Cry cry: this passage from an earlier Laurie Anderson bio made me very upset today. It's one thing to be an armchair feminist hemming about the lack of women in the canon. It's another to be an innovator who can feel themselves being marginalized in their own practice:
ANDERSON: I belong to a nerd computer network called Global Business Nework – we’re futurists, trying to design things for the future. We actually get paid for this, it’s a pretty strange deal. And we get books every month. I got this book, The Discovers, by Daniel Boorstein; I started reading it and, after two or three pages, I burst into tears. I never get this emotional.
HOWELL: What did he say?
ANDERSON: It’s about human achievement. It’s about all of the bridges and operas and symphonies and formulas and paintings and novels – all done by men. Okay, we have Georgia O’Keeffe and Madame Curie, and we have this tiny handful of others. Women’s groups will say we have a lot more than we’re ever given credit for, but when I went through the rest of the book just kind of looking to see if any woman was in there, there was only one in the index, out of thousands. I don’t even remember who it was. I have always though of myself as an inventive human being, but I’m not even part of human history. It was devastating to read this thing. I had heard about women having this kind of a reaction to things, but I had always thought, “Oh, come on, don’t be so sensitive.” (81)
