"Over 16 years, beginning in 1965, John Cage compiled anecdotes,
observations and koanlike tales, originally typing everything on an IBM
Selectric and using chance methods to determine the formatting of texts
that twist down each page. The Siglio edition preserves the graphic
effects, but, more important, it gives a sense of the company he kept
during these years--Marcel Duchamp, R. Buckminster Fuller, D.T.
Suzuki--and of his passionate feeling about a world locked in a state of
perpetual warfare. Cage has a reputation for being a Zen-inspired wit.
He was also much more, an intensely engaged moral thinker." -Holland
Cotter, New York Times
Now available in an expanded paperback edition, Diary registers Cage's
assessment of the times in which he lived as well as his often uncanny
portents about the world we live in now. With a great sense of play as
well as purpose, Cage traverses vast territory, from the domestic
minutiae of everyday life to ideas about how to feed the world. He used
chance operations to determine not only the word count and the
application of various typefaces but also the number of letters per
line, the patterns of indentation, and--in the case of Part Three,
originally published by Something Else Press--color. The unusual visual
variances on the page become almost musical as language takes on a
physical and aural presence.
While Cage used chance operations to expand the possibilities of
creating and shaping his work beyond the limitations of individual
taste, Diary nonetheless accumulates into a complex reflection of
Cage's sensibilities as a thinker and citizen of the world, illuminating
his social and political awareness, as well as his idealism and sense of
humor: it becomes an oblique but indelible portrait of one the most
influential figures of the 20th-century American avant-garde.
Collecting all eight parts into a single volume, coeditors Joe Biel and
Richard Kraft also used chance operations to render the entire text in
various combinations of red and blue (used by Dick Higgins and Alison
Knowles for Part Three) as well as to apply a single set of 18 fonts to
the entire work. In the editors' note, Kraft and Biel elucidate the
procedure of chance operations and demonstrate its application, giving
readers a rare opportunity to see how the text is transformed.
This expanded paperback edition reproduces the 2015 hardback edition,
with a new essay by mycologist and Cage aficionado David Rose and, most
important, an addendum that includes many facsimile pages of Cage's
handwritten notebook of a ninth part in progress, bringing the reader
into compelling proximity to Cage's process and the raw material from
which Diary was made.
