Laurie Anderson’s six Norton Lectures, ‘Spending The War Without You: Virtual Backgrounds’ were shining gifts in the making of 2021. I now add this series “looking at the challenges we face as artists and citizens as we reinvent our culture with ambiguity and beauty” to a treasured collection over several decades of her recordings on vinyl – material backgrounds.

Recognised with the 2021 Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry at Harvard University, Anderson deserves every accolade for being named a Professor in Poetry in a much larger sense – as a multimedia visual artist, composer, poet-writer, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist, and instrumentalist. And, in her own words, more or less, a (portable) philosopher.

Grazie mille, Laurie Anderson.