M

Mainly mesostics inspired by music, mushrooms, Marcel Duchamp, Merce Cunningham, Marshall McCluhan, etc. and includes "Mureau"- - composed from the writings of Henry David Thoreau. "Ordinary people brood over their failings and try to correct them; talent puts its failings to work. John Cage is not a powerful logician or rigorous thinker in the linear sense, but that has not kept him from being widely regarded, at age 60, as the most disturbingly original musical mind (if not the best composer) that America has produced since Charles Ives..Cage's most characteristic compositions probably stand slight chance of outliving him by much. They are in essence conceptual: uncollectable and unpreservable, gaily but deliberately writ on water. Not so his books. In 'Silence,' 'A Year From Monday' and now 'M,' the latest installment in his diary series, we have the solid, seizable stuff of art, whether the antiartist likes that or not: Cage caught."-- Donal Henahan, The New York Times Book Review "A fascinating, maddening, charming miscellany . . . set in over 700 different typefaces, with illustrations and word-drawings adding an esoteric zest . . . It all seems abstruse, but attuned readers could enjoy Cage's high humor while soaking in his penetrating insights and anecdotes intended to 'unstructure' bourgeois society"-Publishers Weekly.