Douglas address the fundamentals... Twenty years ago I was somehow able to think about sex all day long. I could think about sex even when I wasn’t thinking about it. Temporarily distracted by bus schedules, term papers, potential muggers, or the likelihood of being able to pay my rent, sex still ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Douglas Dalrymple
Sufferers from Foreign Accent Syndrome suddenly find themselves speaking with an alien accent. Douglas explains how you can get a piece of that action... Every now and then news reaches us of a case of so-called Foreign Accent Syndrome. In 2011, for example, a middle-aged woman made a visit to her ... Read More...
What if all that we see or seem takes place in a sea beneath a sea, beneath a sea...? Fans and devotees of Spongebob Squarepants (yes, I’m raising my hand) will recall that while the town of Bikini Bottom itself is located underwater it nevertheless borders a sort of sea-under-the-sea. At ... Read More...
In his early 20s Douglas Dalrymple followed a romantic notion to work in a salmon cannery in Alaska. It turned out to be tough. Here is his story... It’s a romantic notion. By way of explanation for a summer’s grubby employment on a steamer bound for Alaska in 1923, E.B. White ... Read More...
Can reading fiction ever really be justified when there are so many more 'important' things in the world? Douglas ponders a question that occasionally troubles all bibliophiles... My first year of college I took a course in Arthurian literature. There were fewer than ten of us in the class. After a ... Read More...
Douglas Dalrymple on Before Philosophy, Black Elk and Catholicism... My paternal grandfather’s sympathies were evenly split, I think, between cowboys and Indians. When he died, my grandmother begged me to take a few items from his closet. I kept a button-up cowboy shirt with a nighttime western scene stitched on the ... Read More...
Douglas Dalrymple on one of the best things about children: their books.... One of the richer returns of parenthood is the welcome excuse to reacquaint oneself with children’s books. There are the old crowd-pleasers, of course, likeAlice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Kipling’s Just So Stories, Dr Seuss, Curious George, Madeline, Babar and all the wonderful little books ... Read More...
Douglas muses on life, death and the meaning of Lou Reed ... You might have mistaken the cars out the window for lumps of sugar. A series of winter storms had come down from the Gulf of Alaska and dropped enough snow on Seattle to enforce a five-day hibernation. Queen Anne ... Read More...
The current Dabbler Book Club monthly choice is The Broken Road, the posthumously published third volume of the memoirs of the great adventurer and prose stylist Patrick Leigh Fermor. Here, Douglas Dalyrmple explains the author's enduring appeal... I’m deaf… That’s the awful truth. That’s why I’m leaning towards you in this ... Read More...
Today we welcome the literary blogger Douglas Dalrymple to The Dabbler. In this first post Douglas recalls working in a low-life Seattle bookshop, with its collection of eccentric regulars including the actor Ethan Hawke, who never bought anything... In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable ... Read More...
