Foreword
Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 1968 (Revised)
62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham
36 Mesostics Re and Not Re Marcel Duchamp
Mureau
Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 1969
Song
Six Mesostics (Present; On the windshield of a new Fiat for James K. and Carolyn Brown; In Memoriam S.W.; July 13, 1972; For A.C. on his 70th birthday; Ten years before sixty-seven)
Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continues 1970-71
Mushroom Book
25 Mesostics Re and Not Re Mark Tobey
Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse Continued 1971-72
JOHN CAGE was born in Los Angeles in 1912. At the age of 37 he received an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for having extended the boundaries of music. At 70, he was named the Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters and decorated by the French Minister of Culture. He lectures in America and abroad, continues to hunt wild mushrooms, and has a collection of more than 200 houseplants.
"Ordinary people brood over their failings and try to correct them; talent puts its failings to work. John Cage is not a powerful logician or rigorous thinker in the linear sense, but that has not kept him from being widely regarded, at age 60, as the most disturbingly original musical mind (if not the best composer) that America has produced since Charles Ives....Cage's most characteristic compositions probably stand slight chance of outliving him by much. They are in essence conceptual: uncollectable and unpreservable, gaily but deliberately writ on water. Not so his books. In 'Silence,' 'A Year From Monday' and now 'M,' the latest installment in his diary series, we have the solid, seizable stuff of art, whether the antiartist likes that or not: Cage caught."
~Donal Henahan, The New York Times Book Review
""Ordinary people brood over their failings and try to correct them; talent puts its failings to work. John Cage is not a powerful logician or rigorous thinker in the linear sense, but that has not kept him from being widely regarded, at age 60, as the most disturbingly original musical mind (if not the best composer) that America has produced since Charles Ives.Cage's most characteristic compositions probably stand slight chance of outliving him by much. They are in essence conceptual: uncollectable and unpreservable, gaily but deliberately writ on water. Not so his books. In 'Silence,' 'A Year From Monday' and now 'M,' the latest installment in his diary series, we have the solid, seizable stuff of art, whether the antiartist likes that or not: Cage caught.""
~Donal Henahan, The New York Times Book Review
""A fascinating, maddening, charming miscellany . . . set in over 700 different typefaces, with illustrations and word-drawings adding an esoteric zest . . . It all seems abstruse, but attuned readers could enjoy Cage's high humor while soaking in his penetrating insights and anecdotes intended to 'unstructure' bourgeois society.""
~Publishers Weekly