The APA library

On Tuesday I often leave the house a bit earlier than I need to for work, and go to the APA (Academy for Performing Arts) library. It is a small, florescent lit affair on the ground floor of the APA building, but it contains a concentration of books on – surprise surprise – the performing arts.

If you are not a current student of faculty member, you need to apply for a card to use their library. For non-graduates, a reading card per year costs ($1000) and the privilege to take books out cost an additional. Which means that in the coming year I am doing to drink down as many books as I can.

With only the reader card, each visit becomes a little like a pilgrimage. I go there, armed with fountain-pen and notebook, find the book I want, and spend an hour or two there drinking it down. It is actually a bit like taking a shower – I read through the book, taking notes, and writing questions down. Yesterday I was reading a book of interviews by Peter Brook, about how he came to do the Mahabharata. The interviewer was asking how he chose this Indian epic, and he talked about how, you know, you have many ideas and then eventually they filter down into the one seems infinitely more important than the rest. He talked about the responsibility for choosing a play, in that it involves a lot of people's time. In his case, the Mahabharata took ten years...

What purpose does this scholarship serve? I'm not sure, but it feels great to be reading these books. And I really want to take the time and care before launching into the next production. If there was a place that went slightly wonky with Berzerk!, it was that the premise of the whole production was ill-defined (um.. "city-life" .. how broad is that?)

Making the trip to the APA reminds me a bit of all those times in Paris where I would walk down to the Pompidou library. Sometimes you had to queue up to get in, and once you were in, again, you couldn't borrow any books. But I went there because it had a beautiful collection of English books, and I was hungry for English books. I copied down Ted Hughes' poems, I devoured Virginia Woolf and Michael Cunningham, and I was hungry.

There's something wonderfully clandestine about books that you can only touch in situ; books you can never own, not even for a day or a week, but can only touch and read and copy on the spot. It's wonderful to feel a hunger for books, and be able to quench this thirst. I can still remember those times in Poland where an English bookstore was a gold mine, never mind that they had only classics that I might not have read in another context. I was hungry, and when you are hungry, the loaf of bread tastes like manna from the gods.