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Monthly Archives: April 2016

To William on His 400th Death Day

Saturday, April 23rd, 2016 marked the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. It’s also believed to be his birthday, based on the recorded date of his baptism. Historians will likely never cease to debate this.

It’s no secret that I love Shakespeare. It’s not just a love of his writing, though. It’s a joy to hear his work performed, to see the incredible understanding that he had of the world around him. He was a man who embraced the differences in cultures, who invented words and phrases that have become commonplace, and who has influenced countless writers over the centuries.

I’ve seen and read a lot of Shakespeare’s work. It’s sort of a thing about earning an English degree, but it started long before college. My English teachers in high school had us read at least one Shakespeare play each year. I attended travelling performances that came to my town as part of a program called Shakespeare on the Plains (one cast included my future theatre professor). I own a few different copies of the complete worksk, and I’m most proud of an annotated set which belonged to one of my high school teachers. I have yet to read any of them in their entirety. And you know something? That’s okay too. He was an incredibly prolific writer. You don’t have to have memorized every sonnet and soliloquy, or even know what those things are, to appreciate Shakespeare.

My absolute favorite Shakespeare play is The Tempest, though sadly, I’ve never managed to catch a live performance. Several years ago, however, a new film version of it was released, starring Helen Mirren as Prospera (a very clever casting and genderswapping of the role of Prospero). This is probably my favorite production of the show, and is absolutely phenomenal. Djimon Honsou co-stars as Caliban, with Felicity Jones (soon to be starring as Jyn Erso in Star Wars: Rogue One) as Prospera’s daughter, Miranda. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.

And a couple of notes on The Tempest. It’s the show in which I feel the greatest connection between one of the characters, Prospero, and Shakespeare. In Act IV, Prospero has been using his magic to perform a little show for his daughter and the young man who is wooing her. When he realizes that the time has come for the act to end, he says:

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex’d;
Bear with my weakness; my, brain is troubled:
Be not disturb’d with my infirmity:
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose: a turn or two I’ll walk,
To still my beating mind.”

He’s done with his life as a writer, it seems. Tired of his life of creating illusions for the people, Shakespeare is voicing his exhaustion through Prospero. The time, it would seem, has come for him to focus elsewhere. There’s a tragic beauty in it. Since The Tempest is believed by many to have been Shakespeare’s final play (or at least the last that he wrote on his own), Propsero’s dialogue at the close of Act V has always felt like a farewell message from the Bard himself.

“Now my charms are all o’erthrown,

And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint. Now, ’tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell,
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.”

How’s that for an epitaph?

And so, while I may have missed the actual date by a couple of days, I would like to reiterate my love for the writing this man accomplished. Shakespeare will always be one of my favorites. Happy birthday, Will. 400 years after you died, you work lives on.

Orchard After

This one’s another entry for one of Chuck Wendig’s Terrible Minds Writing Challenges. We were given two lists of twenty words, picking one from each list to create a random title. After a day of brainstorming, the final line popped into my head. So, here you are. It’s a flash piece, really. Not even 500 words, but I like it. I hope you do too.

 

“Orchard After”

 

They met as children, wandering across the meadow that connected their parents’ farms. They became friends instantly, each thrilled to have the other to talk to, to share in the collective adventure that is youth. Rain or shine, they would meet. Every day during the summer, and every free moment during the school year, they were together. One would wait for the other at the old apple tree in the middle of the meadow.

Borrowing tools and parts from their parents, they built a tree house. It would shelter them from the rain and shade them from the sun more than the tree could alone. The apples fed them when they wished to remain away from home. They took great care to plant the seeds when they could, and in time, they sprouted.

They grew older, and closer together. High school brought them a series of new challenges. They each began work on the farm, learning the trades of their mothers and fathers. In between tasks in the fields, they tended the burgeoning orchard that was now growing Soon, the summer day arrived when they shared their first kiss, hidden from a thunderstorm inside their tree house.

Time passed, and their love grew stronger. Though they could no longer both fit inside the tree house, they could still spend a hot afternoon sleeping beside each other in the shade of the tree’s branches. School came to an end, but still they stayed on, neither willing to part for more than a few days at a time. As their parents grew older, they took over the farms together, consolidating and focusing on the apple orchard.

Years became decades, and the two grew old. They still made and sold apple pie and cider with apples that they grew, having sold the rest of their parents’ farmland, save for what had been the meadow. Children visiting the orchard would play in the tree house while the grownups shopped and sampled. In the quiet evenings, the lovers would meet again, beneath the tree where it had all began. They would sit and hold hands and talk about how quickly the world had gone by.

One winter day, it was time for them to say their final goodbyes to each other. They kissed one final time, pledged their love. The cold took them both, there under the branches of the ancient apple tree, fingers entwined as the roots below. They were buried there, as they had wished for years to lie together.

And as the snow came down, and the years passed, the lovers were forgotten, and all that remained was the orchard after.

 

 

 

 

National Library Week

It’s National Library Week! In fact, today is National Library Workers Day.

That’s right, folks. It’s that time of year again. In celebration, I’m working 40 hours!

Well, I’m doing a few other things, too. It’s not just about being here for the community. As part of that, last week I attended my first ever library conference, PLA 2016. It was an absolutely incredible experience. PLA is held every other year, and by sheer luck, I was given permission to attend for the opening of the exhibits last Wednesday.

It’s a short drive to Denver. I got to the conference about an hour ahead of the exhibit hall opening, and wandered the convention center, marvelling at how weird it was to see the place devoid of cosplayers (since the last time I’d been there was Denver Comic Con in 2013). I watched the bustle of downtown Denver from a balcony, read some Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, and waited as patiently as possible for the doors to open.

When 3:30 finally arrived, I entered the exhibit hall and was blown away by the sheer number of vendors on site. Book distributors Baker & Taylor and Ingram; publishers Hachette, Penguin Random House, Scholastic, and Dorling Kindersley; library service providers Overdrive and Mango… I spent three hours wandering the rows, chatting with representatives of companies like Lulzbot. I got to meet people from libraries around the country. I snagged some ARCs from publishers (stay tuned for some reviews!), got a free mango smoothie from the folks at Mango Languages, and chatted with some library school representatives about my desire to pursue my masters degree. I got to demo some software, play a game of Super Mario Bros. using a system of fruits and circuits as a controller, and drive a BB-8 Sphero toy around. I saw floor models of furniture designed for library use and new construction toys for kids. But the best thing that I saw at the entire conference? People like me. Young people who are just as enthusiastic about libraries as any generation before. People who want to challenge the stereotypes of libraries and librarians alike. People who are eager to spread their knowledge of and passion for libraries around the country and the world.

The future of libraries is bright and varied, folks. Please continue to support yours.

“It’s still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding.”
― Neil Gaiman

The Dragon

This one’s for Chuck Wendig’s Terrible Minds Writing Challenge. Our instructions were to write a sci-fi story about a dragon, only not necessarily a mythical one. It’s a short piece, well under the 2,000 word limit, but it was something that came to mind immediately after reading the challenge prompt.

“The Dragon”

 

“Are we starting?”

“Yes ma’am. We’re recording right now. You can start wherever you like.”

“I was there that day. They said that there’d been nothing like it since the old calendar, since the bombings on Earth. I never saw footage of those, but I’ve heard statistics. It amaze me still to realize that we used to live in such numbers that the loss of a couple hundred would be considered relatively insignificant. That that could’ve been the better option. I don’t know what exactly this new weapon was. Just the name all of the news outlets on the colony gave it. The dragon.”

***

“Yes, she was the first one to call it that on the intrasystem media. I asked her about it afterward. She said it seemed like a good fit. Something so destructive that it couldn’t possibly be real. She was never the same after that day. Nightmares kept her from sleeping, and eventually she just… she couldn’t stop seeing them.”

***

“What do you remember most about that day?”

“The smell. I’ll never forget the smell. Melting metal, charred flesh. I can’t eat barbecue anymore. The masks could only filter out so much, and we didn’t have them for the first wave. And the heat. Even when we got the bunker gear, we couldn’t stay on site for too long. Dozens of folks were dropping just from the heat.”

“You were with the first responders?”

“We all were. There weren’t enough of us. We didn’t have adequate supplies, or enough people. How can you plan for a disaster on that sort of scale when there’s been nothing like it used for centuries?”

“Had you ever seen footage of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?”

“Once, when I was a kid. They told us that no one had ever done anything on that sort of a destructive scale since. People kept pointing to those two bombs as one of the worst things that humanity ever did to itself. I wish they’d been right, that we’d never come up with anything worse.”

“You said supplies were inadequate too. Would you like to elaborate?”

“Well, there was no way we’d ever have the rescue equipment or the medical supplies to treat burns of that intensity on that large of a site. No colony would. The governors would never allow the funding for recovery for a disaster that they couldn’t foresee, and half of them are too young to have learned about the bombings back on Earth. They’d dismiss them out of hand and say that we should be prepped for real emergencies. Loss of atmosphere, gravity failure. Things that you expect to happen on an orbiting colony. Not the heat, not a fire so sudden and massive that it burns through 85% of your oxygen supply in a matter of seconds. Not some lunatic trying to hurt or kill everyone. We were damn lucky we didn’t lose the whole colony.”

“But you kept trying, despite being understaffed and under-supplied?”

“We had to. 12 hour shifts and then some, to start. You know how critical the first hours are in a recovery effort. More people died, but we kept trying. We had to, damn it. We had to know that we were doing our best. It was the only way we could keep going.”

***

“I don’t think anyone could have predicted it. My understanding is that the work on the project was so compartmentalized that no one team could’ve put together a solid idea of the whole. Different groups of engineers and scientists working on components on different planets and colonies. No communications other than what was absolutely necessary would’ve been allowed. Tell one team they’re working on one project under one code name. Take their work and have an unaffiliated group start working on it from there under a different code name. Never let the right hand know what the left is doing, you know.”

“Hence why there couldn’t be a contingency in place.”

“Exactly. No one knew what The Dragon was capable of. Just that it was a dangerous weapon.”

“And someone set it off in the middle of a civilian population center.”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe the attack itself was premeditated?”

“We’re done here.”

***

“How many people died?”

“In the initial burst? Estimates say over half a million. The Dragon’s Breath, the mishmash of various ailments people caught in the aftermath is still killing people. Nearly double that.”

“Do you honestly believe it was an accident that the weapon was discharged on the colony?”

“I’d like to believe that, but the investigation is ongoing.”

“Thank you for your time.”

PLA 2016

I get to go to my first library conference!

The Public Library Association’s biennial conference is in Denver this year, and my boss acquired passes for some of our staff. While I’m only attending for a day, and only to see the exhibits, I couldn’t be more excited. There will be library people from all over the country coming in for this, and it’s going to be a great chance to do some networking and see what cool developments are in store. I’ll be tweeting from the conference tomorrow, under the #PLA2016 hashtag. If you’ll be there, come say hi.

P.S. Non-library friends in the area, I might be around after!

When the Sea Meets the Sky

“When the Sea Meets the Sky”

“I’ll find you again,” she whispered in
My ear before we parted. “I’ll find you
When the sea meets the sky.”

Years passed, and I searched high and
Low, travelling the world over, seeking
Where the sea meets the sky.

Never in that time did I ever meet any
Who loved me as she did, who made
My heart soar to meet the sky.

On the day I knew I was to die, I sat
Alone and waited, certain I would
Hear her voice under the grey sky.

And as the rain began to fall, she
Whispered once again. “My love,
Did you not see how sea meets sky?”