How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)
Edited by Richard Kraft, Joe Biel.
Composed over the course of 16 years, John Cage's Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) is one of his most prescient and personal works. A repository of observations, anecdotes, obsessions, jokes and koan like stories, the diary registers Cage's assessment of the times in which he lived as well as his often uncanny predictions about the world we live in now. With a great sense of play as well as purpose, Cage traverses vast territory, from postwar music to Watergate, from domestic minutiae to ideas on how to feed the world. Typing on an IBM Selectric, Cage 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 (published as a Great Bear pamphlet by Something Else Press)--color. The beautiful and unusual visual variances become almost musical as the physicality of the language on the page suggests the sonic. This first complete hardcover edition collects all eight parts Cage originally published in A Year from Monday, M and X. Coeditors Kraft and Biel have consulted these publications along with Cage's original manuscripts, and--with the Great Bear pamphlet as a guide--they have used chance operations to render the entire text in various combinations of red and blue as well as apply a set of 18 typefaces to the entire work. Composer, philosopher, writer and artist, John Cage (1912-92) is one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. A pioneer in extending the boundaries of music, often composing works through chance operations, Cage also had an extraordinary impact on dance, poetry, performance and visual art.
Featured image is a spread reproduced from John Cage: Diary.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Hyperallergic
Gilbert Alan
A work in which the visual dimension has become as multifaceted as the textual one, making Cage the posthumous collaborator on an artist' book
The New York Times
Holland Cotter
The Siglio edition preserves [Cage's] graphic effects, but more importantly it gives a sense of the company he kept... and of his passionate feelings 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.
The Paris Review Daily
Nicole Rudick
These fragments of opinions and problems, worries and joys are meant to be meditative, and working through them recalibrates the reader’s perspective.
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FORMAT: Hbk, 6 x 8.5 in. / 176 pgs / 145 duotone. LIST PRICE: U.S. $32.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $42.5 GBP £28.00 ISBN: 9781938221101 PUBLISHER: Siglio AVAILABLE: 10/27/2015 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
John Cage: Diary How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)
Published by Siglio. Edited by Richard Kraft, Joe Biel.
Composed over the course of 16 years, John Cage's Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) is one of his most prescient and personal works. A repository of observations, anecdotes, obsessions, jokes and koan like stories, the diary registers Cage's assessment of the times in which he lived as well as his often uncanny predictions about the world we live in now. With a great sense of play as well as purpose, Cage traverses vast territory, from postwar music to Watergate, from domestic minutiae to ideas on how to feed the world.
Typing on an IBM Selectric, Cage 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 (published as a Great Bear pamphlet by Something Else Press)--color. The beautiful and unusual visual variances become almost musical as the physicality of the language on the page suggests the sonic. This first complete hardcover edition collects all eight parts Cage originally published in A Year from Monday, M and X. Coeditors Kraft and Biel have consulted these publications along with Cage's original manuscripts, and--with the Great Bear pamphlet as a guide--they have used chance operations to render the entire text in various combinations of red and blue as well as apply a set of 18 typefaces to the entire work.
Composer, philosopher, writer and artist, John Cage (1912-92) is one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. A pioneer in extending the boundaries of music, often composing works through chance operations, Cage also had an extraordinary impact on dance, poetry, performance and visual art.
