Reading list: by Laurie Anderson

评语：Anderson has said that technology today is the campfire around which we tell our stories. She reconsiders this idea. "Of course, there's the attraction to light and to this kind of power, which is both warm and destructive. We're especially drawn to the power. Many of the images of technology are about making us more powerful, extending what we can do. Unfortunately, 95 percent of it is hype, because I think we're powerful without it." She thinks the information superhighway is being oversold, and brings out a book she's reading: Digital Woes: Why We Should Not Depend on Software, by Lauren Ruth Wiener. She ticks off the examples that trouble her: unmanned supertankers to carry oil to Japan, software bugs that overdose radiation therapy and kill cancer patients, even the car that will parallel park itself, thanks to sensors, and wedge you into the available space with an inch or two to spare. "But suppose you go to the movies," Anderson continues, "come back, find yourself between these two super-wonder cars, and you don't have the software - you're in big trouble. The information highway is being used mostly for tracking people down in terms of debt and credit, not for tapping into the Library of Congress, not really." Quote from: https://www.wired.com/1994/03/anderson/

评语：Laurie mentioned in her lecture, The Road: Spending the War Without You. Oct 6, 2021, at Mahindra Humanities Center Zoom room. “And in his book, a Prehistoric of the Cloud, the writer, Tung-Hui Hu, looks at the cloud’s military origins and ideologies, and its potential to exert control over people. Meanwhile, using the term cloud, a friendly, romantic, and fluffy word that invokes the natural world and clouds…”

评语：Foreword by Laurie Anderson.

评语：An extract is quoted in "Blue Lagoon" (United States I-IV and Mr Heartbreak): Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell Hark! Now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell. (Act I,Sc. II)

评语：Laurie mentioned in her lecture, The City: Spending the War Without You. Nov 10, at Mahindra Humanities Center Zoom room.

评语：Laurie mentioned in her lecture, The City: Spending the War Without You. Nov 10, at Mahindra Humanities Center Zoom room.

评语：Laurie mentioned in her lecture, The City: Spending the War Without You. Nov 10, at Mahindra Humanities Center Zoom room.

评语："It Was Up In The Mountains" (United States I-IV) paraphrases one of Kafka's short parables “Excursion into the Mountains”.

评语："Terrorists are the only true artists" quote on "The Cultural Ambassador" (Stories from the Nerve Bible / The Ugly One With The Jewels) is from novel Mao II.

评语：United States I-IV: ''The idea was to make a big portrait of the country,'' she said, ''and I divided it up sort of arbitrarily into four parts, transportation, politics, money and love. If there's any throughline, it's some question about America as Utopia and trying to understand how people really feel about living here. ''I've been using as a sourcebook 'The Machine in the Garden,' she explained, referring to Leo Marx's classic study of American culture, which discusses the dreams and impressions of people who came over in the 1600's and 1700's and thought this was Arcadia, the lovely garden setting they had been seeking. ''For me,'' she continued, ''that vision of Utopia is very bound up with technology. This is a country where the machine was supposed to free people from menial tasks, where we wouldn't have the sweatshops and steel mills that England had. I think we've found out how quickly you can mess up a country, how much a machine like just the car can change things utterly. ''It's not that I object to any of that stuff,'' Anderson said. ''Another theme of my work is how to live with technology and how to accept it -how to humanize it.

评语：The final line of "New Jersey Turnpike" (United States I-IV) is from the novel Invisible Cities.

评语：Quote on Gravity Angel (Home of the Brave / Mister Heartbreak).

评语：Laurie mentioned in her lecture, Rocks: Spending the War Without You. April 14, at Mahindra Humanities Center Zoom room.

评语：Laurie mentioned this book in her lecture The Forest: Spending the World Without You. Feb 10, 2021.

评语：Laurie mentioned it in her conversation with Brian Eno and Nitin Sawhney in Ways of Listening last night. She said “I never had this experience of hearing photographs before this... they’re very intense photographs.”

评语：Laurie Anderson and radio DJ and writer Stuart Maconie talk about favourite books with Harriett Gilbert. Laurie chooses Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson.

评语：LA mentioned it on SVA 2012 commencement exercises. “How to be an artist?”

评语：“Reminds me that disasters can be positive. Reminds me to accept whatever happens and to make it my friend. Grounded in disaster, it leads to the comfort and understanding that we — and only we — can bring to ourselves. Reminds me that we all have broken hearts.”

评语：The Tibetan Book of the Dead, 版本未知

评语：There are a number of utterly engaging reads on Anderson’s list, one classic being Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the artist said of that pick “I fell in love with this book. The words were songs, the flow embraced the way we actually think. Backtracking, looping, jumping.” LA在1999年的performance，Songs and Stories from Moby Dick 直接以本书为题演出

评语：It is a question of distance I think, the relationship of the individual to the group. And I’m thinking of a wonderful writer who wrote a book called Within the Context of no Context, he explained like this: there are two grids. There are many grids to hold culture together, the individual grid, the grid of mass media… And he talks about the middle distance falls away that means there are only two grids, the grid of the individual, and the grid of mass media. So the individual is always comparing himself or herself to the mass media, preventing the individual growth of that person in the way that they would like. Because there’re always kinds of going, how do I look up there? It’s maybe a particular American obsession. You could see it on its shows like American idol, everybody want to be a star. Bibliography: https://youtu.be/KE1Lux96RMM