From a Diary: I:xi

[This diary is an obvious and modest homage to Cage's Diary: How to Improve the World (You'll Only Make Matters Worse. Like that model, it is to be organized into an imagined month of thirty days, with the length of each daily entry determined by chance operations. Cage completed a decimal "year" of ten months over a period lasting from 1965 to 1982 of interrupted writing and these were published, serially in a number of his Wesleyan University Press volumes, beginning with A Year From Monday. I intend to complete a single month and then dismount from my high horse. As with Cage, chance operations — I use poker decks — here determine the length of each entry. (This entry was assigned a length of zero, so I have inserted this explanation between brackets, rendering it sort-of invisible.) Topics for each entry here are derived from reader suggestions, at least two of which are required to initiate an entry. The topics were suggested by others but I take full responsibility for the direction of discussion here. Cage used a variety of typefaces in his Diary, contributing to the greater fragmentation of his entries. Considering this text to be somewhat urgent, if quixotically so, I decided on a greater, but far from absolute, degree of continuity in both prose style and layout.]