The Wacky Mode

I love John Cage's music. His writing,  not so much. Some of these read like unfunny jokes. Others seem like the punch lines have been omitted. They are aping towards a sort of Zen grace but lack the skill necessary to achieve it.  Then again I'm pretty picky and critical of what I read.I like the shorter ones.The best one is: 

Xenia told me once that when she was a child in Alaska, she and her friends had a club and there was only one rule: No silliness.

I am suspicious of people who use their experiences with psychoactive substances as subject matter for their art. I am annoyed by the stereotype of the tortured artist armed with drugs and despair. 

I hate the spacing of the words and lines. It's pretentious. What's worse is others have done it and done it better. Consider the poetry of E.E. Cummings. It does not add anything to the content. It does not give us any insight into the text. Were these not said/told by John Cage they would be indistinguishable from any other college beginning fiction writing workshop. I bet they would get a B. 

I'm all for wacky modes. I love the experimental. The best teacher on this campus is Padgett Powell, probably best known for his novel,  Edisto. Powell is a better storyteller than all of us and I like to think that maybe he taught me something about writing. Powell was a student of Donald Barthelme, one of my personal favorite authors. Barthelme himself is known for his extremely short stories and and other untraditional modes of storytelling. This lead me to a quote by Barthlme as relayed by Powell: 

“We have wacky mode,” Powell remembers Barthelme saying to his class, a writing workshop Powell was taking. “What must wacky mode do?” The students, clueless, stayed quiet. Barthelme said, “Break their hearts.”

That quote has stuck with me.This writing by John Cage failed to break my heart.