?, Crit

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 magic. They got this idea during World War II, when real airplanes (both Allied and Japanese) visited these islands and airdropped actual cargoes — food, weapons, clothing, medicine, and the like. After the war, the planes stopped coming. But the islanders, convinced that the proper conditions would bring more goods, built airstrips (in some cases, complete with landing lights) and otherwise mimicked certain behaviors they thought would achieve their goals. It’s a powerful communal buzz, and easy to get lost in.

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Writ

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 Uulian Commonwell, and without the need for too many probing questions, Prosatio Silban employed artificial eyebrows made from grey mouse-fur. They were tedious to affix each morning and challenging to remove each night, but in their absence, his customers might ask something like:

“Why don’t you have any eyebrows?”

“Were you injured in some culinary mishap?”

“I thought only Sacreants were hairless…?”

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Crit, Torah

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 also date from the Bronze Age, I’d like to address the so-called contradictions. Sure, they exist. But my argument is that they’re not accidental, but intentional.

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Writ

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 dreams, however, were anything but common; mad reels of dissolute frivolity, the raw taste of cheap spirits, a seething anger, an unfulfilled lust.

Prosatio Silban had bought the skillet in stony-hearted Tirinbar, the northernmost of the Three Cities of the Uulian Commonwell, situated at a mountain’s foot on the northern shore of the Inland Deep, and one of the beefy cook’s least favorite locations due to the unfriendly materialism of its population and their policy of enslaving the Exilic Lands’ indigenes.

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Crit, Life

The Mask by the Side of the Road

SONOMA IS A SMALL TOWN: small enough to be intimate, but also large enough to have its share of common human misbehaviors.

Take the occasional gutter-detritus. The first time I saw an empty bottle dumped near a Sonoma curb by an unseen hand, I was surprised (and a little delighted) to see that it once held a rare French wine rather than the malt liquor I had come to expect in more urban settings. Over the years I have witnessed a variety of dry-land jetsam: smoked-oyster tins; car keys; take-out containers from upscale restaurants; and once, a $20 bill. But in the past two weeks (at this writing, 8/4/20), I have been happening on objects more timely and topical — viz., abandoned COVID-19 masks.

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Writ

Passing Notes (A Prosatio Silban Tale)

(Ten-and-a-half printed pages; the longest Prosatio Silban tale so far, and though it’s the third I’ve written, it’s actually the first one in narrative order. If you’re new to these, here are the (much shorter) preface and introduction. Enjoy.)

IT IS MUSIC. AND IT is Time. But mostly, it is Love.

Harpsong and drumbeat whirl through the broad moons-lit hollow like a flight of bright starlings air-dancing over a rain-pocked lake.

In a hollow atop a vast cliff squat two robe-wrapped figures: intent, eyes closed, one plucking, one pounding. Nearby lies a third, hands chest-clasped, contemplating the two moons gently contending overhead for celestial supremacy. The trio is edging across the tenuous bridge connecting youth to manhood, when the character which shapes the face has been poured but not yet hardened.

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Crit

Words To Bring Back: “Fervent”

– Definition: adj. Having or displaying a passionate intensity.

– Used in a sentence: “Our” cat was a fervent consumer of rats and squirrels.

– Why: There are good and bad manifestations of this quality. On the one hand is our hyperpolarized political landscape; on the other hand are fen of all stripes. One is harmful, the other harmless. You decide.