Eddie Kohler has, as one of his many online projects, Indeterminacy. From the About page:
John Cage was an American composer, Zen buddhist, and mushroom eater. He was also a writer: this site is about his paragraph-long stories—anecdotes, thoughts, and jokes. As a lecture, or as an accompaniment to a Merce Cunningham dance, he would read them aloud, speaking quickly or slowly as the stories required so that one story was read per minute.I got this from wood s lot, and I'm going to quote the same one quoted there, for what should be good and obvious reasons:This site archives 186 of those stories. Each story is spaced out, as if it were being read aloud, to fill a fixed area. If you like, you can also read them aloud at a rate of one a minute.
I never had a hat,
never
wore one,
but recently
was given a brown suede
duck-hunting hat.
The
moment I put it
on I realized
I was starved for a
hat.
I kept
it warm by putting
it on my head.
I made plans to
wear it especially
when I was going to
do any thinking.
Somewhere in
Virginia,
I lost my hat.
Cage, charming sweetie though he was, surely not very interesting as a poet?
The various re-arranged lines of "I have nothing to say and I am saying it, and that is poetry." has a certain whimsical appeal, but this hat piece?
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Posted by: mark at June 23, 2005 01:40 PMFromt the "About" page:
"A note on permissions: I haven’t tried to get permission for the inclusion of the various Cage texts on this site. This is due to lack of time, not lack of desire. I would feel much better with permission."
This excuse does not stand up in court very well. The estate of John Cage is rather zealous in enforcing its copyrights -- they are famous for bringing suit against against Mike Batt, a composer who put a one-minute silent track on a record of his, as infringement on Cage's 4'44", a work consisting of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. Right now this site is a major piece of plagiarism. Lack of time? Just Google and pick up the phone:
John Cage Trust
(212) 807-0646
463 West St
New York, NY 10014
Sorry, make that 4'33"
Posted by: martin at June 23, 2005 03:04 PMmark: Cage wasn't claiming it as poetry, and I'm not sure he arranged the pieces like that -- it's an attempt by somebody to indicate the pauses of varying length. To him, they were just "stories."
Posted by: language hat at June 23, 2005 03:27 PMAh I see, Steve.
In any case, I thought Cage was so lovable and sincere when I saw him on a television documentary in Britain in the 1980s that I find it hard not to give him quite a lot of licence.
Great name, of course. Would a composer have succeeded quite so well in his line of business with a name like Adrian Beshchinsky? The Noam Chomsky name-just-right-for-professional-reputation effect in part, perhaps?
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Posted by: mark at June 24, 2005 05:22 PM