Author Archives: wjduquette

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About wjduquette

Author, software engineer, and Lay Dominican.

Recorder Day

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Thursday is Recorder Day. Every Thursday morning I gather up my bag of
recorders and sheet music, and the separate case containing my bass
recorder, and lug them in to work. At lunch I meet with three other
people (on a good day), and we play a variety of things ranging from
Early Music to relatively modern klezmer.

For those who aren’t familiar with them, the recorder is the ancestor of
the modern transverse flute. It’s played differently; instead of blowing
across an opening, you blow into a mouthpiece. It’s similar in that
regard to a tin whistle. They come in a variety of sizes, and on a good
day we’ll play four part music, Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass. The
ranges aren’t the same as the choral parts of the same name; I believe
the overall tonal range is about half that of a choir.

A bass recorder is a thing to see. Picture if you can
a small bazooka, about four feet long, turned out of exotic hardwood and
festooned with metal keywork. But if a bass recorder is a bazooka, today
we were graced with the presence of a howitzer–Dave (Dave my co-worker,
not Dave my little boy) was able to borrow a “great-bass”. This beast is
almost half again as long as a bass and speaks half-an-octave lower. You
blow into a long metal tube called a bocal that curves up from your mouth
about eight inches and disappears into the top of the recorder; you rest
the bell of the recorder on your shoe–and you have to start blowing
earlier than everybody else in the consort in order to have the note come
out on time. It’s heavy as all get out, and it doesn’t sound nearly as
good as it ought to.

Or that’s what Dave keeps saying. But we all know he’s trying to prevent
himself from wanting one of his own.

Eternal Frontier, by James H. Schmitz

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Over the last year, Baen Books has been publishing anthologies of all of
Schmitz’ published fiction; this is the penultimate book in the series.
The previous anthologies collected his short stories and novellas in
related series; this one collects everything else but his outstanding
novel The Witches of Karres (which will be re-released in a
few months).

A few of the stories in Eternal Frontier have been
anthologized since their original magazine appearances; most have not, in
some cases because the magazine folded shortly afterward, and nobody had
ever heard of them. So there’s likely to be something new here for all
but the most hardcore Schmitz fans, and it was all new for me.

I wish I could say that I liked this volume as much as its predecessors,
all of which have been great fun. On the other hand, I’m not sorry I
bought it; some of the stories (“Crime Buff”, “The Big Terrarium”, and
“Summer Guests”, to name of a few) are very good. But this isn’t where
I’d start.

If you like science fiction at all, and you’ve not read any of these
reissues, you owe it to yourself to pick up
The Witches of Karres when it comes out. If you like that,
I’d look for the first few books in this edition and only buy this one if
you enjoyed those.

Mama Makes Up Her Mind, by Bailey White

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I first started listening to NPR during the opening days of the Gulf War.
Our local NPR station, KPCC, abandoned its regular programming and had
war news on most of the time. It was like CNN, only I could listen to it
in the car. The normal programming returned over the next few days, and I
made some pleasant discoveries. Bailey White, an occasional
commentator for All Things Considered, was chief among them.

I believe the first spot I heard detailed Bailey’s discovery of how to
teach first-graders to read: maritime disaster. Teach a kid that a book
can tell him something horrible, and you’ve won the battle. And then
there was the bit about Bailey’s mama and roadkill recipes; and the story
about the Evil Bed in the guest room.

I don’t listen to NPR much any more, and I haven’t heard Bailey’s voice
in years. But I happened to open Mama Makes Up Her Mind the
yesterday (a friend returned it to us), and got hooked all over again.
It’s a book of short sketches, two or three or five or six pages long, a
form that is never completely satisfying in book form; it’s like trying
to satiate yourself on carrots and iceberg lettuce. And some of the
sketches aren’t nearly as interesting the second time around, like when
Bailey’s mama saw the flock of bicyclists from the bathtub on the back
porch.

But then there’s “Midnight Cowboy”, and “Dead on the Road”, and “The Bed”,
and “Scary Movies”, and “Memorizing Trollope”, and “Maritime Disaster”,
and “The Dance of the Chicken Feet”–oh, there’s more than enough here to
be worth the price of admission.

A Day of Rest

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Sunday is Nap Day around our house. Sleep in, have a
leisurely breakfast, go off to church, have a simple lunch and then it’s
nap time. We don’t plan it that way; it’s just that Sunday is a day of
rest and come Sunday afternoon we feel like resting. Jane and I feel
like resting, I mean; the kids often require some encouragement. That’s
become my definition of adulthood: that age when naps suddenly start to
sound like a good idea.

Today was exceptional only in that David went off to a birthday party for
his new kindergarten friend Max. Max just turned six; and apparently
when you’re six it’s no longer cool for your friends’ parents to hang
around for the party. So there was one less child needing encouragement,
and as Anne (the littlest) had fallen asleep right after church I took
James off on an errand. He fell asleep in the car, and after I sent him
up for a nap it was my turn. I had a blissful time until David came home
and wanted to show me the prizes he’d won at the party (a couple of small
Lego toys, including what looks like a Martian driving a swamp boat;
heaven only knows where he’d find a swamp to drive it in). Ah, well. I
knew the job was dangerous when I took it.

March Upcountry, by David Weber and John Ringo

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What happens when the Empress of a good bit of the known galaxy treats
her third son like a mushroom (e.g., keeps him in the dark and, well, you
get the idea) from his childhood until he grows to adulthood because he
resembles his treacherous father a little too much? You get Prince Roger
MacClintock, good-looking, bored, possibly disloyal, unskilled (except at
a few things he genuinely likes) because he’s never been trusted to do
anything important.

You get Prince Roger MacClintock, possible tool of the Empress’s enemies.
You get Prince Roger MacClintock, obnoxious, ill-tempered, and petulant,
the burden of the Bronze Battalion of the Empress’ Own Regiment. They’ll
keep him alive, die for him if necessary, but that doesn’t mean they need
to respect hiim–and they don’t.

And then the ship that’s taking Prince Roger and his bodyguard to show
the flag on a remote planet is sabotaged. Prince and bodyguard have no
choice but to land on Marduk, an extremely unpleasant place with only one
starport where they can find a ship back home. And because that starport
has just been taken by the forces of the neighboring star empire, they
have to land in secret halfway around the planet or risk getting blown
out of the sky.

This is a war novel, of the sort for which both David Weber
and John Ringo are already known; it’s also a coming-of-age
novel. Bravo Company is going
to have to do considerable fighting to get the Prince safely home; but
the Prince is going to have to pull his weight and earn the respect of
his troops. Roger’s growth through the novel adds some needed depth to
what would otherwise be a fairly shallow (if exciting) science fiction
adventure.

I feel kind of like Deb English felt last month: I’m not at all sure that
this is a good book, but gosh I had fun reading it.

March Upcountry takes Roger and the gang half the way home;
the story is continued in March to the Sea, which is now out
in hardback (I think). I’ll wait for the paperback, but I’ll definitely
buy it when it comes out.

Oh, and my thanks go to my brother Chuck, who passed this one along
to me.

Soccer

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Today was David’s fourth soccer game of his first AYSO season, and
his team, the Blue Tigers, scored two goals against the Mighty Dragons.
These were, I might add, only the second and third goal the Blue Tigers
have ever scored, and the only goals of the game. That doesn’t mean that
the Blue Tigers won–they don’t officially keep score in the
five-year-old league–but still, there was great rejoicing. We won’t
talk about the Mighty Dragon’s goalie or the fact that David was in a
brown study for most of the game.

It was a surprisingly vicious game, the most violent I’ve seen to date.
I don’t know who started it, but there were kids falling over each other
all over the field. In some cases it was benign–one kid falls, and the
next kid, who’s really nowhere near him, falls down in sympathy–and in
some cases it was accidental, like when one kid went to kick the
ball just as the goalie fell on it, and ended up doing a header over the
goalie’s back. But there was a lot of pushing and shoving going on as
well.

David, I’m proud to say, had no part in the pushing and shoving…but
given his general air of detachment during much of the game, that’s not
particularly noteworthy.

Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry, by Harry Kemelman

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I had to come up for a breath of air after reading Stowe so I searched
around on the bookshelf for a likely looking mystery. The David Small
“Rabbi” series have been around for quite a while and, my friend the
local bookstore owner had recommended them to me a while back so I
thought, what the hey, I’ll give this one a try. Rabbi and detective are
two words I normally don’t associate in the same thought so if detectives
have a “gimmick” and they usually do, then this sounded at least unique.

Rabbi Small is a young rabbinical scholar serving as Rabbi to a small
congregation in Barnard Crossings, a small town in Massachusetts. The
synagogue is fairly new and serves Orthodox, Reform and Conservative
believers, giving Rabbi Small a thin line to tread when dealing with the
politics of the congregation. On the eve of Yom Kippur, a man is found
dead in his garage of carbon monoxide poisoning. His wife, a Gentile,
wants him buried in the Jewish cemetery with Jewish rights since he had
been raised a Jew. The police have ruled it accidental death due to the
alcohol content of his blood, but the insurance company comes sniffing
around making noises about suicide and the suicide clause in his policy.
And if he had killed himself, his burial in the Jewish cemetery would
make the rest of the land “unclean” which really ticks off an elderly
Orthodox Jew who’s wife is buried there and who is also about to donate a
pile of money for a new chapel addition to the synagogue. It gets much
more convoluted and complex from there but the upshot is that Rabbi Small
must figure out if it was suicide, accidental death or murder. And he
uses Talmudic logic to work his way thru the puzzle.

I whipped right thru this one. The reading is easy and the story moves
along fast enough to keep the pages turning without losing any detail in
the process. I found the details about the Jewish faith and customs to be
interesting as well and was amused to find that Synagogue politics and
Church politics, as depicted by Trollope, are not all that different. I
may have to look for more of these to keep on hand when I need a good,
light book.

Monsters, Inc.

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I didn’t post anything yesterday because I was watching
Monsters, Inc. with Jane instead. It was delightful the first
time I saw it, by myself last December, and it was delightful the second
time I saw it, with my boy David, also last December, and it was
delightful this time on DVD, even if the screen was too small.

The more I consider how much time George Lucas has spent on digital graphics
in the last two Star Wars movies, and to such little effect, the more
impressed I am with Pixar. Their technology is just as cutting edge,
and yet they never forget that the story comes first. And they
consistently do an outstanding job.

An Exchange of Hostages, by Susan R. Matthews

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This is the story of a young nobleman named Andrej Koscuisko. He’s a member
of the nobility on one of the planets of a star empire called the
Jurisdiction. As the name implies, power in the Jurisdiction is held by
the judiciary rather than by an executive or legislative body. The
Bench’s decisions are enforced by the Fleet. Trial for criminal
wrong-doing is by inquisition, accompanied by torture; the point of the
torture is twofold, to elicit confessions and to deter other criminals.
As a result, the Jurisdiction is always in need of skilled inquisitors.

Due to the practical difficulties involved in using torture as a way of
gathering information, it’s required that all inquisitors have medical
training. It so happens that our hero recently graduated first in his
class from the best medical school in the Jurisdiction. His father (for
reasons that are never explained) has insisted that he go to Fleet
Medical Orientation Station, there to learn how to be an
inquisitor/torturer. The book covers the time he spends in training.

I have mixed feelings about this book. It kept me reading, and there are
many interesting, well-drawn characters; Andrej’s personal development
through the course of the book is particularly well described.

But…. there are many extremely unpleasant scenes. This is not a book
for the squeamish. Only my concern for the characters kept me reading.

But…. The folks in charge of the Orientation Station are portrayed as
being kind, thorough, decent men and women who truly care about their
charges, low and high…and yet they have dedicated their lives to
training torturers. Why?

But…. after chapters of extremely painful material, the book just kind
of ends. There’s no satisfactory resolution; young Andrej simply goes
off to be a torturer.

In short, I fail to see the point of this book. It was undeniably
interesting, but after putting up with all the pain I had hoped for a
better payoff. Matthews is an author to watch, but I can’t recommend
this particular book. Unless, that is, you like to read detailed
descriptions of blood and gore.