When Laurie Anderson spent two days with us at the Writers House in 2003, I interviewed her and moderated her discussion with others. This morning we release the segmented edition of the audio recording of that session, dividing the whole into topical parts. Here is the list of topical segments, and here is the link to our Anderson Writers House Fellows page, where you can also find links to video recordings of Laurie's performance and also of the discussion session (in RealVideo format).1. introduction by Al Filreis (3:19)
2. on the Nerve Bible and the body (4:06)
3. on the autobiographical nature of the Nerve Bible (1:57)
4. on time and responsibility (4:34)
5. on ending but not concluding performances (2:28)
6. on performing Statue of Liberty at the 2001 Town Hall performance (8:20)
7. on starting out as an artist and being in a commune (7:49)
8. on technology and media (8:57)
9. on Puppet Motel (2:52)
10. Anderson's favorite contemporary poets (6:37)
11. on the impossibility of technology being sensually subtle (6:27)
12. on Melville's bible and Songs and Stories from Moby Dick (8:33)
13. on whether or not people are getting better (3:51)


"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'"
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for
