I am way too slow witted to respond immediately to something as insightful and complex and true as Laurie Anderson’s new album, Homeland . I picked it up only yesterday. And I’ve listened to it only twice. But I have this to say: I’ve often wondered about how applicable to our lives and our collective worldview is the familiar (practical) assertion that the way for a corporation (or a political party or a human) to get on successfully is to get control over “the narrative.” In the minds of pundits, this isn’t a question of honesty or truth or of art or of writing or even of storytelling really. It's just a matter of being-in-the-mediated-world (or at least of controlling perceptions in that world). What gets me, is that this assertion is repeated constantly in a world where constructed narratives are so often otherwise dismissed for being untrue. In the liner notes to the remarkable set of narratives that is Homeland , Laurie Anderson has this to say: [Stories are] illusions. You c...
on the many-tentacled business of books