The gut anarchism of John Cage: the strange beauty of a composer's avant-garde diaries.

• Author: Kostelanetz, Richard
• Position: Diary: How to Improve the World - Book review

WHENEVER JOHN CAGE performed, he insisted that the auditorium have accessible exits: A spectator who didn't want to stay, he said, should be able to leave easily. Cage--most famous for his 1952 composition 4'23", in which musicians sit in perfect silence for four minutes and 33 seconds--was a gut anarchist. Asked about the word ecology, the composer replied that whenever he heard that seductive word he knew he'd soon hear the word planning, and "when I hear that word, I run in the other direction." He boasted that he never voted.

Born in Los Angeles, Cage came in the 1940s to New York, where he quickly became known as not just a composer but as a radical aesthetician who profoundly influenced many colleagues in several domains. Though his achievements as a composer and a theater artist remain well-known, he was also a brilliant and original writer, especially at the intersection of poetry and politics. Emphasis on original--both his forms and his sentiments were unfamiliar.

More than two decades after Cage's death, a small press called Siglio has published a definitive edition of his major long text. Starting in 1965, Cage developed a poetic form he tided a Diary and accurately described as "a mosaic of ideas, statements, words, and stories."

Among the constraints informing these writings were these: He would write less than 100 words each day, use no more than twelve different typefaces available at the time on an IBM Selectric typewriter (now antique), count no more than 45 characters in a single line, and change the typeface for each new statement. Earlier selections from Diary appeared as a pamphlet from the legendary Something Else Press in 1967 and in later perfectbound collections of Cage's essays published by Wesleyan University Press. This new handsomely produced hardback assembles all eight texts, the first seven written annually until 1972 and then an eighth, previously unpublished and perhaps incomplete, "continued" from 1973 to 1982.

Cage's informing theme is announced in the book's subtitle: How To Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse). Always is he predisposed to leave well enough alone; almost always are his sympathies libertarian. (The exception is a peculiar, unfortunate, and temporary admiration for Mao Zedong.) In addition to appreciating such '60s touchstones as Marshall McLuhan...