London Still: I'VE BEEN...

First Prologue

They brought a woman
from the street
And made her
sit in the stalls
By threats
By bribes
By flattery
Obliging her to share
a little of her life
with actors

But I don't understand art

Sit still, they said

But I don't want to see sad things

Sit still, they said

And she listened to everything
Understanding some things
But not others
Laughing rarely,
and always without knowing why
Sometimes suffering disgust
Sometimes thoroughly amazed
And in the light again, said

If that's art I think it is hard work
It was beyond me
So much beyond my actual life

But something troubled her
Something gnawed her peace
And she came a second time, armoured with friends

Sit still, she said

And again,
she listened to everything
This time
understanding different things
This time
untroubled that some things
Could not be understood
Laughing rarely
but now without shame
Sometimes suffering disgust
Sometimes thoroughly amazed
And in the light again said

This is art,
it is hard work
And one friend said,
too hard for me
And the other said,
if you will
I will come again
Because I found it hard
I felt honoured

-- Howard Barker,
from The Bite of the Night

Books

East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
The Museum at Purgatory (Nick Bantock)
Howards End (E.M. Forster)
The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
Ex Libris (Anne Fadiman)
Cosmicomics (Italo Calvino)
The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)
The Complete Works of T.S. Eliot
Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)
Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Caroll)
Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay (Michael Chabon)
Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban (J.K. Rowling)
The Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell)
The Heavenly City of the 18th Century Philosophers (Carl Becker)
The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino)
The Phantom Tollbooth (Norton Juster)
Jonathan Livingston Seagull (Richard Bach)
The Forgiveness Parade (Jeffrey McDaniel)
The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene)
Tolstoy Short Stories
The Griffin & Sabine Trilogies (Nick Bantock)
Elementals (A.S. Byatt)
The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems (Charles Simic)
Tipping the Velvet (Sarah Waters)
The Matisse Stories (A.S. Byatt)
Honey & Salt (Carl Sandburg)
Chicago Poems (Carl Sandburg)
The Chronicles of Narnia (C.S. Lewis)
The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger))
The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

Music