Thursday, September 25, 2008

23, 24, 25, 26, 27

A lot to catch up on!


Dialogues in Swing, Fred Hall
Interesting interviews with Bob Crosby, Dick Haymes, Jo Stafford & Paul Weston, Woody Herman, Mel Tormé, George Shearing, Wild Bill Davison, Peggy Lee, Artie Shaw, Jimmy Van Heusen, Maxene Andrews, and several members of Glenn Miller's band.

George Shearing on writing "some Mozart type music":

But instead of drums we would probably add percussion, you know, little finger cymbals and triangles and little tiny drums and stuff so that the percussive end of it would be of a far more delicate nature than some drummer looking for something in the attic.


When Oscar Hammerstein hit it big with Oklahoma!:


[Oscar Hammerstein] took the back page of Variety, took out an ad, and he listed about 40 flop shows he had written, [...] and the ad said, "I did it before, and I can do it again."


Interesting note: the bouncing ball that follows your karaoke lyrics has its origin in audience sing-alongs in theatres.
More Dialogues in Swing, Fred Hall
Less interesting interviews with Kay Starr, members of Count Basie's band, Steve Allen, Teddy Wilson, Alvino Rey and the King Sisters, Herb Jeffries, Johnny Green, Les Brown, Helen Forrest, Helen O'Connell, Harry James, and Tony Bennett.
Telling Lies for Fun & Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers, Lawrence Block
A collection of columns from Writer's Digest. Some quite good, though they are tediously repetitive in book-form.

In a chapter on collaboration, Block shares some anecdotes from his days writing erotic paperbacks. In one case, Block and his partner in writing traded chapters, leaving each other with impossible cliff-hangers at the end of each chapter. In another:


These collaborative experiments led in due course to the ultimate reductio ad absurdum, The Great Sex Novel Poker Game. This ill-advised venture consisted of half a dozen of us, all writers of this sort of trash and all fond at the time of nightlong poker sessions. Operating on the premise that any of us could produce a chapter in an hour or so, we met for a night of poker during which five of us sat around the table while on of us at a time went upstairs and wrote fifteen or twenty pages of The Book. By the time the night was done--or the following day, or whatever--we would each have contributed two chapters, and the book would be finished, and a division of the spoils would make us all winners, even those of us who had proved unlucky at cards.


This plan turns out not to be foolproof, but who cares how it fails? I love the absurd setup.

This sounds familiar:


Like many people who wind up writing, I've always tended to be interested in a great many things. I'm given to intense if short-lived enthusiasms, taking up hobbies and areas of interest with a passion, reading everything I can get my hands on about them, pursuing them relentlessly for three months or so, then shelving them and moving on to something else. I used to regard this fickleness as a character defect, but have come instead to view it as a useful aspect of my personality in that it has enabled me to learn a fair amount about a curious mix of subjects.

Jingo, Terry Pratchett
Klatch, the patrician, and the City Watch.
The Book of Sand, Jorge Luis Borges
A collection of short stories (I started Ficciones months ago, but somehow have not read it back-to-back yet). Borges expressed a preference for The Congress and The Book of Sand. I didn't think The Congress stood out among these great stories, but Book of Sand and The Disk I though were particularly strong.