One Minute Stories - Part II

edit - 3/3/2006

My friend reads this piece and notes that it was John Cale who co-founded the Velvet Underground, not John Cage. However, I am heartened by the fact that they knew each other, and even collaborated for a time.

In conclusion...umm...yeah.

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So I'm doing these narcissistic searches for any online reference, however unlikely, to my blogs. And I discover that "One Minute Stories" is a concept that is being explored by John Cage, erstwhile founder of the Velvet Underground and all around avant artiste at his site, Indeterminacy.

While I've never been a Cage guy...in fact, the lines above pretty much sum up all I know about him, I'm still getting this huge feeling of "i'm not worthy of having the same ideas as John Cage." Which, of course, is nonsense. I'm perfectly capable of having good ideas. I just don't.

Anyway, he's a much more disciplined artist, and the ideas are fascinating. Here's what he's doing:

John Cage was an American composer, Zen buddhist, and mushroom eater. He was
also a writer: this site is about his paragraph-long stories -- anecdotes,
thoughts, and jokes. As a lecture, or as an accompaniment to a Merce Cunningham
dance, he would read them aloud, speaking quickly or slowly as the stories
required so that one story was read per minute.

This site archives 186 of those stories. Each story is spaced out, as if it were being read aloud, to fill a fixed area. If you like, you can also read them aloud at a rate of one a minute.

You can read a random story (reload or select the asterisk for another), pick one by number using the form on the main page, or choose one through one of the three indices. The index of names lists people and beings and the stories they are mentioned in, and the index of first lines lists the first line of each story alphabetically. The stories often end in punch lines; the index of
last lines (my favorite) lists these alphabetically.

The stories are taken from two of Cage’s books, Silence and A Year from Monday, and from the Folkways recording of him reading 90 of them aloud as David Tudor plays piano (among other things). The numbering is arbitrary, except that the first 90 stories are those on the Folkways recording in order. Several of them (numbers 104, 124, 138, 139, 140, and 163) were not specifically presented as stories by Cage; they were taken from various longer texts.

So there you have it. I'd never heard of this before, but I will say that my version is a bit less complicated. I'm writing short stories. It takes about a minute to read them. I think. I've never tried it. You should. It' s fun. I hope you'll visit One Minute Stories. Visit John Cage's site, too ... but don't compare, for the sake of my self esteem. Just don't.