Anarchy [Bargain Price] [Hardcover]

John Cage (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2001

"That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have." This quote from Henry David Thoreau's Essay on Civil Disobedience is one of thirty quotations from which John Cage created Anarchy, a book-length lecture comprising twenty mesostic poems. Composed with the aid of a computer program to simulate the coin toss of the I Ching, Anarchy draws on the writings of many serious anarchists including Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, and Mario Malatesta, not so much making arguments for anarchism as "brushing information against information," giving the very words new combinations that de-familiarize and re-energize them. Now widely available of the first time, Anarchy marks the culmination of Cage's work as a poet, composer and as a thinker about contemporary society.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cage (1912-1992), the internationally renowned and highly influential avant-garde composer, first publicly introduced this collection of 20 "fifty percent mesostics" as a lecture on anarchy in New York City in 1988. Using a computer simulation of I Ching chance techniques, Cage culled 30 quotations from his favorite anarchists, poets and thinkers (Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, Walt Whitman, Buckminster Fuller, Leo Tolstoy) to use as source material for his mesostics, in which a central letter in each line contributes to the spelling out of a source-author's name or a key phrase or passage. (The caps in the quote below spell out a tiny portion of one passage.). The poems are not meant to be understood in terms of literal or linear surfaces, but in terms of sound and a random-by-design reorganization of information: "If nonsense is found intolerable, think of my work as music... We are doing everything we can to make new connections." The poems themselves do create space for rethinking what anarchy and, more immediately, sovereignty can mean in a fully globalized 21st century, despite their resistance of common sense: "neArest/ oNly/ fOr/ To/ perisH/ unitEd/ dominion of Religion/ songs of loyalTy/ yEt/ soiL/ siLence/ thiS mystery every/ hUman/ Simple you/ soldier of The/ wOrks/ repeateD/ tO." Cage's methods, intentions and good will are impeccably rendered on a platform that is at once fiercely inventive and deeply concerned for the collective human freedom within its own governance. (June)Forecast: Cage's Silence (1973) remains the seminal (and frequently assigned) collection of his essays, but his poetry is more frequently encountered in anthologies than in single-author collections, the giant I-VI notwithstanding. This more manageably sized book should fill a need in the classroom for a week's worth of Cage; it also brilliantly highlights the political commitments of his work as a whole.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Review

"The poems . . . create space for rethinking what anarchy and, more immediately, sovereignty can mean in a fully globalized 21st century . . . Cage's methods, intentions and good will are impeccably rendered on a platform that is at once fiercely inventive and deeply concerned for the collective human freedom within its own governance . . . [this book] brilliantly highlights the political commitments of his work as a whole." --Publishers Weekly --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 91 pages
• ISBN-10: 0819564664
• ASIN: B0009YARHS
• Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 6.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,304,476 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars An unnecessary enterprise, March 22, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Anarchy: New York City-January 1998 (Hardcover)

This book is, I regret to say, more or less an attempt by Wesleyan University Press to artificially expand their catalog of Cage's works. The observant among you will notice that this same text has already been printed once before, in Bucknell Press's _John Cage at 75_ Wesleyan has played an incredibly important role in promoting Cage's writing for forty years now, but unfortunately this addition was just plain unnecessary.

Also note that the text is littered with typographical errors that were not in the original. The layout and overall book design are beautiful however.

2 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars anarchic seems every bit more escapist, self-indulgent, January 23, 2002

By 

scarecrow "scarecrow" (Chicago, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Anarchy: New York City-January 1998 (Hardcover)

John Cage was never an activist,at least not one that had tangible results toward change. His work remains amongst/ within the safe,complaisant corridors of escapist realms. He encouraged throughout his life,gently, cadre's of creators, all brilliant,provocative, interesting, and thought provoking, with a utopian flair to change the world.But to change what? Yet there is a grotesquely large gulf between these realms, opaque boundless chasms of artistic creations, notebooks, concepetual art, performance art, all spawned from the Cage Zen inspired pacifist anarchy.Yet what has this work changed as fascinanting as it remains???
It has been well known that the great anarchist thinkers that Cage utilizes here as Mikail Bakunin, Petr Kroputkin, and Murray Bookhin in the 20th Century hardly proved to mount pathways worth pursuing.They indulged in corrupt opportunists politics as those they criticized, as Kroputkin's affair with double dealings.And Bakunin spent most of his life in the Czar prisons. When he was released this rendered him a humble repenting pacifist inwardly. All their work simply remains as Cage's as fascinating, interesting, arresting probes,improvisations into history the 19th and 20 Centuries as a conceptual canvas, with an unreality for the utopian mind.
But the world still needs reform and correction,and change,there still is poverty, and malnutrition, and genocide, and corruption, and now more than ever with the turn within world politics after September 11 to Rightward magnetic attractions,with the reoccuring collapse of national currencies,(as Argentina, Brazil, South Korea)tied as a tyranny tied to the American Dollar$$ add to that the new face of corporate corruptions, as Enron which are coming more to the surface for the populace in the face of ever more speculative global capital greed within the financial world. In this light the plight and pursuit of anarchy seems infantile, accelerated to even more escapist self-indulgent, realms as Cage encourages.

There are some facinating moments in Cage's "Anarchy" here the very process of "reading" "interpreting" his mesostics, is a sense of the humanly performative, something we haven't lost the capacity for. Yet this is a self-absorbed endeavor, self-referential and need I say deeply masterbatory, hardly emancipatory in content.
We've lived admirably attentively through the revolution of the aesthetic,the conceptual, the Duchamp universe wrought with the carnage of the First World War,the Surrealists and made more transgressive,andirrational with the Second.

The Cage conceptual creative edifice was never one to gaze outward at this negative,odious impalletable world, Cage's creative magnetic fields were always one of a distant opaque, unexplainable future, made ever more distant and unreachable with each new work, further setting the light at the end of the tunnel ever further out of reach of humanity.