April 10, 2011

Someone lent us a cottage in Harsfordshire. I was sitting in a sort of parlor there one day, writing. And suddenly I saw someone run past the window, along the lane outside. With shorts on, white shirt and so on. And it seemed to me such an unusual image... that I wrote down at the top of a sheet of paper, 'the loneliness of the long-distance runner.' I didn't know where he had come from, I didn't know where he was going. He was simply a sort of ...vision, floating by the window. And I put the line away, I thought I was going to write a poem with this sort of line in it. It seemed rather a nice line."
- Alan Sillitoe, author of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner



Alan Sillitoe also wrote an Autobiography entitled Life Without Armour which is only available on the used book market. Will try to obtain one from Better World Books.



Also on the reading list is Alexandra Horowitz' Inside of a Dog.

April 28, 2010

Active natures are rarely melancholy. Activity and melancholy are incompatible.--BOVEE.


"The first thing is that them bastards over us aren't as daft as they most of the time look, and for another thing I'm not so daft as I would look if I tried to make a break for it on my long-distance running, because to abscond and then get caught is nothing but a mug's game, and I'm not falling for it. Cunning is what counts in this life; I'm telling you straight: they're cunning, and I'm cunning. If only 'them' and 'us' had the same ideas we'd get on like a house on fire, but they don't see eye to eye with us and we don't see eye to eye with them, so that's how it stands and how it will always stand. "

R.I.P. Alan Sillitoe.



I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce