No End of Charlie Johnsons

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...

Dabbler Diary – Tick Tock

I’ve taken on a gig writing about culture and whatnot for sofa.com, purveyors of fine furniture and certainly the best place in the visible universe to buy a sofa, and have already written about Vincent Van Gogh's chairs, Impressionist Interiors, His Girl Friday, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette ... Read More...

I Remember My Father

Frank remembers his father, who would have been 90 years old today... I remember Joe Brainard, Georges Perec, and Gilbert Adair. In I Remember (1970) Brainard devised a form of memoir-writing based on short, single-sentence fragments, following no particular sequence, each beginning with the words “I remember ...” The memory that ... Read More...

Merry Christmas from The Dabblers!

Merry Christmas to all our readers! In lieu of a card, here are some Christmas memories from the Dabbler Editorial staff, plus some lovely music... Gaw - Arguments About War Some of my fondest Christmas memories are of the arguments (and I don’t mean rows). There was a golden period for arguing: two ... Read More...

The Pursuit of Knowledge

Google and Wikipedia have utterly transformed our relationship with knowledge, and now everything we need to know seems to be accessible within seconds. We have gained much - but what have we lost?... The novelist Jean Rhys, after a long period of inactivity, responded to her publisher’s gentle suggestion that she ... Read More...

On Idleness

In today's poetry feature Stephen considers the importance of being idle... I think of idleness as a good thing.  I do not associate idleness with lassitude, laziness, or sloth.  Rather, I associate it with repose, reverie, and contemplation. People who carry on cellphone conversations in public are in dire need of idleness. ... Read More...

Remembering Mary Irene

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...