Tuesday, March 20, 2012

1-6: Let's catch up!


  1. The Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Dashiell Hammett
    Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man. The last was the most intersting to me: it's far grittier, sexier, and less light-hearted than the movie. Motion Picture Production Code in action. Anyway: good. Will read the short stories one of these days.
  2. Seizing Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-Boat Codes, 1939-1943, David Kahn
    Excellent. Everything Enigma is interesting to me right now. (I don't remember which of the flurry of Enigma books told me this, possibly more than one of them, but I was interested and somewhat annoyed to learn that one of the reasons for keeping the decipherment successes secret after the war was that the British government sold or gave captured Enigma machines to their colonies and overseas territories--without informing them, of course, that their communications were readable by the home country!)
  3. The Baby Dodds Story, Baby Dodds, as told to Larry Gara
    Another good jazz autobiography.
  4. Good as Lily, Derek Kim & Jesse Hamm
    Graphic novel. Pretty good. (Which reminds me: I read Hiroaki Samura's Ohikkoshi some time last year. It was amusing.)
  5. Închisoarea noastră cea de toate zilele (volumul 1), Ion Ioanid
    Excellent. Radu at work is amused to explain words and expressions to me after my train commute.
  6. All This Jazz about Jazz: The Autobiography of Harry Dial, Harry Dial
    Aaand one more good jazz biography. Some interesting bits:


    In the spring of 1923 [...] Tuesday night dance classes were staged so that hte patrons could learn the routined dances that were so popular then. [...] such dances as the Bonita, Fishtail, etc. Each dance was done to a special tune and at any Negro dance you attended those tunes were only played for those dances. The orchestra would play the introduction and stop until partners had been selected and lined up on the dance floor. For instance, the Bonita was done to the tune of You'd Be Surprised and when that introduction was played those who didn't know the dance would take their seats and every couple on the floor when the band started would do the Bonita.


    I should ask Richard and Peter about the Bonita.

    According to Dial, Chicago had many homosexual piano players, and that led to Earl Hines's nickname:


    We called all the piano players 'Mother', whether or not they had those female tendencies, and that's how Earl got the nickname of 'Father Hines'. When his band began broadcasting from the Grand Terrace, Walter Bishop, the drummer, would holler during the playing of their theme song "Father Hines", and this was in effect saying he was 'straight'. Of course, the general public had no knowledge of that.


    When describing Fate Marable's big band, Dial mentions:

    [...] the average combo at that time consisted of piano, violin and drums. Piano and drums were standard but the third man in a lot of cases was clarinet or trumpet. Some places only had piano and drums and the real small places [...] only used a piano player. The business did not advance to a standard of five or six piece combos until the late teens.


    Finally, a surprising mention of Duke and head arrangements:

    Some folks won't believe this either, but the great Duke Ellington didn't have much music on paper until he engaged Billy Strayhorn as his arranger, which was sometime in the thirties. His son, Mercer, and his long-time drummer, Sonny Greer are two living persons who could substantiate the above statement. That is why Duke's band used to sound so bad when he was breaking in new men.

    That sure sounds...unlikely to me. I'll have to dig into some Ellington biographies.

2012

I have been reading. Just not writing.

32-35: Finishing off 2011


  1. Code Breakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, edited by F. H. Hinsley & Alan Stripp
    Uneven, because of the many authors, but a fascinating history definitely worth reading.
  2. The Arabian Nights, selected and edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen, translated by Husain Haddawy
    Excellent translation. I had been playing a lot of Tales of the Arabian Nights when I read this, and found many tales from the game to be taken directly from the, well, tales. Unsurprisingly, I suppose. I didn't have the patience to read all the critical essays, not even Borges's!
  3. The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes, Gordon Welchman
    Excellent. Probably the clearest popular technical description of the deciphering effort.
  4. Mathematical Apocrypha: Stories and Anecdotes of Mathematicians and the Mathematical, Steven G. Krantz
    What a disappointment. Terribly sourced, so the anecdotes do remain apocrypha. What a waste.