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Label: UbuWeb
From release notes:Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1988-89 as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, they were more like performances, as the audience heard them. Cage calls them "mesostics," a literary form generated by chance (in this case computerized I-Ching chance) operations. Using the computer as an oracle in conjunction with a large source text, he happens upon ideas, which produce more ideas. Chance, and not Cage, makes the choices and central decisions. Such a form is rooted, Cage tells us in his introduction, in the belief that "all answers answer all questions."
There are sound files of Cage reading a mesostic (IV), allowing the listener to experience it as it was delivered, and with a lively selection from the question-and-answer seminars that conveys the flavor of the event.