Abstract

While it has been described as ‘a paean to a canine friend’ and ‘a meditation on love and loss’, Laurie Anderson's Heart of a Dog (2016) can also be understood as a network of ghost stories. Drawing on Anderson's idiosyncratic multimedia technique (foregrounding technology) and conceptualizing of the future, this chapter explores the ways in which the figures of 9/11, Lou Reed, David Foster Wallace, Gordon Matta-Clark, and the Bardo course through Heart of a Dog. Exploring the implications of the juxtaposition of these themes and Anderson's oeuvre, Williams positions the film in relation to a confluence of network theory and hauntology as a particular rendering of 21st-century subjectivity.

Keywords: network, sashaying, subjectivity, ghosts, the Bardo, voice

For much of the time I worked on my biography of David Foster Wallace I had no title. Then, in 2011, Alice Elman, the wife of the late writer Richard Elman, sent me copies of the letters David had written to Richard, with whom Wallace studied in the University of Arizona M.F.A. program. In a letter from 1986 I found the phrase ‘every love story is a ghost story.’ I was smitten; it smote me. When you write a biography, there are moments when you feel that your subject is thinking things just for you to find them out.