Laurie Anderson | Paul Holdengräber
June 16, 2016
LIVE from the New York Public Library
www.nypl.org/live
Celeste Bartos Forum
(applause)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s a dream come true to have you here. How long is it that I’ve asked you to come? A long, long time. (laughter) And each time it’s taken more time, but it’s so worth the wait and so I’d like to start with what’s next. Very often people who are in my position ask at the end, “So what are you going to be working on next?” In this particular case I’d like—because I know how excited you are to go to the cradle of civilization I think in some ways, to go off to Greece and to go off to Athens. I would like to ask you, Laurie. What are you going to be doing when you go off to Athens in a few days? They’ve invited you to be at a festival and maybe tell us something about the work you will be doing there.
LAURIE ANDERSON: Thanks, first of all, it’s really, really nice to be here, so thanks, Paul, for inviting me, (applause) and I was really—when you told me the date, I fell over because Bloomsday is just a really amazing day, (applause) just compacted like that, so we’re going to cover a lot of ground today. They asked me to go to Athens to be the director of a festival there and—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What’s the festival?
LAURIE ANDERSON: The festival is—they didn’t know what it was. (laughter) They said, “What do you think the festival should be?” So and this is really fun—I did that at another time this spring, I was the director of the Brighton Festival and also a bit of a—a kind of an almost puppet director, I didn’t really choose things, but it was a wonderful festival, and I got to do things that normally I wouldn’t do, so I got to try my stand-up act in the Brighton Festival, because since I was the director, you know, no one could say, “You know, I don’t think trying out a stand-up act is the best idea (laughter)—in the Brighton Dome, maybe try it out in a club first, something, you know.”
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Well, you should feel the same way here, you can do whatever you want.
LAURIE ANDERSON: Try it out here? Okay. So anyway they asked me to be a director of this festival in Athens, and I love being in Greece. I spent a time there a long time ago working on the opening ceremony with a lot of Greek artists and that was a really great experience for me.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: When was this?
LAURIE ANDERSON: That was three and four, so it was a couple of years like kind of commuting to Athens, and it was such a great experience because they were the smartest people I’ve ever met. They were just—we would sit around at these meetings talking about what should the open—they get an idea and they would all kind of look up there as if it was a chandelier up there, this idea, then they would kind of be able to look at it from this angle and angles I could never have imagined existed. So it was really, really exciting to be with them. They didn’t know at the time. They invited me, I think, because I was a kind of multimedia tech person. They didn’t know that I was a burned-out multimedia tech person.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And that multimedia really didn’t mean that much to you.
LAURIE ANDERSON: At that point, no.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No.
LAURIE ANDERSON: No, it didn’t. I really had a severe reaction. So every time they said, Let’s have like ancient kouroi come down from the heavens and collapse into star fields over the stadium. And I’m like, “Nah. I’ve seen that one before,” it was like, and I was so frustrated, because we’re kind of used to the fact that if you push a button something’s going to happen and it wasn’t so startling. Anyway they eventually said, “Well, what do you like?” I was like, I said, “Well, you know, you invented everything here in just a flash and just this gigantic burst of philosophy, poetry, history, physics, geometry, sculpture, you know, so why don’t you like take the whole field and just, you know, do something hard like write ‘Know thyself’ on it, something like that?” And they were like, “Nah.”
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s been done before.
LAURIE ANDERSON: It’s been done. But just one more thing about that was I was given a tutor, because I was the only American on this committee, and they wanted to kind of blend Greek history.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: A Greek tutor.
LAURIE ANDERSON: Yeah, a Greek tutor. And he was the head archeologist of the Parthenon. His job was to put it back together with kind of tweezers. There were all of these little tiny pieces from the explosion and he was trying to figure out how they went back together, and I guess it was sixteen-something when it exploded. So I hesitated for a long time before I asked him this question, because I had a question and I really wanted to ask, and I finally got up the nerve, because this guy, you know, looked exactly like Plato, so I thought, you know, he’s going to be able to come up with something to answer this. And the question was: “Why after all of this like huge surge of energy why aren’t we a thousand times smarter than we are? Why didn’t we build on this, what happened at that point?”
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I’d like to know.
LAURIE ANDERSON: Yeah. (laughter) He actually answered me with this theory and his theory was at this time during this surge people came to the Parthenon, his zone, to bring offerings to Athena, the goddess of war and wisdom and they brought these like statues that were just taking their first step, and they looked kind of very iconic, very Egyptian, but they left them there and then he said, “and then it started getting more competitive as time went on and people began to make statues that were more realistic and they were doing this and they had muscles and attitude and they were just all,” and he said, “until the whole Parthenon started looking like a big uncurated Biennale,” you know, just all of these.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Before their time.
LAURIE ANDERSON: Yeah. And then he said something that I will never forget, he said, they just couldn’t—they figured out that they couldn’t worship in an art museum and that just like whoa, kind of really rocked me because you know my religion in a way is art, I mean, this is what I believe in, you know, and it was like. He said they all went back to the groves and the caves and the places where the gods lived and they left this high point of civilization and went back there and I thought how could that happen, that the need to believe something supersedes the need to know something, you know, and then I thought, “Wait a second, I’m from America,” (laughter) think about that.
So anyway that was part of my experience there working with these Athenians and so I’m going to be working with some of the same people again because I kind of brought them into this festival called Metamorphosis, and so it’s going to be really interesting. We’re going to do a lot of improvisational music, that’s one of the things I’ve been working with a lot lately.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Have you—a parenthesis but an important one—have you gone here in New York to see the exhibit at the Onassis Foundation, Gods and Mortals?
LAURIE ANDERSON: No, have you?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I have.
LAURIE ANDERSON: Okay, tell us about it.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Go.
(laughter)
LAURIE ANDERSON: Okay.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s open for another week, and I know you’re leaving soon, but in order to prepare your trip properly, you must go. It’s on Fifty-third Street, and it’s really extraordinary.
LAURIE ANDERSON: This is such a great city, isn’t it? Look at all the stuff we have.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Athens. Here or there?
LAURIE ANDERSON: Here, here.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Here, in this city.
LAURIE ANDERSON: This city, this city. Fifty-third Street.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I don’t know what to do next. We just came from a visit to the Special Collections.
LAURIE ANDERSON: Thank you so much for that. We got to go behind the scenes here.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You know, we have a lot of stuff here.
LAURIE ANDERSON: You do, yeah.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I’m told something like 52 million items.
LAURIE ANDERSON: Really? What do you count as an item?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I don’t know exactly. (laughter) As I often say, “I’m not a librarian, nobody’s perfect.” So I don’t quite—I don’t quite know. But I know that one day I said 52 million books and a librarian corrected me and said, “No, items.” So I should go back and ask him what an item is. What is an item? That would be an interesting question.
LAURIE ANDERSON: Well, we saw one item, which was one page Herman Melville wrote, and that was amazing.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Describe it.
LAURIE ANDERSON: It was a piece of paper about this big in a piece of plastic and on it was lots of lists of Mr. and Mrs. Curtis—and so on. It had several cities, Albany, New York, where else, Lexington, maybe. It was a party list of people I think, it seemed like people that were going to be invited to a party and if you turn it upside down there’s a little bit of notes from—it’s text from “Bartleby the Scrivener,” so there’s Herman Melville saving paper, or whatever, you know, (laughter) to do his writing on the fly.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street,” I think was the subtitle and it is my—I think it’s my very favorite short story, or one of my very favorite short stories.
LAURIE ANDERSON: And the name of your dog.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And now I have a dog named Bartleby, who would prefer not to. (laughter) I remember teaching “Bartleby the Scrivener” a hundred years ago when I was a pretend scholar at a university and a student always said very interesting things about all books and that week we were reading “Bartleby the Scrivener” and I asked this student a question I should never have asked him. I said, “Michael, have you read Bartleby the Scrivener?” And he said, “Not personally.”
(laughter)
LAURIE ANDERSON: What a great answer.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I can’t resist since you brought up Bloomsday. Do you think it might be a good moment to begin afterwards—
LAURIE ANDERSON: Sure, I do want to say one thing about one other book we were talking about when we were looking at Bartleby. Cause all these collisions of books in the libraries are really crazy.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The sheer folly of contiguity, really.
LAURIE ANDERSON: We were thinking that this book, “Bartleby,” which was written in 1848, or wait, which was the Manifesto?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: We didn’t know.
LAURIE ANDERSON: There were two books written right in the middle of the last century, the nineteenth century, not the century before this one, about work, and one was The Communist Manifesto and one was “Bartleby the Scrivener.” And, you know, I really for me these are the two you know questions about why we work. I mean, I think before that point, nobody really asked, “Why do I work?” You work because you work, you have to work for your living and so on. So here’s Bartleby who is, “I prefer not to,” and the Communist Manifesto that is, you know, “workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.” And “a specter is haunting Europe.” I mean one of the greatest mystery stories ever written, you know, it’s such a beautiful book, but the polar opposite, and so when you see these books together in just all collected in a huge place like this, it really is mind-boggling.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: One of my favorite lines from The Communist Manifesto is “all that is solid melts into air.”
LAURIE ANDERSON: Yes, it’s very Zen.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And in “Bartleby,” just one of the most extraordinary I mean for me one of the most extraordinary features of “Bartleby” is there is no nature, there is not a tree. There is nothing that grows.
LAURIE ANDERSON: I hadn’t thought of that. That is really true.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I hadn’t thought I would say that, but here we are.
(laughter)
LAURIE ANDERSON: I mean, but what a contrast to Moby-Dick.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I know, really. Moby-Dick. You brought up Moby-Dick.
LAURIE ANDERSON: But the nature in that is a little bit stagy, somehow, I find.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So maybe before Moby—maybe before Ulysses we can a talk a little bit about Moby-Dick and your absolute interest and obsession with it.
LAURIE ANDERSON: And ill-fated opera, actually. Because I have to say one thing about that—I did write an opera based on Moby-Dick, and I just have one thing to say about that. If you fall in love with a book, don’t write a multimedia opera based on it. (laughter) Just a tip, you know, because you have to—you know, I mean I fell in love with that book in way that you know, it’s music. What a story, it’s like, and it works the way your mind works, made of jump cuts, you know, just zoom zoom zoom zoom, and I loved it so much and but if you’re writing something like that and you’re changing things around, you know, you have to be a little bit rough, you can’t—and my white gloves were on, I was really kind of afraid of it. Also, I live not so far from where Melville lived and worked, and I thought he was going to come and find me and kill me, you know. (laughter) “My book does not need to be a multimedia opera, thank you so much. It’s fine as a book,” you know.
I also asked Thomas Pynchon once if I could write an opera based on Gravity’s Rainbow.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And his response was fantastic.