review of
John Cage's Anarchy
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 25, 2016EV

I 1st heard of John Cage when I was 14 & my music class teacher in Junior High School told us about his "4'33"" aka 'The Silent Sonata' in 1967 or 1968. In retrospect, that was somewhat astounding of her. If she's still alive & if I had any idea what her name was or how to get in touch w/ her I'd thank her. I didn't want to be in the music class, I'd been given the 'choice' of art or music & I chose art but the school administrators just put me in the music class anyway. Why they bothered w/ the pretense of a 'choice' is beyond me. I resented this. I chose German as the language I was interested in & they put me in the French class. I resented that too. Nonetheless, Cage's "4'33"" caught my attn & it's one of the only things I remember about that class.

I don't know when I finally got to hear his music but it was probably when I got my 1st record by him in 1973: “Variations IV - Volume II” - John Cage, assisted by David Tudor. I was 19 or 20 then. Volumes I & II are somewhat infamous for the contextualizing intro. How many records come w/ an intro that 'explains' the music before you hear it? Imagine that at the beginning of a Madonna recording. “Variations IV" is still one of my favorite pieces of all time & I have no problem crediting it w/ being an influence on my own Usical direction.

By 1977 I was asked by an artist friend, Augusta Leigh MacDonald, to teach her about Cage's work & I gave her an 11 wk course on it for wch I wd've picked representative works of his that I thought exemplified innovative breakthrus: things like his 1st prepared piano piece, "Bacchanale", the absolutely incredible "Credo in Us", the aforementioned "Variations IV", his collaboration w/ Lejaren Hiller, "HPSCHD", "Cartridge Music", etc.. Cage was amazingly inventive & most of his inventions represented paradigm shifts. I was getting every Cage recording I cd lay my hands on. Fortunately for me, the work was still unpopular enuf for the recordings to be affordable - even usually ridiculously cheap.

However, by 1976 I was already becoming slightly less enthralled. It was then that I got the Cramps nova musicha no. 1 John Cage record that included his "62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham". Now Cramps was an incredible label, the nova musicha series was an extraordinary series. The performances were all fantastic. Demetrio Statos was the vocalist on the Mesostics & he was phenomenal. The record sleeve even had 2 sample Mesostics w/ considerably more imaginative typography than Anarchy does.. &.. yet.. I just wasn't that impressed.

For one thing, I was in the midst of writing my 1st bk, wch was finished by the summer of 1977, & this bk was definitely experimental at a significant level - I'm still inclined to think that it hasn't rc'vd a truly deep reading yet 39 yrs after it was published - so I wd've been more critical of Cage's writing innovation as not really that innovative.

To this day I think my high school yrbk self-description written when I was 16 in September of 1969 was probably more sophisticated than the Mesostics were: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/W1969.Yearbook.html . For another, I had started producing other work of substance such as my "Frame of Reference" (sculpture, 1975) & "d composition" (score, 1974) & my 1st film (1975). All of these things were 'extreme' in ways that I think people still find perplexing to this day.

In other words, Cage, a thinker/producer still of colossal importance to me to this day, was beginning to seem like someone who was slowing down w/ old age (he was 58 or 59 when the Mesostics were created) & I was just getting started. I started losing interest, I wasn't interested in his artwork in wch he traced rocks, I eventually found the later number pieces more or less boring. His "Roaratorio" (1979) excited me again but I didn't hear it until Scottish Neoist Pete Horobin made available a recording of it for me in 1988. By then, I'd already made my own roughly contemporaneous "Accumulation" (1980) wch I thought was of similar value so I didn't feel influenced anymore, just appreciative.

I'd read the Cage edited Notations & found it utterly wonderful & I'd read the Cage Great Bear pamphlet published by Dick Higgins called "Diary: How to Improve the World (You will Only make Matters Worse) continued Part Three" (1967) but to this day haven't read his major bks wch include: Silence, A Year from Monday, & Empty Words. I've had a deep respect for Wesleyan University Press for having the intelligence to publish these works. I even heard Cage read in 1979, 1982, &, possibly, 1989. AND I read a so-so biography about him.

It was w/ this abundance of familiarity w/ Cage's work & simultaneous lack of reading of his bks as a background that I was very happily surprised to find copies of a bk by him that I'd never heard of w/ a title referring to a subject central to my interests in the Strand bkstore in NYC in July, 2016: Anarchy!

The bk was written in January, 1988 - 4 & 1/2 yrs before Cage died shortly before his 80th birthday in 1992. However, this 1st Wesleyan edition that I have wasn't until 2001. Alas, while I'm delighted that the bk exists it seems degraded by its having been published posthumously. For one thing there's no attn pd to typography. The 2 Mesostics reproduced on the Cramps sleeve have a variety of fonts & font sizes that complicate reading & that were apparently arrived at using 'chance' operations b/c these differences serve no apparent purpose otherwise.

Contrarily, the only typographical 'oddity' in Anarchy is that the mesostics that constitute the unifying vertical text are all in UPPER CASE while the rest of the text, including the beginnings of proper nouns, are in lower case.

Cage's "Diary: How to Improve the World (You will Only make Matters Worse) continued Part Three" is printed in multiple colors - again apparently arrived at thru 'chance' methods insofar as the color doesn't delineate, eg, individual sentences or other obvious divisions of content. Anarchy is printed all in one color. In fact in every Cage publication I've seen prior to this one there's more visual imagination at work.

SO, Cage is dead, he's not there anymore to direct higher levels of complication & Anarchy gets released in a starker, more minimal, form than it might have if he had been alive to supervise. Maybe there were internal debates at Wesleyan about the pros & cons of releasing the bk in a form that might not've been Cage approved. I'm glad they chose to publish.

What I'm not glad about is that we live in an increasing age of illiteracy in wch spellcheck programs substitute for an ability to proofread. I'm not sure who to credit or blame for the preparation of the text for printing. Maybe the job got shunted off to a Wesleyan work-study student, maybe it was done by a lazy pseudo-intellectual professor. The design credit goes to Richard Hendel.

Whatever the case, consider these errors:

"The themes of Themes and Variations are the named of fifteen of the men who have been most important to me in my life and work." - p v

This is 'classic' spelling correction app at work: "named" where it shd've been "names". The original typing may've actually read as "named" but since "named" is a word it wd pass the spell check since the app wdn't be able to check for correct meaning. OR the correcting app might've corrected a typo something like "namex" to "named", again unable to check for appropriateness of meaning.

"to find a way of writing which through coming from ideas is not about them" - p vi

Another typical uncorrected or incorrectly corrected typo: "through" instead of "though".

"business through international banktuPtcy" - p 22

"banktuPtcy" instead of "bankruPtcy"

A spellcheck wd underline the word in red b/c of the alternate capitalization - thus making the proofreader assume that that's the only reason why its underlined & not noticing the "t" substituted for "r" - letters that, after all, look similar in lower case.

"the intellecUtalized expression of that force liberty which" - p 49

"intellecUtalized" instead of "intellectUalized" - see my note about the preceding typo

"of people ceaes to do thIs" - p 67

"ceaes" instead of, presumably, "ceases" - there's no excuse for this one: it's not another word that wd pass the spell check, it doesn't have deviant capitalization.

I have enormous respect for Wesleyan for various reasons, they certainly have a great music dept. But I also subject them to a scrutiny that such respect expects them to pass. 5 typos is hardly a big crime but I expect better from Wesleyan & even 5 typos indicate to me laziness & low standards. [But how many typos are there in this review, eh? - of course I'm not getting PAID]

OK, w/ that out of the way, let's move on to more important things: Cage took 30 quotes relevant to anarchy & made 20 mesostics out of them. He explains the process in a preface:

"The themes of Themes and Variations are the name[s] of fifteen of the men who have been most important to me in my life and work. Buckminster Fuller is one of them. From the beginning of my knowing him I had as he did confidence in his plan to make life on earth a success for everyone. His plan is to make an equation between human needs and world resources." - p v

'What?! What does this have to do with anarchy?!' the yellow journalism / tv 'news' victim might exclaim. They might continue: 'Where are the masks & the Molotov cocktails & the broken windows?!' However, if such a hypothetical person were even capable of producing a statement even that coherent they'd still be highly unlikely to read Cage's Anarchy - even an improbable cursory glance wd tell them that this is some-kind-of-weird-poetry-bk.

Cage gives some personal history & states that he's "grateful to Sydney Cowell who led me to Paul Avrich who led me to Paul Berman, author of Quotations from the Anarchists" (p vi) Sd bk being one of the sources for Cage's quotes. Now this resonated strongly w/ me. I remember reading somewhere that Cage didn't declare himself as an anarchist until he was 60 - yr 1972 or 1973. I realized I was an anarchist as soon as I ran across the idea in my reading when I was 16 - yr 1969 or 1970.

I don't recall anarchy being a widely disseminated concept at the time, SO it's interesting that Cage & I wd've read the same bk. I read Quotations from the Anarchists in May of 1976 when I was 22. It was published by Praeger in 1972 & might have been one of the very few somewhat widely distributed bks on the subject available at the time. One of the quotes Cage based a mesostic around not from the Berman bk is this:

"Anarchists or revolutionists can no more be made than musicians. All that can be done is to plant the seeds of thought. Whether something vital will develop depends largely on the fertility of human soil, though the quality of the intellectual seed must not be overlooked. (Emma Goldman, Preface, Anarchism and other Essays, 1910)." - p viii

Do I agree w/ this? Do YOU? One might say that robopaths & other conformists are made, by definition, by pressure from external sources while anarchists & other free thinkers continue to follow their natural course despite the pressures of society. Any anarchist seeds planted have to grow in fertile soil & will be thwarted by concrete unless there's at least a tiny crack. The pressures of society operate more like topiary gardeners - cutting every growing thing into a shape determined by someone else's vision of what they shd be, going completely against their natural tendencies. I enjoy the craft of topiary but NOT in the metaphorical sense described above.

I've never had any luck using many of the html tips provided by Goodreads. Things like indentation have never worked for me. SO, as w/ pretty much all poetry, I won't be able to accurately SPATIALLY quote "I" in Anarchy, the 1st of the mesostics, b/c I can't place each line of text in such a way so that the capitals line up to make the vertical text. STILL, you'll get the idea from the following:

"sPirit of
him for onE

corporaTions
arE
failuRe
Know-how of
aRe
idOls will

free rePublic
each thrOugh
Them in
maKe

I

to me

aNarchism" - p 1

The caps spell "PETER KROPOTKIN" a famous Russian anarchist. Note that between the "I" & the "N" there's "to me" w/o any caps. In the actual layout that's off the central shaft. It's not clear to me how that qualifies to be in the mesostic at all. Note also that there are spaces between lines that don't correspond to the name. Hence, there's a space between "PE" & "TER" but no space between "TER" & "KRO" making it "TERKRO" but then there's a space between "KRO" & "POTK" & another between that & "I" & another between that & the final "N".

In the preface or introduction or whatever Cage states that he's trying "to find a way of writing which th[r]ough coming from ideas is not about them; or is not about ideas but produces them." (p vi) He also says "My mesostic texts do not make ordinary sense. They make nonsense, which is taught as a serious subject by Yasunari Takahashi" (p vi) & "Instead of working, to quote McLuhan, we now brush information against information." (p vi)

What can I say? I like the results but I probably still attach more importance to what Emma Goldman had to say, eg. Reading this, as w/ reading any poetry that I like, was an interesting experience b/c of the way my mind adjusted to it. Sometimes I tried to read the VERTICAL texts, sometimes I didn't bother, sometimes I jumped between the 2. The reading experience was of a nature that I seek out insofar as it stimulated me to read w/ a fresh mind. On the other hand, I didn't really find it THAT great, I mean I find my own work more stimulating. The reader is directed to:

"text msg editorial" - http://sibila.com.br/english/tentatively-a-convenience/6535

"Po, Li, Ou" - https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/62010-po-li-ou

"diSTILLed Life / rfeEINr Ashairenm / reFINEr Anarchism / reINfer Arachnism" - https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/13193-distilled-life

"vii" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GohN-MtOMg

Cage is great, Cage is good, now I lay me down to sleep. Cage's anarchism is all too easy for non-anarchists & anti-anarchists to use as a distraction from having a clear-headed purpose of liberation from serious societal oppressions. I've seen a local leader of a hierarchically organized orchestra perform a program of Cage works & throw around the word "anarchy" but it's all just bullshit. Such leaders might like the music (or find that they can get funding to perform it) but their hierarchy of privilege is never going away w/ any help from them. In the long run, it's the experience of people like William Buwalda that's important, NOT Cage's poetry:

"In San Francisco, in 1908, Emma Goldman's lecture attracted a soldier of the United States Army, William Buwalda. For daring to attend an Anarchist meeting, the free Republic court-martialed Buwalda and imprisoned him for one year. Thanks to the regenerating power of the new philosophy, the government lost a solder, but the cause of liberty gained a man. (Hippolyte Havel, Biographic Sketch of Emma Goldman, 1910)." - p viii

& here's a somewhat fuller description of his story:

"On April 26th of 1908, Buwalda attended Goldman’s lecture at Walton’s Pavilion in San Francisco wearing his full Army uniform. After the lecture, he shook Goldman’s hand. Detectives who had witnessed the handshake followed Buwalda to his Army base and turned him into the Army authorities.

"Buwalda was court martialed" [..] "for breaking the 62nd Article of War, which states that a service member can be court martialed or other punishments for participating in “contemptuous or disrespectful words against the President, Vice President, the Congress of the U. S., the Secretary of War or the Governor or Legislature of any states.” Not only was he court martialed, but he was found guilty by a military court, dishonorably discharged and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, sentenced to five years at hard labor on Alcatraz!

"Buwalda’s commanding officer, General Funston, called Buwalda’s interaction with Goldman “a great military offence, infinitely worse than desertion, a serious crime, equal to treason.”About a month later, Buwalda’s sentence was commuted to three years hard labor because of his 15 years of exemplary military service. The court decided that Buwalda was under the spell of an “anarchist orator” and therefore wasn’t really in control of his actions.

"Goldman immediately started a campaign to free Buwalda, which was successful. Buwalda served only 10 months in prison before he was pardoned by President Theodore Roosevelt, who disliked the anarchist movement, and Goldman in particular. Buwalda was released on December 31st, 1908. In January of 1909, Emma Goldman announced that anarchists across the country had raised one thousand dollars for Buwalda to begin a new life after prison.

"That new life started rapidly when Buwalda became an anarchist orator! He spoke with Goldman in San Francisco soon after his release. The very next night, Goldman and Buwalda were arrested for disturbing the peace. In April, Buwalda sent a letter to the Secretary of War returning his medal that he had received for bravery while fighting in the Phillippines, saying that he had no use for it and that the Secretary should give it to someone who might appreciate it more." - https://www.tenement.org/blog/one-powerful-handshake/ ( )