MOVING

If anyone cares this blog has moved over to tumblr. I'm not super-thrilled about this but blogspot is kind've a ghost town. Sort of a relic from a different age on the internet, but as it is approaching 2014 I find myself wanting to move on to a different age. One has to go where the action is, get with the times, etc.. This move is something like the jump we all made from myspace to facebook. So, you can find me at tumblr now. See you there.

dog-ear-this.tumblr.com
dog-ear-this.tumblr.com
dog-ear-this.tumblr.com

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

Alan Sillitoe (1959)

Running had always been made much of in our family, especially running from the police.

            Been in some kind of awfully British mood recently; it feels as though I have endured week after week of bad skies and dreary food, and in some of my more desperate and pitiful moments I have even listened to the Smiths. I haven’t ever been to England, and I never will, but I wouldn’t hesitate to call this mood “British”. And the cherry is I have begun to occasionally drink tea, a couple times a week, like somebody’s desiccated old grandmother. This Brythonic attitude of mine can be traced back, I believe, to a documentary about the Beatles I recently watched in a “History of Rock and Roll” class I am taking at a Community College because I failed it years ago when I was a shifty, miserable teenager prone to taking out his relationship with his mother on himself and the world. Obstinate ol’ me may be the only person on the planet who isn’t totally jazzed and fully erect over the Beatles, though I have mellowed on that front a little bit. I was struck at the footage used in the beginning of the documentary, during the earliest part of their career, in Munich and Liverpool. It was very grimy and romantic, and I think it infected me somehow. Mostly I just zoned out though, because of the indecipherable Liverpudlian accents of many of the interviewees. One could hardly call it English at all. Also because skiffle is terrible music.