What do the unsettling and astonishing multi-generational migratory habits of the monarch butterfly tell us about humans?... The multiple life stages of butterflies were strangely upsetting to me as a boy. Their transformations were supposed to inspire wonder, and the eruption of the adult butterfly from the pupa, I was told, ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Douglas Dalrymple
Douglas on Henry James, cardiac arrests and coping with one's health... I had to forgive myself last year for not finishing a Henry James novel. I’d read maybe a dozen of his shorter fictions, all of them with relish. The Middle Years, The Pupil, The Liar, The Real Thing, and The Altar of the Dead were ... Read More...
'If I’m a failed smoker it’s not because I haven’t tried...' - Douglas is talking tobacco... My wife had a teenage crush on James Dean. She confided it to her father who latched onto the idea and bought her anything he could find bearing the beloved likeness. Grateful for his generosity, ... Read More...
A chance reading about a little boy abandoned at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair gets Douglas thinking... According to Erik Larsen in The Devil in the White City, visitors to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair [above] were able to drop their children at an official daycare and retrieve them by claim ... Read More...
Douglas Dalrymple remembers his great-grandmother... Mary Irene and I used to hunt snakes in the fields behind her house. By July the mustard flowers and tumbleweeds had dried up and blown away to uncover the little holes where I imagined that snakes plotted and hid. Playing the chivalrous protector, I would ... Read More...
Douglas has words of consolation for anyone who ever thinks: 'I Am Not My Job'... I started as a busboy and dishwasher at a greasy downtown bar and grill in California’s flat, hot Central Valley. I was “paid” (if you want to call it that) under the table. My duties included killing ... Read More...
Ever tried to write a novel that wasn't worthless? Douglas considers talent, mediocrity, the limits of creativity and the art of appreciation... In A Mathematician’s Apology G.H. Hardy estimates that only five or ten people in a hundred can do something “rather well.” Considerably fewer are truly gifted. We do not each have ... Read More...
Douglas Dalrymple considers American attitudes to genealogy and knowing one's place... Uncle Marv numbers his socks with permanent marker, “1” for left and “2” for right. That way he gets each one on the correct foot and his toes are happy. He’s retired now but used to work on computers for ... Read More...
They don't make bad poets like they used to, laments Douglas Dalrymple... It’s a sad truth not often recognized that the glory days of bad poetry – no less than the glory days of good poetry – are behind us. In the dewy springtime of bad verse a sorry line or ... Read More...
Poems, as we have seen, can terrify children. But what about the pictures we unthinkingly display in our houses?... At the bookshop years ago I had a colleague named Jefferson who slicked back his hair and wore a black three-piece every day and who claimed that in his childhood living room was ... Read More...
