Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)

A repository of observations, anecdotes, proclivities, obsessions, jokes and koan-like stories, Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) registers John 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.

Cage 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 color. The unusual visual variances on the page become almost musical as language takes on a physical and aural presence. While chance operations expand the possibilities of creating and shaping work beyond the limitations of individual taste and perspective, Diary nonetheless accumulates into a complex reflection of Cage’s own particular 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.

Collecting all eight parts into a single volume, co-editors Biel and Kraft used chance operations to render the entire text in various combinations of the red and blue (used in the Great Bear pamphlet publication of Part Three) as well as to apply a single set of eighteen fonts to the entire work. This expanded paperback edition reproduces the 2015 hardcover edition. It also includes a new essay by mycologist and Cage aficionado David W. Rose and, most important, a significant addendum with over twenty facsimile pages of Cage’s handwritten notebook of a ninth part in progress. These previously unpublished pages bring the reader into compelling proximity to Cage’s process and the raw material from which it is made. In the editors’ note, Kraft and Biel succinctly elucidate the procedure of chance operations and demonstrate its application, giving readers a rare opportunity to see how the text is transformed.