It must be clear by now that I have lost much of my interest in this whole blogging deal. For several months, I’ve felt like I have nothing further to say here. I no longer read blogs. I no longer keep up on developments that pertain to blogging. I’ve grown bored with the whole thing.

But…I do keep coming back to a persistent, no, nagging sense that I might be able to do something interesting with this site, if I just give it some thought. So, scribble, scribble, scribble… is going on hiatus for a while until I can figure out some bright new move. Thank you for reading, and maybe I’ll see you back here someday.

Dale

The old lion, interviewed by The Paris Review:

Now people grow up with television, which has an element within it that is absolutely inimical to serious reading, and that is the commercial. Any time you’re interested in a narrative, you know it’s going to be interrupted every seven to ten minutes, which will shatter any concentration. Kids watch television and lose all interest in sustained narrative. As a novelist, I really feel I’m one of the elders of a dying craft. It once was an art, and now it’s down to being a craft and that craft is going to go. The answer to your question is this: America is no longer a good place to be a novelist, and once it was a wonderful place.

One of the great things about my work is the weird stuff that turns up when I dig into the background research for a story. I’ve just begun a major project on drug-resistant infections like MRSA and C. difficile. A 2006 story by Mike Stobbe in The Boston Globe, about 44 people who got tattooed by unlicensed skin artists and walked out of the parlors with MRSA, turned up this beauty: “The tattooists sometimes did not use masks or gloves, did not properly disinfect skin, and did not properly clean the equipment. One Ohio tattooist used a homemade tattoo gun made from a computer ink-jet cartridge and guitar strings.”

When I read that, I wasn’t sure which was stranger—that someone invented such a device, or that walking around somewhere is a guy who was dumb enough to get a tattoo from it. Of course, I had to know more. So I went here, and found this:

I’ve personally used this so I know it works… Things you’ll need:

• Bic pen (this is your tube that houses the needle)
• 4” or 5” section of guitar string, second one from the smallest. (this is your needle)
• tooth brush (this gets bent like a “7” and joins the pen to the motor)
• an eraser from a pencil (this joins the shaft of the motor to the needle/guitar string)
• small battery-operated motor (from a Walkman or a hand-held fan)
• some tape (to join everything together)

Putting the pieces together:

1. Take the guitar string and bend a little bit of the end down or up.
2. Take out the ink tube of the pen, and cut it to about a 3” or 4” length, now file down the brass tip of the pen to get the ball out, make the hole big enough to allow passage of the needle.
3. Insert the needle into the pen.
4. Now take the tooth brush and cut off the bristles making it about 4” long. Heat it up in the middle with a lighter and bend it in to a “7” and hold in place until stiff.
5. Join/tape the pen needle assembly to the tooth brush.
6. Now take the eraser from the pencil and shove it onto the shaft of the motor, try to get it as dead center as possible. Join the pen/needle/tooth brush to the motor/eraser assembly, tape the brush to the motor.
7. Take the bent part of the needle/guitar string and stick it into the eraser, IMPORTANT—the needle must be purposely OFF CENTER.
8. Now all that is left to do is find a power source. I used the plug-in adapter from a CD player. I guess you could hook up some batteries to a switch and then to the contacts of the motor.

Further comment would be superfluous.

What’s on my mind, in my story stream, competing for my attention:

• For the next two months, an extensive article dealing with superbugs—methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and its evil ilk. I’m tempted to call it the next big public health danger, but it’s already here. Just the sort of complex story I like to tuck into.
• Essay on my father called “Wall Dog,” which I began three years ago and now want to finish. My father was a sign painter, a wall dog, who clambered all over buildings painting immense signs for 30 years. It’s a vanishing craft, and my dad was good at it.
• Plans for a series of linked essays about revisiting childhood pleasures.
• My new Flickr page. Yr. Faithful Scribbler, were he not a scribbler, would want to be a photographer. Not much here yet, but I’ll be adding to it.

From Kafka Was The Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir:

I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books—I’m talking about my friends and myself—went beyond love. It was as if we didn’t know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn’t simply read books, we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us. Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the Sixties.

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