Category: Writ

My own serious stuff; the craft itself; literary (and authorial) inspiration; the art of reading.

The Cook For Any Price: Now With Art!

JUST A QUICK NOTE to announce that, thanks to the talents of locally famous Sonoma artist and musician Jon Shannon Williams, my e-books now have handsome new covers – which (I strongly believe) are reminiscent of The Brothers Hildebrandt (Google same if you weren’t a Lord of the Rings fan in the 1970s). Please check him/them out and bask in the glow!

Sober Assessment

TWO-AND-A-HALF MONTHS AGO, I completed my tenth year of clear-eyed, clean-headed and grateful sobriety.

Now, when some people hear that, they might think, “Great, here comes the self-righteous lecture on the evils of intoxication.” But that won’t happen, at least not from me. I don’t and won’t disdain anyone else’s recreational or coping choices; frankly, they are none of my business, and refraining from inebriation is not a crusade that I feel either comfortable or qualified to pursue toward others.

Instead, I want to speak about the rarefied and addictive intoxicant that actually “saved” me, keeping me sane and healthy not just during the past decade but all of my life – and if you know me as well as you think you do, you can already guess what that is.

WRITING.

Not for nothing did Stephen King say of this 6,000-year-old-plus art: “Do it for the buzz.” There is an ineffable thrill in watching the words spill out onto paper or screen, an actual physical and mental rush only gotten from congealing thought into alphabetic form, that’s as hard to beat as it is to describe.

And the best part is, it’s free. Easily accessible. Shareable. No more watching my money go up in a cloud of marijuana smoke; no more furtively prowling dodgy neighborhoods; no more keeping it all to myself lest I run out.

Did I mention addictive? Once you start writing, you’re hooked for life. I sometimes find myself typing and typing until I fall asleep at the keyboard, literally unable to stop ’til I drop. (True story.) E.g., tonight: I meant to take advantage of the finally clear Sonoma skies and do a bit of long-delayed stargazing. But as I write this, it’s well after 10:30pm (or, if you prefer, 2230 hours) PDT and I’m already getting sleepy.

So before I trundle off to Dreamsville, I’ll leave you this hard-earned advice: Try not to let the Great American Novel (or Essay, or Blogpost) keep you from tending your other bodily needs. Otherwise, you may find yourself face down in a pool of your own ink – or even with “QWERTYUIOP” reverse-imprinted deeply into your throbbing forehead. Nighty night.

Ageless Speech

SPEAKING OF H.P. LOVECRAFT, as I was in the prior post, it’s easy to dismiss him for what some have called his “overly purple prose.” He can, I admit, become extremely flowery at times, but as mentioned here and elsewhere, the man was a true poet at heart: his writing is evocative, and justly so – its literary power is derived from the consent of the reader to simply and happily wallow in it. By way of illustration, I offer the following sonnet from a collection of same on weird topics titled Fungi from Yuggoth. It speaks to me, and deeply; I hope it does the same for you.

XXXVI. Continuity

There is in certain ancient things a trace
Of some dim essence—more than form or weight;
A tenuous aether, indeterminate,
Yet linked with all the laws of time and space.
A faint, veiled sign of continuities
That outward eyes can never quite descry;
Of locked dimensions harbouring years gone by,
And out of reach except for hidden keys.

It moves me most when slanting sunbeams glow
On old farm buildings set against a hill,
And paint with life the shapes which linger still
From centuries less a dream than this we know.
In that strange light I feel I am not far
From the fixt mass whose sides the ages are.

Welcome To An All-Text, AI-Free Zone!

DEAR PATIENT READER (and anyone else who happens by),

Now that you’re here, a word or two:

1. If you’re eager to meet Prosatio Silban, the self-defrocked holyman in a fantastic land who teases out a meager but honest living as a mercenary cook, allow me to introduce you.

2. You may also/instead browse at leisure some rusty recollections, offbeat observations, friendly particularism, tasty recipes, unpretentious poetry, entertaining quotes, recreational science, and wry spirituality.

Thank you for your patronage, and please enjoy,

Neal Ross Attinson

First Graf (rather, Line): The Lord of the Rings

OF THE 90% PETER JACKSON got right in his 11-hour and 22-minute adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s best-beloved work – the lush landscapes, the Balrog, Elves, the Nazgul, Sauron, Orcs and Uruk-hai, Gollum, Ents, hobbits (MY GHAWD! THE HOBBITS!!!), the Ring, Grima, the very different cultures and props and sets and cities and overall “look” – he got right in abundance.

But that other 10% … oy.

Read the actual books and you’ll discover that Aragorn is not a timid wimp, Gimli is not comic relief, Arwen isn’t an avenging angel, Saruman and Gandalf never duked it out with magic staves, Faramir didn’t try to bring the Ring to his father, the dialogue is more formal and less modern (except for the rustic hobbits), there’s a wonderful character named Tom Bombadil, and the book features a single climax instead of three simultaneous ones. And that well-traveled literary road begins, quite simply, like this:

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

First Graf: Sidereus Nuncio

PERHAPS THE GREATEST THING ABOUT Galileo Galilei’s first publication, translated from the Latin as The Sidereal Messenger, is his sense of adventure at being the first known human to telescopically observe and painstakingly chronicle the night sky.

Galileo recorded his unprecedented experience in 1610 CE, a time of adventurous European discoveries in general. His detailed and methodical observations will be thrilling to anyone also observing the same celestial sights for the first time through a simple 20x (read: low-power) backyard telescope. Science historian Albert Van Helden’s superb 1989 translation reveals Galileo’s excitement and wonder on every page, and adds valuable context via explanatory bookending and notes.

That era being one of grand aspirations and flowery speech, Galileo’s grateful bow to his patron, Duke Cosimo II de Medici, is fully titled, “SIDEREAL MESSENGER, unfolding great and very wonderful sights and displaying to the gaze of everyone, but especially philosophers and astronomers, the things that were observed by GALILEO GALILEI, Florentine patrician and public mathematician of the University of Padua, with the help of a spyglass lately devised by him, about the face of the Moon, countless fixed stars, the Milky Way, nebulous stars, but especially about four planets flying around the star of Jupiter at unequal intervals and periods with wonderful swiftness; which, unknown by anyone until this day, the first author detected recently and decided to name MEDICIAN STARS.” (That honorific didn’t stick; instead, the “four planets” are now called by astronomers the “Galilean moons.”)

Let us skip Galileo’s five-page introductory paean to the Duke de Medici and dive right into the first paragraph of the work itself:

In this short treatise I propose great things for inspection and contemplation by every explorer of Nature. Great, I say, because of the excellence of the things themselves, because of their newness, unheard of through the ages, and also because of the instrument with the benefit of which they make themselves manifest to our sight.

Points of Honor, Literary and Otherwise

– STUFFING SENTENCES TO CARRYING CAPACITY.
– Never starting a blog post (or sermon) with “I.”
– Punctuality.
– Creative segues.
– Repeating verbatim whatever someone wants said to another.
– That only what I actually heard appears inside quotation marks.
– One-sentence ledes.
– Snappy ledes. (“If you can do that, you’ll never be out of a job,” quoth a mentor.)
– Keeping an open mind, especially when it’s difficult.
– Never speaking in absolutes. (Present list excluded.)
– Crediting my sources.
– Communicating as accurately as I can. (Challenging, but aspirational.)
– Pushing through my shyness. (Also aspirationally challenging.)
– Being kind to cashiers, sales clerks, waiters, and tradesfolk.
– Saying “Take your time” whenever necessary.
– Waving at passing cars.
– Not speculating.
– “Killing my darlings” (per Wm. Faulkner, via Stephen King).
– Making an effort to pet stray cats.
– Greeting passersby with (at least) a smile.
– Concisifying.

(And yours?)

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