What Is Dave Doing?!?

Hi Sneaky friends!

I really like to read books and listen to music so in order to bump up the content on our website, I thought I’d keep a little journal called:

WHAT IS DAVE DOING?!?

 

READING: Anthony Trollope’s The Macdermots of Ballycloran

Call me crazy, but I decided to read or, in most cases, re-read all of Anthony Trollope’s novels. He was a ve-e-e-ery productive author due to the fact that he wrote 2500 words every day of his writerly life – every day. It didn’t matter if he was sick, tired, working, travelling; he wrote 2500 words every day or for three hours. Even if he finished the novel he was working on. He turned the page and finished his quota of words on his next novel. All in all, he wrote 47 novels – some of them very great; some so-so; but all of them enjoyable. He had a great gift as a storyteller of empathy or imaginative feeling and his novels are full of humour and warmth as his characters navigate our harsh world.

Anyway, so that’s what I’m doing. I predict it will take me a while – unlike my re-reading of all of Jane Austen’s novels, which took me less than a month. Most of these books are your typical Victorian doorstoppers and there are forty-seven of them! Forty-seven!

His first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, was written while Trollope lived in Ireland where he worked for the Royal Mail as a postal surveyor’s clerk and published in 1847. It’s one of those novels with an inexorable march to unhappiness that would be painful to read if not for Trollope’s affectionate eye for the Ireland of that period and the Irish themselves. His description as the narrator of discovering and exploring the old house at the beginning is magical and gives the book a Gothic feeling as the harbinger of inescapable doom. His portrayal of the lives of the Irish poor is full of tenderness, but also humour. His account of an Irish race day is particularly vivid.

Still, I’m not a huge fan of books with an inevitably sad and tragic ending so my enjoyment of this book was limited in some ways, but Trollope is always hard for me to put down.

 

LISTENING: 10cc Tenology

I’ve been listening quite a bit to a new box set from the band 10cc who, upon listening to this box set, will make you ask yourself, “This band was popular???” I mean, I like them, but I’m a weirdo! It seems odd to me that this band once had hit records on the charts – crazy records like the doo-wop pastiche “Donna” and the multi-part “The Dean and I”. Of course, everyone knows “I’m Not in Love” and it’s understandable why it was a hit, but it’s still a strange song with the stacks and stacks of multi-tracked vocals that must have taken forever to do.

As I jokingly tweeted a little while ago, “The worst part of a band’s career is the fourth disc in a box set”. Tenology avoids it a little by having its fourth disc be a disc of rarities, but you see a real drop off between the first disc of singles – all crazy English art rock – and the second disc – a slide into bland, AOR. The third disc is a collection of album cuts including one of my faves, the 11-minute Pink Floyd pastiche “Feel the Benefit”.

I still think I need to listen to this a few more times to soak it all up and I have yet to watch the fifth disc – a collection of promo films and live television performances.

 

READING: Joe Ollman’s Mid-Life

This book should be charged under some sort of standards and practices code for false advertising as it was completely different and much better than I thought it would be. Outrageous!

I was expecting a jokey meditation on aging – something we all must face eventually – with a lot of one-pagers and humorous diagrams, but what Ollman gives us is much deeper. A man, whose life choices have him feeling suffocated and put upon, who is seeing the effects of age in the mirror and the old joints and sees no escape, has a public meltdown when he falls “in love” with a popular children’s performer. We also see her life too – at the crossroads as she prepares to sign a deal with the Devil – a large TV network – and give up on her dreams of being a “serious musician”. This huge decision leaves her feeling unmoored and open to someone to guide her. She and Ollman’s stand-in get to meet and the humiliation is palpable. Plus a lot of one-pagers and humorous diagrams!

I have a feeling that Ollman has taken aspects of his real life and blown them out of all proportion for our amusement and I take off my hat to him!

 

LISTENING: MOJO compilation CD The Roots of the Rolling Stones

As a regular purchaser of the Greatest Music Magazine on the Planet, MOJO, I also get to enjoy their CD compilations, which started intermittently but have now become a regular monthly event like not completely paying off my credit card. The price you have to pay for such regularity is the occasionally uninspired CD like this one. The music is great, of course; mostly blues: Slim Harpo, Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, etc. My favourite songs are Gene Allison’s “You Can Make It If You Try” and Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee”. But the roots of the Rolling Stones? Yawnzo. Nothing you haven’t heard before if you’re a fan of music at all.

 

Well, that’s all for this week.