One of the projects that’s keeping me busy these days is the Meg Quigley Vivaldi Competition. The competition, founded in 2004, is for young women bassoon players who are either from or in school anywhere in the Americas. The repertoire changes for every competition, but always includes a Vivaldi concerto, an unaccompanied work, and a new piece by a living woman composer. The competition happens every two years, and since the 2010 competition, has been accompanied by the MQVC Bassoon Symposium — three days of masterclasses, recitals, and other activities open to all bassoonists.

The 2012 Competition and Symposium are happening at the University of the Pacific, where Veronica is now the music librarian. Nicolasa Kuster is the bassoon prof. at Pacific, and also the co-founder of MQVC (along with UT-Austin’s Kristin Wolfe Jensen). She invited me to join the organization as Operations Coordinator, and I will also serve as co-host for the 2012 Competition and Symposium.

I created a brand new web site for MQVC, which launched today. Check it out at mqvc.org. The launch marks the announcement of the repertoire, guidelines, and dates for the 2012 Competition. This year’s new piece is Sortilege by Margi Griebling-Haigh, which Barrick Stees will premiere at this summer’s International Double Reed Society Conference. Besides the web site, I’m also managing MQVC’s mailing list, Facebook page and Twitter account (@MQVCBassoon).

As January 2012 approaches, I’ll probably post more here about organizing the event, who will be serving as judges, etc. But, all that information will definitely show up at mqvc.org first.

Most of the stories in this collection are explicitly tied together by the presence of an apparently immortal narrator named Qfwfq. Many of the stories involve space, but they take place in many times and many settings — with Qfwfq in many different incarnations. In one, he describes life before the Big Bang, with everyone and everything coexisting in a single point. In another, he and another young friend play games with atoms and fly around on galaxies. In yet another, he is a third-generation land dweller with an embarrassing still-aquatic great uncle. Even within these fantastical narratives, Calvino often manages to add a further level of surreality: a dinosaur catches the first train and gets lost in the crowd, cosmic beings transmute into ordinary humans, playmates get locked in an endless spatial loop. These stories are quite good, although they’re not my favorites among Calvino’s works. My only real objection is to his use of intentionally unpronounceable names. Qfwfq is actually a relatively tame example; other characters have names like (k)yK, Granny Bb’b, and Rwzfs.

Paleontologist Robert Bakker has written a number of books, but Raptor Red is his first (and so far as I can tell his only) novel. His characters are all Cretaceous dinosaurs, with a female Utahraptor (Raptor Red) as the protagonist. The story follows Red as she loses one prospective mate and finds another; encounters various other species of dinosaurs and other animals, many already known to her but some not; and meets up with her sister and her two chicks. Aside from other animals of various sorts, Red and her fellow raptors also must deal with strange new plants, bugs, weather, and natural disasters as they travel through present-day North America in search of food.

Throughout, Bakker provides a wealth of information about the anatomy and behavior of the dinosaurs and other animals in his story. The behavior is, of course, educated guesswork. He makes the Utahraptors very social creatures, which he argues for based on their relatively large brains and close ties to birds. As Bakker wrote this book in the mid-1990s, I’d be interested to know if any new discoveries have been made in the intervening years that might change his characterizations.

One quote from a review printed on the back cover of the paperback edition proclaims that “Michael Crichton may be a good storyteller, but even he wouldn’t have the nerve to write a dinosaur novel from the dino’s point of view.” I might counter by saying “Robert Bakker may know an awful lot about dinosaurs, but he’s no master storyteller.” Not that the novel is the worst I’ve read — far from it. But, it’s far more interesting for its dinosaur information than for its narrative arc.

Journalist Bill Smithback, a recurring Preston/Child character, is killed in a brutal attack in his Manhattan apartment (this happens on page 7, so it’s not really a spoiler). Eyewitnesses and building security footage make identifying his killer easy, but a bigger problem appears almost immediately: the man is thought to have committed suicide ten days earlier. There seem to be connections between Smithback’s murder and a story he’d been working on about a strange religious sect at the northern tip of Manhattan that has been accused of practicing animal sacrifice. The deeper FBI Agent Pendergast, NYPD Lieutenant D’Agosta, and Smithback’s wife Nora Kelly get in their investigation, the more it seems that the cult is not only sacrificing animals, but also turning people into zombiis.

Sigh… yet another Pendergast novel. I was hoping that Preston and Child would give their eccentric FBI agent a rest after six books in a row, the last four of which were increasingly Pendergast-centric. I long for a return to their earlier unconnected (or at least only tenuously connected) novels, like Thunderhead and Riptide. But, this book does bear some similarities to the authors’ first collaboration, Relic: it takes place in New York, involves the Museum of Natural History (about which Douglas Preston knows a great deal), and for the most part doesn’t involve Pendergast’s personal life or family history. For me, Cemetery Dance ranks not among Preston and Child’s top five books, but I liked it better than that last few they’ve written.

At the beginning of 2010, I decided to start keeping track of my swim workouts. To do so, I’ve been using Ugomo, a very useful web-based workout log with some social media features. Ugomo lets you track workouts and your weight, set goals, and visualize your workout data in various ways. If you’re a runner or cyclist, it also lets you map rides/runs and store your regular routes. You can also see what other people are doing and comment on their workouts, although in my experience this doesn’t happen much on the site.

I set a goal of 365 miles over the course of the year, which I knew was a pretty ambitious mark. I started out pretty well, swimming five or six days a week; I was even ahead of my goal pace by the end of February. But little things like finishing my dissertation; giving two recitals; trips to Seattle (twice), Maine, and Britain; and moving across the country really cut into my pool time. Luckily, I now have access to the wonderful outdoor pool at the University of the Pacific, and I’ve been able to make up some of my lost ground. I didn’t make it anywhere close to my original goal, but I did manage to swim 208 1/4 miles this year — roughly the distance from the White House to 30 Rockefeller Plaza in NYC (as the crow flies). Thanks to Ugomo, I also know that I spent a total of 5 days, 8 hours, and 27 minutes in one pool or another.

Even at my fastest in the last year, I was still a ways off my best times from high school, which was the last time I swam competitively. Then again, I haven’t tested myself in an actual meet situation recently. I hope to up my total distance during 2011, and maybe I’ll also find a Masters meet or two in which to participate. But, even if I am past my swimming prime, I’m still in better shape than I’ve been in years. Plus I think think that swimming, more so than other forms of exercise, gives me lung capacity and breath control training that benefits me as a woodwind player (perhaps more on that in a future post). I’ve had my last swim for this year already, but I look forward to starting anew in January.

This volume of short stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle (who just goes by “T.C.” these days) is slim, but it contains fifteen tales. Most of the stories are dark or depressing to some degree, involving death, fighting, adultery, theft, swindlery, obsession, and other less than savory actions, feelings, and attitudes. I found some of these to be rather thought-provoking, but I’m not sure I’d say that I really enjoyed most of them. Notable exceptions are “On for the Long Haul,” in which a paranoid city-dweller gets sucked in by propaganda about the threat of imminent nuclear war and moves his family to a secure compound in Montana, and “Overcoat II,” which involves a Soviet bureaucrat and his first foray into the black market.

I also enjoyed some of the lighter stories like “Ike and Nina,” which describes a short-lived affair between Eisenhower and the wife of Nikita Krushchev, and “A Bird in Hand,” which tells of both a man’s futile attempts to get rid of starlings and the (true) story of the man who introduced the birds to North America. Overall, this isn’t my favorite collection of short stories, but still worth reading. It has not, however, yet inspired me to pick up any on Boyle’s other works.

This is another gem I picked up at St. Vinny’s in Madison. The cover alone, with its stereotypical Wagnerian Valkyrie with an old-style conga, was worth the purchase. But the record turns out to be pretty good (read: delightfully cheesy), too. Edmundo Ros ( who I hadn’t heard of before picking up this record) was born in Trinidad to Venezuelan and Scottish parents, and has spent the bulk of his career in Britain. From 1940 to the mid 90s, he led a variety of Latin jazz bands based in London, toured the world, and recorded extensively. He retired to Spain in 1994, was appointed to the Order of the British Empire in 2000, and just turned 100 a couple of weeks ago.

Having not heard any of his other albums, I’m not sure whether this level of cheese is representative of or anomalous within his output. In any case, it’s pretty fun. Ros and his Orchestra tackle Carmen, Rigoletto, La Traviata, The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro, and even Lohengrin, among others. My favorite cut is their treatment of the “Toreador’s Song” from Carmen:

Listen to Edmundo Ros and His Orchestra — The Toreador’s Song:

The Egyptologist opens with a letter, dated 1922, from archaeologist Ralph Trilipush to his fiancée Margaret Finneran. In it, he tells her that he and her father, Chester Crawford Finneran, will soon leave Egypt and return to her in Boston. He also tells her that he is sending all of the journals and research materials relating to his recent discovery of the tomb of XIIIth dynasty king Atum-hadu, and gives her detailed instructions about what to do with them should some accident (or attack) befall him on his journey home to her.

Phillips allows the rest of the story to unfold in a similar way: through letters and telegrams between Trilipush and the two Finnerans, Trilipush’s journals, and letter dated more than thirty years later from retired private investigator Harold Ferrell to a descendant of Margaret Finneran. Ferrell’s letters recount a strange case he’d had years earlier that began as a hunt for an Australian-born illegitimate son of an English businessman, became a double murder investigation, and eventually led to his becoming involved with the Finnerans and Ralph Trilipush. As the story progresses, it becomes evident that at least one — and possibly all — of the correspondents are lying to some degree. Trilipush and Ferrell each write about wanting to turn their tales into books, so a the very least it seems like they embellish their stories a bit.

Phillips’s epistolary narrative style is quite interesting, largely because it becomes clear early in the book that you can’t be sure which narrator(s) to trust. The interplay of conflicting narratives keeps the reader on his or her toes. Even in the end one isn’t quite sure how much of the story’s climax actually happened as described. This ambiguity might be annoying to some, but I found it intriguing and thought-provoking. It also, more often than not, leads to humorous situations, as the reader begins to see through the narrators’ lies to what is really going on. The Egyptologist, published in 2004, is Phillips’s second novel, and he now has four total. If the others are as inventive and well-written as this, then I would quite enjoy them.

Giant Sequoia

A couple of months ago, we went with friends Monika and Derrick to Calaveras Big Trees State Park. The park lies about eighty miles east-northeast of Stockton in the Sierra Nevadas. The area has served as a tourist attraction for a surprisingly long time (although native peoples like the Miwok have, of course, known about the giant trees for a very long time). A white hunter named Augustus Dowd happened upon what is now known as the Discovery Tree in the spring of 1852, and people soon started looking for ways to make money from the behemoths. Some early schemes involved taking the trees to the people; the tree Dowd first saw was cut down and sections of its trunk and bark were shipped to New York (by way of San Francisco and Cape Horn) and put on display. Another tree was left standing but stripped completely of its bark. But once the Mammoth Grove Hotel was built nearby in 1861, the public began to travel to see the giants in their natural state.

Roots of a Fallen Tree

There are two types of huge trees in California: the Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), which is the sort found in Redwood National Park and Muir Woods, and the giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum), which is found in the western Sierras. Redwoods are the tallest living trees, with the current record holder at 379 feet tall. But giant sequoias are the largest, with diameters up to 32 feet or more. Redwoods live up to 1,800 years or so, but the oldest living giant sequoias are more than 3,000 years old. When these elders of the forest first sprouted, the iron age was just getting under way in Eurasia, King Tut was relatively fresh in his grave, and the Olmec culture was flourishing in Mesoamerica.

Fallen Trunk

“Big Trees” is a truly apt name for the park, and not just because it accurately describes the place’s draw. The name’s succinct simplicity is a reflection of the effect the giant sequoias have on the visitor. For the first few trees spotted, my mind was awash with florid language: colossal, gargantuan, Brobdingnagian; majestic, regal, magnificent; ancient, venerable, primordial. But, my mind seemed to regard these initial sightings as flukes. The more trees I encountered, the less I was able to comprehend the combination of sheer size and sheer numbers — to accept that this wasn’t just a few genetic freaks, but an entire population of giants. Pretty soon, my internal monologue was reduced to a troglodytic “Big. Trees.”

Pioneer Cabin Tree

The park contains two clusters of giant sequoias. The North Grove is the more often visited group, and contains the trees that first drew tourists to the area. This section of the park is right off Highway 4 and has short, wide, and level trail that makes many trees very accessible. When we were there, it was packed — a parking lot full of cars and the almost constant presence of others along the path. The North Grove contains a hundred or so large trees, many with names like the Pioneer Cabin Tree, the Abraham Lincoln tree, the Father of the Forest, and the Siamese Twins. But the main concentration of trees — and the real draw of the park, as far as I’m concerned — lies an eight-mile drive away (three as the crow flies) in the South Grove.

A Quartet

The South Grove’s four-mile loop trail is pretty well developed, but is a far cry from the wheelchair-accessible North Grove path. This, along with its distance from the highway, keeps the South Grove much less busy. We only met a few people on the trail, and mostly were alone with the birds, small woodland mammals, and the trees. The South Grove has about a thousand large giant sequoias, and contains the park’s largest specimens. The experience of walking amongst the trees isn’t quite one of having been shrunk to the size of an ant. In a way it is more jarring, because the arboreal titans are interspersed with other species of “normal” trees and, of course, smaller immature sequoias.

Next to a Sequoia

We ended up spending quite a bit of time at the South Grove. Without the crush of crowds like at the North Grove, we were inclined to spend more time investigating and simply contemplating individual trees. We sat for awhile at the Agassiz Tree, which at almost 250 feet tall and 22 feet in diameter is the largest in the park. In addition to the hikes at the two groves, we stopped for a nice picnic lunch on the banks of the Stanislaus River. The trip as a whole was quite fun, and I look forward to seeing big trees elsewhere — especially the Coast Redwoods. I took quite a few pictures, mainly of the trees but also some of wildlife we happened upon. Click any of the photos above to see the whole gallery.