[silence] Cage and Oulipo 2

Tue Feb 20 03:58:45 EST 2007

The writing and thinking of Gertrude Stein was likely more important  
for John Cage than any other
literary phenomenon, except Thoreau.

Cage composes "Living Room Music" for percussion and speech quartet  
is in four movements: "To Begin", "Story", "Melody", and "End". No  
percussion instruments are used. Instead, Cage indicates that "any  
household objects or architectural elements may be used as  
instruments." Examples given are things such as magazines, a table,  
"largish books", the floor, a window frame. In the second movement  
the players perform a rhythmic reading of a text from Gertrude  
Stein's The World is Round: "Once upon a time the world was round and  
you could go on it around and around." The third movement is  
optional. In it, one player performs a melody on "any suitable  
instrument."
LISTEN : John Cage - Story from Living Room Music
http://www.arnoldmarinissen.com/Pages/Cage.html

"When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is  
as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and  
everything that you have written. After the audience begins,  
naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not  
everything is so important, something is more important than another  
thing ..." — Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), U.S. author and patron of  
the arts; relocated to France. "What Are Masterpieces and Why Are  
There So Few of Them," (1936)

"The avant-garde musician, John Cage, whose microtonalist pieces have  
been directly influenced by Stein, once said that he was trying to do  
with the piano keys what Stein had done with words, that is take all  
the keys off of the piano, shake them up in a sack and strew them  
across a landscape that we do not so much move through, as jump about  
on or step on in order to create sound (Four American Composers)." —  
Gertrude Stein, The Great Great Grand MF of Rap?: Four Saints in  
Three Acts and the Hip Hop/Rap/Spoken Word Aesthetic. By Jean E. Mills

"Before dinner I mentioned Gertrude Stein.
       Suzuki had never heard of her."
http://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/s.cgi?38

archive.org: Joan Retallack lecture, Geometries of attention, Cage's  
silence, July, 2002. - Retallack, Joan
Joan Retallack lecture discussing Gertrude Stein's influence on John  
Cage. The correlations between Stein and Cage are related to their  
style of writing and the avante-garde. Retallack discusses the  
necessity of coincidence, surprise, and crime in the world and in  
writing, and that real time cannot be mirrored in literature or  
performance. This form of writing is contrasted with conventional  
writing styles.
http://www.archive.org/details/ 
Joan_Retallack_lecture__Geometries_of_at_02P087

kind regards,
ralph li
http://www.lichtensteiger.de/diary.html

On Feb 20, 2007, at 3:06 AM, Rob Haskins wrote:

> I know nothing about the Oulipians, but I think it's worth noting  
> that in at least some of his chance-composed poems, Cage strove for  
> a kind of sense-making.  He suggests as much in his description of  
> renga in the preface for _Themes and Variations_--that the process  
> of writing renga created new and unexpected meanings.
>
> It's true that some of his works--I'm thinking of Part 4 of _Empty  
> Words_ and _Mureau_--are profoundly opaque (and maybe that's  
> putting it very charitably).  But there are moments in _Anarchy,_  
> _Themes and Variations,_ and _I-VI_ that make quite a bit of  
> (unconventional) sense.
>
> Rob
>
>
>
> Rob Haskins
> Assistant Professor of Music
> University of New Hampshire
> rob_haskins@yahoo.com
> http://robhaskins.net
>
>
> "Heroism doesn't consist in brilliantly combatting someone  
> else. . . .  What is heroic is to accept the situation in which you  
> find yourself."  -- John Cage
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Chris Piuma <piuma@flim.com>
> To: Marjorie Perloff <mperloff@earthlink.net>
> Cc: silence@list.mail.virginia.edu
> Sent: Monday, February 19, 2007 8:52:56 PM
> Subject: Re: [silence] Cage and Oulipo 2
>
> It's not "according to taste" that's at issue, though -- it would  
> be "to have it make sense". Hence the Oulipian shortened sonnet  
> technique (under "redundancy" in the Compendium) -- it's not just  
> the last word, or the last syllable, or the last n letters of each  
> line that you take -- it's as little as you can while still  
> retaining a syntactically "intelligible" or "normative" poem.
>
> Duchamp did spectacularly little for Oulipo except perhaps lend his  
> name and fame to the group; he's only recorded as attending one  
> meeting, never wrote anything Oulipian, and his entry in the Oulipo  
> Compendium suggests he was mostly in it for the puns. Plus he seems  
> to have joined any group or scene that would allow him...
>
> The mesostic rule -- when Cage was composing "freehand" in it,  
> writing "normative" poems/lectures/sentences with it -- and when he  
> was excluding the occurrence of a key letter between the previous  
> key letter and the following one (oof, that's a complicated rule to  
> describe; I hope you know what I mean) -- anyway, that is  
> absolutely an Oulipian form. "Mesostic" isn't keyed in the  
> Compendium, but it's mentioned under "acrostic" with this  
> parenthetical -- "John Cage published many mesostics dedicated to  
> friends and colleagues" -- which are the "freehand" ones I was just  
> describing, mostly, rather than, say, the Writings Through.
>
> The N+7 is one of a number of Oulipo rules that allow for a certain  
> measure of indeterminacy, but are still constructed so that their  
> results are still, in some way, "sensical". But that is the real  
> dividing line; one gets a sense from Oulipo that without the need  
> for ending up with something "sensical", all their acrobatics are  
> just calculations; which is the opposite of what Cage is doing.
>
> But I'm happy to see you working on this; the synthesis of the two  
> modes of thought is something I've been interested in for years.
>
> I don't recall that you were at the noulipo conference last year; I  
> seem to recall that this issue got lightly touched upon in a few of  
> the presentations. I seem to remember Christian Bök talking about  
> it, but I also remember him talking about something else, so... Hrm.
>
> Yrs,
>
> Chris.
>
> On 19 Feb 2007, at 5:26 pm, Marjorie Perloff wrote:
>
>> Thanks, everyone, for your prompt and good responses.  But I am  
>> not wholly convinced.  True, Oulipo descried chance but what, in  
>> practice, is the difference between, say, a mesostic rule (even if  
>> the vertical strings are generated by chance operations) and the  
>> Oulipo N+7 rule, which is not ‘unchancy” in that different  
>> dictionaries would give you a different seventh noun after the N.   
>> Besides, Cage admits again and again that he changed the chance  
>> products “according to taste.”
>>
>> The key link may be Duchamp,, who is connected to both camps.  I  
>> will try to check more fully.
>>
>> Marjorie Perloff
>>
>> --
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>
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