Last night I went with some other theater enthusiasts to see Tom Stoppard’s brilliant play, Arcadia. It’s the kind of play you want to talk about after, over coffee, but I didn’t get the chance to do that so I guess I’ll just ramble a bit here.

While I loved A Brief Encounter, Arcadia might just be my favorite modern play of all time. Not that I’m an expert by any means, but Stoppard, in my mind, is a genius.

To those who don’t know it, the play alternates between two timeframes – taking place in one house in both 1810 and the present day. It’s a story about love and death, about art and science, poetry and mathematics, truth and perception, chaos theory and the heat death of the universe. Of God and Newton and Byron. It’s about all of these things and yet much more.

As the narrative unfolds we follow two distinct sets of characters who nonetheless begin a conversation with one another, particularly about maths and sciences, beauty and reality. Then plots unfold, gaining perspective in each other until the end brings them completely together in the end.

The performances were brilliant, I thought. Billy Crudup, whom most people will know was amazing as Bernard, the most unlikeable character in the play, and perhaps the most misguided, but not quite wrong. No one in the play is ever truly wrong. They all pose different questions, come from differing perspectives, but all of them seem valid in their own way. And one element that came across for me was that it wasn’t just any one belief system or philosophy that stood above the others, it was more about the balance.

Arcadia poses more questions than it answers, but then I think the best art does.

The play draws you in right from the start but the moment I fell in love with it was when Thomasina is sharing her disdain of Cleopatra and laments the loss of the Library at Alexandria, something I’ve done as well. It resonated for me. But Septimus, her tutor, responds with a beautiful passage about how nothing in art is ever truly lost, that we’re part of a continuum, hopeful message that says that there is always what we have and what will yet be.

“We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?”

At one point I told myself that maybe I should give up writing. That while I aspire to such lofty heights of narrative and dialogue, I could never do it as well as this, weaving together so many ideas, playing concepts off of one another, melding comedy and tragedy so effortlessly. But then, I thought, this is something to aspire to. That’s the thing about the play – it’s inspiring and you can’t leave feeling down about creation or discovery, even if we all face entropy in the end.

I feel like I want to say more about it, but it’s hard if you haven’t seen it. And I don’t know if I’ve quite organized my thoughts about it completely yet.

If you get a chance to see it, do. It’s well worth your time.

So as mentioned previously, I am currently on a writing retreat in Kent, CT. My goal for this retreat was to complete revisions on my middle grade novel.

I can now report that I have done that.

Of course it will need another pass to smooth down and polish the new sections (two new chapters were added), but the novel feels like it’s in much better shape than it was before.

Additionally, I completed revisions on another novel that I had written years ago and that I (hopefully) beat into better shape.

So I’m feeling successful right now.

The retreat ends tomorrow morning, but I’m holding out hope that I can finish up a short story by the end. I already completed one (these are already in progress – so it’s really not that impressive) but if I can go home with two novels and two short stories in very close to finished state, I will be happy.

For the second novel, though, I’ll need new beta readers, so if you’d like to read through a less than 60K word YA post-apocalyptic fantasy novel with brown people, let me know.

Back to writing…

This week is a bit of an exciting one. On Wednesday I leave for the annual Altered Fluid & Friends writing retreat for what will be nearly 5 days of writing. This year it is even more exciting than usual for a number of reasons. One of those being that it will occupy the time between me finishing one job and starting another.

It also gives me the much-needed time to finish revisions on my middle grade novel. Come the end of February, I intend to hand it over to my agent and, hopefully, forget about it for at least a little while. And for the moments when my brain will inevitably need a break from that, I have a few short stories that I need to complete as well.

The other exciting thing is that N will be coming up for part of the retreat, which minimizes one of the harder parts of such retreats, namely being away from the people you care about.

Perhaps in anticipation of this, I had a dream last night that played out like a story. In it, I was picked up from the airport by two men driving a car. The fact that they anticipated where I was going before I was able to tell them, clued me in to the fact that they were up to no good. It was soon clear they were abducting me for nefarious reasons and one of them pulled a gun on me.

Unfortunately I don’t remember the exact reason for them wanting me but I remember pleading with the man, saying that I’d be out of the way since I would be on my writing retreat and it was really important to me and if they just let me go I wouldn’t muck up whatever they were planning. It was as soon as I mentioned the writing retreat and the gunman realized how much it meant to me, that he moved the gun barrel toward my right hand. That’s when I really started freaking out.

Thankfully, the dream shifted gears shortly after that.  So yes, the retreat – I’m really looking forward to it.

I don’t typically get political on this blog and that’s mostly because there are numerous people that I surround myself with who are better at this thing, more eloquent, than I am. But sometimes I feel the need to say something.

Over the past few weeks we’ve seen some amazing events transpire across the world, one of which being the people in Egypt succeeding in ousting the dictator, Mubarak, and calling for what I think we all hope will be democratic elections in the region. And there are now people in Bahrain, in Yemen, in Tehran, and other cities calling for similar democratic process. And I sit here and watch them risk their lives, their blood, for a better life and wait for what seems like the inevitable response, that we stand in solidarity with them. And yet it doesn’t come. The US government “condemns” but does little else. There are no peacekeeping forces. There are no sanctions. Even the UN is mute in the face of this massive wave of democracy. And I see, and mourn in the face of the inherent hypocrisy in what this country claims to stand for, and what it actually does. We, as a country, are being schooled in what the fight for democracy actually is, and the lie of what this country stands for is made plain for everyone.

And yet it’s not just fighting in other countries. Recently, in addition to seeing the rights of LGBT people being trampled across this country, we have recently seen an attack on education in this country, on unions, and on the right for women to choose what happens with their bodies. There has even been an initiative that would make it easier for people to legally kill abortion doctors.

This is unacceptable.

We must protect the right for all of our people to healthcare, including the right for women to have counseling and aid and, if they choose to, abortions. We must protect the right for people to unionize in the face of a government that is all too quick to cut the programs that help support workers and their families. And we must protect and defend the rights of all of us to have equal protection and liberty under the law.

This is not negotiable.

I am heartened by the Democrats in Wisconsin who chose to remove themselves rather than participate in an action that was blatantly in defiance of the very ideas this country was founded upon. I am heartened by the protests that are being planned in response to the cutting of funding to Planned Parenthood, an organization that seeks to do good by reaching out to women across our country.

It’s not enough.

A few years ago I watched and wept as Obama was elected as the President of the United States and I thought it heralded a change in this country, a wave of tolerance and progressive action that I could be proud of. I know I was proud of my country that night. Since then, there have been few moments where I’ve had anything near that level of pride. Don’t ask, don’t tell has become a battleground. Guantanamo Bay, they now say, can never be closed. The promise that I thought we could count on has not come to pass.

So it’s up to us. We have to fight all this bullshit wherever it rears its head. We have to fight for the rights of women, for minorities, for LGBT individuals, for anyone who doesn’t have a voice that’s protected by politicians or lobbyists or corporate interests or the rich or the strong. We have to support the efforts of other people around the world to protect their own rights and their lives and families.

This can take the shape of donations,  protests, or simply tweeting information about what’s really happening. But we need to do something. They depend on us to be quiescent, to be distracted by our daily lives, by our consumerism, by television, by the Internet, by the Grammys, by all the little things that occupy our time. But these things are important. Not because CNN tells us so, or because Fox News is covering them, but because they ultimately affect our lives and the lives of the people around us. Because, without hyperbole, they mean the difference between life and death.

That is too important to let slide.

I know I’m probably preaching to the choir when it comes to people reading this. But at the very least, I stand with you, unless you stand against us. And if so, we will not let you pass.

It’s too fucking important.

I have this great post in my head, all about the two Church shows I went to see, last night and the night before. It’s a sprawling post going into my history with the band, its members, the shows, the venues, the albums and songs. However, partially because of those two shows (each of which clocked in at over 3 hours), I have a significant sleep deficit for this week and whatever part of my brain translates that potential post into an actual doesn’t seem to be functioning properly.

So instead you get this.

I’m sure the post will materialize later. Maybe tomorrow when I get to catch up on some sleep.

There are also other things to talk about – new jobs, writing retreats, recent reading – but that will all have to wait as well until my brain returns to full functionality.

In the meantime, accept this video of a brand new Radiohead song from their new album, “King of Limbs” which is released this Saturday.

As I said on Twitter – Thom Yorke dances for your sins. Watch. Listen. Love.

Lotus Flower