{"title":"Books by John Cage","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781938221217","title":"John Cage: Diary","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e“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, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNow available in an expanded paperback edition, \u003ci\u003eDiary\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile Cage used chance operations to expand the possibilities of creating and shaping his work beyond the limitations of individual taste, \u003ci\u003eDiary\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCollecting 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis 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 \u003ci\u003eDiary\u003c\/i\u003e was made.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309806399861,"sku":"9781938221217","price":24.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781938221217_6f63cb29-c895-45bc-bf29-b17a2b1bd517.jpg?v=1786030598"},{"product_id":"9780714511351","title":"M","description":"\u003cbr\u003eBinding: Paperback \/ softback","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56368140288373,"sku":"9780714511351","price":15.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780714511351_567564e4-8911-4cac-b531-96f6d345b362.jpg?v=1786015270"},{"product_id":"love-icebox","title":"Love, Icebox","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCage’s passionate, distraught and affectionate letters to Cunningham provide a vivid portrait of the start of their life together\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e critics' pick | Best Art Books 2019\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese early letters from John Cage to Merce Cunningham will be revelatory, for while the two are widely known as a dynamic, collaborative duo, the story of how and when they came together has never been fully revealed. In the 39 letters of this collection, spanning 1942–46, Cage shows himself to be a man falling deeply in love. When they first met at the Cornish School in Seattle in the 1930s, Cage was 26 to Cunningham’s 19. Their relationship was purely that of teacher and student, and Cage was also very much married.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was in Chicago that their romantic relationship would begin. Cage was teaching at Moholy-Nagy’s School of Design when Cunningham passed through town as a dancer with the Martha Graham Company, appearing on stage on March 14, 1942. Cage’s letters, which begin in earnest a week later, are increasingly passionate, distraught, romantic and confused, and occasionally contain snippets of poetry and song. They are also more than love letters, as we see intimations that resonate with our experience of the later John Cage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eLove, Icebox\u003c\/i\u003e takes its shape from these letters—transcribed, chronologically ordered, and in some instances reproduced in facsimile. Laura Kuhn, Cage’s assistant from 1986 to 1992 and now longtime director of the John Cage Trust, adds a foreword, afterword and running commentary. Photographic illustrations of their final 18th Street loft in New York City, as well as personal and household objects left behind, remind us of the substance and rituals of their long-shared life.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57492293517685,"sku":"9781942884385","price":22.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781942884385.jpg?v=1786529127"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-john-cage.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}