Author: Neal Ross Attinson

Neal Ross Attinson is one of those text-compulsives who feels naked without a keyboard, or at least a a pad and pen. He is unafraid of adverbs, loves astronomy and gastronomy with equally unabashed passion, and lives with/in an eclectic library in Sonoma, California.

The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.”
— Andre Malraux

365 Names: Flow

FLOW is preferred to The Flow, since “the” suggests separateness — “Thingness,” if you will — and as Flow cannot be reliably distinguished from that-which-flows, said usage would upset “the” carefully built phenomenological apple-cart. (And we certainly can’t have that.)…

“NaSSWriMo!”

TODAY KICKS OFF THE WOULD-BE novelists’ annual motivational event, NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write 1,667 words a day for a total of 50,000 by November 30. (I participated one year, and have a fairly mediocre…

The harder it became, the more I wanted to do it.”
— Female round-the-world sailor, from the film MAIDEN

Temple of the Holy Reruns

HAVE YOU EVER SAT IN a theater after the movie ended so you can see it again? Then you’ll understand Simchat Torah. Simchat Torah, or “Rejoicing of (the) Teaching,” will be celebrated by the worldwide Jewish community beginning tonight through…

Day of At-Onement

IT’S HARD TO DESCRIBE THE feeling I get around 1 or 2 p.m. on Yom Kippur afternoon with no food since the previous evening. It’s an intellectual, buzzy sort of consciousness: colors are brighter, outlines sharper, and an almost euphoric…