Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, talks with Lisa Pearson, publisher of Siglio Press, and artist Richard Kraft, one of two co-editors of the first complete edition of all eight parts of John Cage’s Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse), released by Siglio in 2015. This was an extraordinary idea turned into an extraordinary book: a completely new chance-determined edition of all 8 parts, one with not only changing fonts as we see parsed out across Cage books published by Wesleyan University Press but also changing colors, as we see in the Great Bear Pamphlet that featured Part III of Cage’s Diary, published by Something Else Press in 1967. Co-editors Richard Kraft and Joe Biel executed all of the necessary chance operations using Cage’s practices as a guide.

This book was nearly synchronous with The Selected Letters of John Cage (Wesleyan University Press, 2016), which Kuhn edited. As both volumes contain references to and reflections upon things both sublime and mundane, Cage’s correspondence when coupled with his complete Diary is really the closest thing we have to an “autobiography” by John Cage.

All Things Cage is a weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world. If you’d like to propose a guest or a topic for a future program, write directly to Laura at lkuhn@johncage.org. She’d love to hear from you.

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman once described his Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Knopf, 2012) as the hardest book he’d ever written. This was because, as he put it, pick up any rock and there’s John Cage! Indeed, Cage was not only a world-renowned composer, numbering among his compositions the still notoriously tacet 4’33”, but a ground-breaking poet, a philosopher, a chess master who studied with Marcel Duchamp, a macrobiotic chef, a devotee of Zen Buddhism, a prolific visual artist, and an avid and pioneering mycologist. He was also life partner to the celebrated American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, for nearly half a century, and thus well known in the world of modern dance.

No wonder, then, that nearly everyone who encounters the man or his life’s work has something interesting to say about John Cage!