In the latest post in our series, Daniel Kalder examines the literary efforts of defunct dictator, Saddam Hussein. It proves an unexpected opportunity to explore the intertextuality of man-bear sex. Saddam Hussein's Zabiba and the King was the first book in my library of dictator literature. I got it for Christmas 2004 – after ... Read More...
Month: June 2011
On Sundays and Bank Holidays we will be dipping into the Dabbler's archives to dust off old posts which you may have missed. This post by Brit first appeared on the 'beta' blogger version of The Dabbler in July 2010 and generated a fierce comment-thread debate about marmosets... If you visit ... Read More...
'But you, gods, will give us Some faults to make us men' Shakespeare's words in Agrippa's mouth remind us of our shortcomings: but how is it that birds seem almost faultless? They sing, they soar, they are good to their young, and good to each other. Birds move away from bad weather. ... Read More...
I thought the fascination with all things skeletal had died a death, until I attended a preview of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition on Thursday night and saw Olu Shobowale’s Coffin ‘To Die For’. The late noughties onwards have seen a profusion of Vanitas inspired artworks. Designers have also been influenced, ... Read More...
Father's Day is but a fortnight away - Sunday 19 June. But how can a Dabbler properly treat his or her old man, and ensure that the cantankerous old devil keeps his curmudgeonly remarks to a minimum? There is only one solution. Glengoyne make the best single malt whisky in the world (which ... Read More...
For someone born in Kent and educated at Westminster School, Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan is pretty damn Irish. If your image of MacGowan as the archetypal Paddy Baddie – a rebellious anti-hero straight out of the pages of a J P Donleavy novel: gap-toothed, black-toothed, staggering blind drunk from the bar-brawl ... Read More...
Imagine you have never used a telephone before. It rings, and you pick up the receiver. You don't know that the social convention is to say “Hello?” or “Dabbler reader here. Who's calling?” or something similar. So what do you say? One man who faced this dilemma was, of course, ... Read More...
Plotlands began in the 1870's as a way for speculators to offload marginal farmland as Britain's agrarian populace uprooted en masse to the big cities. Whether barren or dangerously flood prone, worthless land was portioned up and sold off square by square; mostly to the naive and newly mobile working ... Read More...
Jonathon Green continues his occasional 'Heroes of Slang' series by looking at American author George Ade... He was a mid-Westerner (Indiana and thus a ‘Hoosier’ maybe from the rustic’s faltering ‘Who’s here?’) and admirably prolific (93 titles in the Library of Congress). He had been a columnist on the Chicago Morning News and ... Read More...
Want to get some free books? Fancy yourself as a reviewer? This Party's Got to Stop by Rupert Thomson has been described as “Darkly comic, disturbing, strange and ultimately humane, a memoir that discovers love and human kindness in the most unexpected places'” by the Sunday Telegraph, and as "A Masterpiece, in ... Read More...
