,

"It was a large room full of people

of all kinds

& they had all arrived at the same building

(at more or less the same time)

& they were all free &

they were all asking themselves the same question

:

What is behind that curtain?"

Laurie Anderson

[ Born, Never Asked ]

Big Science

via L.Cza

**

Anderson was interviewed in '99 in BOMB mag, regarding her project on Moby Dick

OR synesthetic translations of art in order to have words

/
"CR I’m curious about the lack of eyes.

LA Let’s say I walk into a new place that’s architecturally incredible. That’s not the first thing I notice. The first thing I notice is air pressure. Just the way my dog sticks her nose into a hole to explore: How big is it? And what is it? How it sounds, how it feels. Only then do my eyes roam, but they’re more directly wired to my brain; sound is wired to my heart. In Moby-Dick, you have a book that has very few descriptions of how things sound. Isn’t that strange for a novel? There’s nothing about how somebody’s voice sounded. But there are many discussions about people’s faces and how they looked against the sky. It’s so visual.

CR But the book itself has a sound.

LA The book is totally musical. The words themselves are the sounds and they have to be read aloud to be heard. All of that rollicking stuff. You know, a paragraph of 18 “s” words: “So one silent and suffusive evening, stars are strolling by.”

CR You said that you would start out your imaginary letter to Melville with an apology: “Who am I to raid your work to make mine?” But a lot of his sounds, and his literary sources, were raided from the Bible—and Shakespeare, Pope, Milton and Dante. Doesn’t your method echo his method?

LA I would change the word “sounds” to “voices,” because in many books it takes a while to learn the author’s voice. Who is this person writing? What’s their point of view? The biggest phony bait in the book is the first three words, “Call me Ishmael.” After that you don’t know who the narrator is because he’s hundreds of people: a historian, an accountant, a preacher, dreamer, observer, naturalist or scientist. You cannot find Melville’s voice in there because he’s just hundreds of different voices."

**

...back in the day when we saw Anderson perform Homeland at Spoleto '10. anybody?

the summer of the novice expert.