💬 In Something Close to Music, some of John Ashbery’s music playlists are listed. So much of it is John Cage, of course, whom Ashbery thought deeply about and wrote adjacent to. Crediting him to O’Hara for bringing him out of a block and giving him a new way of seeing. He saw Cage as a kind of kindred spirit, someone who understood music the way Ashbery felt he understood poetry.
Ashbery worked on John Cage multimedia piece “Lecture on the Weather,” check it out → here & listen to the full piece here on soundcloud.
Quote:
The man who answered said: “You may think I’m not serious, but I am; if you’re interested in aspiration, go to the Children’s Library on 52nd Street. I did. I found that anthologies for children are written by adults: they are what adults think are good for children. The thickest one was edited by Commager (Documents of American History). It is a collection of legal judgments, presidential reports, congressional speeches. I began to realize that what is called balance between the branches of our government is not balance at all: all the branches of our government are occupied by lawyers. Of all professions the law is the least concerned with aspiration. It is concerned with precedent, not with discovery, with what was witnessed at one time in one place, and not with vision and intuition. When the law is corrupt, it is corrupt because it concentrates its energy on protecting the rich from the poor. Justice is out of the question
Some of my other Cage favorites: