Laurie Anderson, from Stories from the Nerve Bible


1. In "48. Stories from the Nerve Bible," text about "Bethlehem: rock-throwing capital of the world" is juxtaposed with a text that says that you can't be in your own dream when you are in someone else's. Why? What is Anderson identifying with dreams here? What is her point about "east," "west," "up" and other culturally defined terms? How might cultural stories make us unable to dream our own dreams?

2. In the text "War Is the Highest Form of Modern Art," Anderson has pictures from television coverage of the Gulf War next to a story about taking her performance equipment through security checks. How are these two things related? What is Anderson saying about war? About modern art?

3. In the poem from "49. This Storm," Anderson paraphrases Frankfurt School philosopher Walter Benjamin’s meditation, in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," on progress via a reading of Klee’s painting Angelus Novus. In her rendition, the storm called "Progress" is keeping the angel of history from going back to fix things (Benjamin writes, "The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed"). What does this suggest about the modern notion of progress? What does this text suggest history would be like if it was not hampered by the storm of progress?

4. In "12. Maps and Places," what might Anderson be saying about beauty? About how other cultures "read" or understand Western technologies?

5. In "15. Black Fire on White Fire," Anderson tells the story of trying to remember Canada by creating a smell, the smell of pine trees. She creates a forest of trees in her studio, but eventually the fire inspectors make her get rid of them. She is left with only the words, which she tries to distill, "reducing everything to slogans, mottos, simple tunes." One of these slogans is "What burns never returns." What might this slogan mean in relation to the story of building the pseudo-forest? How might it relate to the title of the piece, "Black Fire on White Fire"? What might Anderson be saying here about words?

6. In "24. Talkshow," Anderson writes that "we should get rid of the value judgments attached to these two numbers and recognize that to be a zero is no better, no worse, than to be number one. Because what we are actually looking at here are the building blocks of the Modern Computer Age." What is the connection between these two statements? How has the meaning of these two numbers been changed by "the Modern Computer Age"?