In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• • • Call Her Ishmael L aurie Anderson cheerfully concedes that Moby Dick was "not really asking to become a multimedia show." But she just couldn't help herself. She rediscovered the barnacled tome when a television producer invited her to create a monologue about a favorite book for a literacy project. (She hadn't read it since high school.) Though that project collapsed, Anderson reread the book six times. "I began to hear it as music," she says. She reveled in its "rambling, rolling sentences , the lapses into iambic pentameter, the lyrical poems all mixed with the thees and thous of another time." Woven into the narrative of Ahab's crazy quest, she saw a collection of little essays and tales about everything from polar bears to the origin of the universe. Still. An avant storyteller and electronics whiz looks at ... whaling? Songs and Stories from Moby Dick would appear to be a completely new direction for Anderson-her first piece with actors, her first with period costumes, and the first based on someone else's writing. Yet she's really only interested in the allegorical level of this fish story. "I fell in love with the idea that what you look for your whole life will eventually eat you alive." As the poet Charles Olson said of Moby Dick: ''It is America, all of her space, the malice, the root." Routinely, it's labeled The Great American Novel. So it's actually logical subject matter for Anderson, whose epic pieces (United States Parts I-IV, Empty Places) and one motion picture (Home ofthe Brave) were always about America. Of course, she's preoccupied less with landscape than with technoscape, that invisible country pulsing with waves and rays where disembodied voices drift from car radios and answering machines, where images travel through the air and materialize on televisions. That's the layer where identities and illusions are built-her subject. Call Her Ishmael 231 Anderson is also a storyteller interested in the limits of languageall kinds. Not just words but symbol systems and body language. In her landmark early '80S piece, United States, for example, she mused about the simple drawing of a nude man and woman that NASA had sent into deep space on the Pioneer, presumably to represent humanity to other life-forms. Anderson wondered what those life-forms might make of this image, which showed the man's right arm raised in greeting. Would they think his arm was permanently attached that way? "In our country, good-bye looks just like hello." In a way, Moby Dick is a tragedy about reading the symbols wrong. When Ahab informs his crew that their real goal is to find one particular fish in the sea, he argues that all visible objects "are but as pasteboard masks." And his particular White Whale means evil incarnate to him. The book is about assigning a single immutable meaning to a thing, then acting on it, acting tragically. But let me not veer into lit crit, where the whale can stick in one's craw. Anderson's Songs and Stories will be a Moby Dick reprocessed. She follows the basic story arc: The boat sinks. But much blubber, even meat, has been trimmed to boil the thing down to ninety minutes. She regrets deleting Queequeg, but now the piece is more focused. (Besides, she wanted to lose the intermission.) In fact, only 10 percent of the text is from the book. She'll take, for example, one Melville line like "were this world an endless plain" and build a song around it. "I'm walking a weird little line here, using bits of this thing and hoping that it will be in the spirit of him." She's introducing yet another new musical instrument , the talking stick, "a digital sampling machine, shaped like a harpoon ." Her secret goal is to sell copies of the novel. After the preview in Philadelphia, Anderson reports, "A woman came up to me and said, 'I'm Ann Melville.' She was the novelist's great-great-grandniece, and she said, 'Herman would have loved the show.'" As if. But the artist couldn't help feeling pleased. Sitting in her loft on Canal Street, she imagines Melville walking through the neighborhood. He worked at the Customs House, after all, and some of these Tribeca buildings were once courier buildings, the early ninteenth-century version of FedEx. "You can still see the courtyards where all the messages were traded and sorted...

Share