurean Pormaris’ busy South Market, Prosatio Silban could see the dockside funeral pyres at their greedy task. It…
Fandom as Cargo Cult
IF WE BUILD IT, THEY will come — again. First, you need to know what a “cargo cult” is: a folk religion among some groups of Melanesian Islanders who believed that they could attract cargo-carrying airplanes by engaging in sympathetic…
Face Value (A Prosatio Silban Tale)
(Six printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.) PARTLY, IT HAD TO DO with the eyebrows. In order to pass as a mercenary cook within the Three Cities and Thousand Villages of the…
5 Thoughts: It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Teacher
1. EVANGELICAL ATHEISTS LIKE TO STATE two reasons why the Torah is irrelevant: 1) It was written in the Bronze Age, and 2) it’s festering with contradictions. 2. Leaving aside the point that many of our species’ current intellectual systems…
Caveat Bibitor (A Prosatio Silban Tale)
(Four printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction. Enjoy.) IT WAS A COMMON ENOUGH skillet: two-thirds of a cubit across, three finger-breadths deep, of simple cast iron with a carved maplewood handle. The…