James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Blog About Jobs I Could Have Had

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Created on Tuesday, 02 October 2012 06:56

Written by James Cahill

Blog About Jobs I Could Have Had

Among the blessings I can count, besides the simple one of reaching old age with only minor physical infirmities and enjoying a progeny--four children, six grandchildren--who are all healthy and well launched on their particular life-projects--is the blessing of having successfully avoided a whole series of “loftier” positions I could have had. This blog--motivated not by pride but by (I hope) self-awareness, as I’ll try to explain below--is about: What I Might Have Been. (What comes to mind when I write that? Marlon Brando in the backseat with his brother in “On the Waterfront”--“I coulda been a contenduh!” And Whittier’s famous couplet: “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, / The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’")  But I mean just the opposite: thinking back over all the wrong decisions I might have made, all the wrong (for me) positions I might have moved into, makes me feel more blessed that I resisted them all, stuck to my first resolve, became a U. C. Berkeley professor, and have now returned to Berkeley to live out my remaining years in the company of family, former students, and friends old and new.

Let me--and not in any spirit of self-importance, quite the reverse, as I’ll try to spell out later--let me list the lofty positions I could have occupied, and chose not to:

- When, in 1964 or so,  I was about to leave the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. to come to Berkeley and become a U.C. professor, the then-director of the Freer John Pope took me to lunch at the Cosmos Club, where people of political and other power came together (but where Harold Philip Stern, who became the Freer’s next director, could not go because he was Jewish)--Pope was trying to persuade me to stay on and assume the directorship of the Freer. I had the good sense to say no. (For more on this, see R&R no. 13 on this website, “Leaving Freer, Move to Berkeley.”)

- While at the Freer, I was invited to Chicago to give a lecture at the U. of Chicago where my teacher’s-teacher Ludwig Bachhofer was teaching, and Bachhofer drew me aside and asked whether I might want to succeed him in that job. I said no, I was happy at the Freer, had no intention of moving--which at that time was true.

-  I was also summoned to Chicago by the collector Avery Brundage, spent a weekend at his hotel, and was offered the job of curator of his collection--a job I quickly turned down, for a number of good reasons.

- Two directors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York tried to persuade me to take on the job of curator, or Head, of the Department of Asian Art: Francis Henry Taylor, toward the end of my fellowship year there (1952-3) and later Thomas Hoving, who not only spent a half-day or so with me at the Met showing me around and making his case, but also, later, stopped in San Francisco on his way back from Asia. for a dinner in Chinatown. He was powerfully persuasive, but I was not to be moved.

- Before I took the job at U.C. Berkeley, I spent a day at Stanford, looking at the job that Michael Sullivan took. I ended up not wanting to apply for it--whether they would have chosen me instead of him, of course I can’t say.

- John Rosenfield, my old and good friend, flew out to Berkeley from Harvard: to convey the big news: that they were ready to offer me a University Professorship if I would agree to succeed my teacher Max Loehr there. And the offer was renewed while I was there for a year, 1978-79, as Norton Lecturer--the top bigwig there (Provost? I don’t have a good memory for titles) spent a half-day with me explaining why this position represented the pinnacle of the academic world. And no doubt it does; but again, I turned it down, preferring to stay at U.C. Berkeley.

- I could have--should have, properly--become President of College Art Association; I had served on their Board of Trustees, then their Executive Board, and I was in line for the presidency. But I refused the appointment--partly because I was just then engaged in China in the complex and perilous process that led to Ts’ao Hsingyuan and me marrying, and her coming to the U.S. Twice-a-year (or more often) trips to New York as CAA president would have interfered with this. And for other reasons, I didn’t want the job. I had for years represented China, or Asia, or the Non-West, on quite a few big committees and organizations that drew me to New York and L.A. (the Getty) and elsewhere for meetings, and I had had about enough of that life.

- In Berkeley, I served for a year (1973-4) as Acting Director of the University Art Museum (now Berkeley Art Museum), appointed to the job by Chancellor Michael Heyman and Provost Roderick Park when they “removed” Peter Selz from the directorship. This year-long experience helped to convince me that I had no gift, or liking, for administration. And I managed to get through over thirty years of teaching at U.C. Berkeley without ever becoming any kind of dean or other administrator--a brief tenure as History of Art Dept. chair, a late and mostly ineffectual posting as Director of the Asian Studies Program, mostly run by a super-efficient Administrative Assistant. All the time observing and admiring my colleagues who were good at administration and seemed to enjoy doing it.

Am I putting down those who took or got the jobs I didn’t take? Not at all--mostly, the reverse: most of them did notably better in the job than I would have. Harrie Vanderstappen, himself a Bachhofer pupil, succeeded Bachhofer in Chicago and was an excellent teacher, from all reports. Wen Fong took on the Met’s Asian Art chairmanship and did far more with it than I would have--my tribute to him at his retirement celebration was genuine. Even Yvon d’Argence, about whom I usually have little good to say, was able to tolerate working for, and being with, Avery Brundage, as I couldn’t have. And, leaving aside Harold Philip Stern, later Freer Gallery directors (Tom Lawton, Milo Beach, the present Julian Raby) not only have been better administrators than I would have been, but have collectively managed to deal with Arthur M. Sackler Jr., as I couldn’t have. (I have just broken a pledge by writing that name, as I have resolved not to do. As recounted in R&R no. 59 on this website, “Two Collector-Donors Whom I Didn’t Like,” he had no real taste for art, but “re-bought” collections already in museums to get his name attached to them--C. D. Carter’s Chinese bronzes at the Princeton Art Museum, where they had borne the name of their collector, the Winthrop jades at the Harvard/Fogg. And there is the great gallery of Chinese sculpture at the Met, collected over many years by Alan Priest and others, now the “Sackler Gallery.” And of course the Freer collection--at least Arthur M. didn’t insist on the elimination of Freer’s name. (The people at the Freer Gallery of Art, during the days when I was there receiving the Freer Medal, respected my feelings by avoiding the mention of that other name for the whole time.)

It’s true enough that moving to Harvard proved a blessing for some--the Shakespeare specialist Stephen Greenblatt, for instance, whom I had come to know before his move. But Max Loehr, after he moved there from the University of Michigan, was never as happy; and some who made the move returned to U.C. Berkeley after a time. I once proposed that we form an organization like “Alcoholics Anonymous” for people who had been tempted by Harvard and resisted.

As for being a museum director or high-level department head: another reason I would not have enjoyed it is that I would have had to deal with rich potential donors, and I’ve never liked doing that. Let me say immediately that I have had the pleasure and honor of knowing several really generous and likeable rich people during my decades of moving about in the world of art; three who come immediately to mind are Mary Burke in New York, the late J.S. Lee in Hong Kong. and the still-active (thank the lord) Danny Goldstine here in Berkeley.

Why have I avoided all these positions, turned down all these prestigious posts? In the end, the right answer is: out of self-knowledge: I have always known myself to be a good indian, not a good chief (to use the old terms, now discredited); I could not have wielded that kind of power without changing in bad ways. (Yes, it’s true, at least for me: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”: Lord Acton, writing in 1862.) I would have lost a lot of whatever objectivity I’ve managd to preserve as a scholar. I would have been more frequently “in the public eye” (a phrase that I cannot write without recalling the old slogan of a popular drink made from grapefruit juice: “Squirt: In the Public Eye!”) I would have had to wear a tuxedo more often than I have--and I dislike dressing up.

And what were the attractions of U.C. Berkeley that somehow trumped all these? They aren’t easy to identify. Was I offered a chair? No--and I spent my academic career as virtually the only upper-level Chinese art specialist in the U.S. without one. (When I retired, two potential successors--who didn’t come--were reportedly promised chairs if they did.) No money for travel, except what I raised myself; no student fellowships to attract grad students--I likened myself to the Daoist fisherman who fished with no bait on his hook, so that he would attract only the fish that really wanted to be caught. (And I ended up having as my students at least my share of the present leaders of the field.) I was promised, when I came, a graduate seminar facility of the kind my colleagues and their students mostly have, where the books, in all languages, could be assembled and where we could meet for study and lectures. It was Walter Horn, then chair of the department, who promised that--what he meant, he explained afterwards, was that he would apply for foundation money for this. The promised seminar space was finally opened, in the new East Asian Library Building, some time after I retired. Before that we made do with an office-sized room adjacent to my office, the now-famous (and now otherwise occupied) 419A. I was promised also a Japanese art position to relieve me of teaching that along with Chinese, but it was some years before we got it. My appeals to the Graduate Dean, my attempts to try for a chair through Development Office and elsewhere, never even roused any serious responses--it was only when Svetlana Alpers, alarmed by Harvard’s offer to me, began to bring pressure on the higher-ups that moves were made to give me my graduate seminar room--which, during my last years of teaching, was nothing more than a basement room, first in Durant Hall where the Oriental/East Asian Languages Dept. was located, then across Campanile Way in the basement of that building where the Graduate Division had been.

And what compensated for these failings? Living in Berkeley, which is (as I now realize) my spiritual home; teaching at U.C.B., a campus that interacts with the surrounding community in lively and healthy ways, as Harvard and Stanford don’t; access to the great seashores and beaches in Marin County (Point Reyes) and elsewhere--trips to these, long walks and sometimes overnights there, were virtually a part of our graduate program in Chinese and Japanese art. And great colleagues to work with--I won’t name them all again--in Chinese studies (for myself and my students) and also in art history--I was part of a faculty not to be matched elsewhere--Alpers, Baxandall, T.J. Clark, Joanna Williams, others--all leaders in their fields. I have spent enough time in other centers over the years--Harvard, Chicago, Princeton--to be able to make informed comparisons. And I end up happy to be a U.C. B. emeritus professor living in Berkeley and counting his blessings, chief among them being: living here instead of somewhere else. And if all this betrays a reprehensible self-satisfaction, so be it: I plead guilty.

James Cahlll, September 23^rd, 2 012

Long XYZ Blog

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Created on Saturday, 22 September 2012 04:02

Written by James Cahill

Long XYZ Blog

XYZ has had a number of meanings. In my youth you could say quietly  to some male friend at a party “XYZ!” and it meant: Examine Your Zipper! That is, Your Fly is Open. Today’s long blog isn’t about that; it will be in three parts, under those three letters.

- The X is about pronouncing that letter when it occurs in Chinese names and words written in pinyin, the transcription system now used pretty much everywhere to write the sounds of Chinese words. I write this one as a service to my readers who are not Chinese readers, or readers of Chinese. We see a lot in the news lately about someone named Xi Jinping, who is expected to become China’s next leader, but who has been out of public sight for several weeks, except for a brief appearance. I don’t mean to offer an opinion on where he was, but only to call attention to the trouble that news-people on TV have with pronouncing his name--and the names of Bo Xilai, the deposed power in Zhongqing, and others. They have been properly taught and get those X’s almost right, but not quite. So let me outllne some background information about pronouncing pinyin, the transcription system used in today’s China, replacing the older Wade-Giles system that was in common use until around the late 1960s or so. I will use “py” and “WG” for these.

Xi in py (hsi in WG--hard to type on computers because the correction system assumes you mean his and changes it to that)--xi in pinyin is pronounced almost, but not exactly, like English “she.” How different? The initial consonant is more in the front of the mouth, the teeth and tongue, instead of the back of the mouth. When we say “she” and “show” we think the initial consonant is the same, but with most people they are slightly different--in “she” it’s more frontal, in “show” further back. Pinyin distinguishes the two slightly different sounds by spelling the frontal one with an x, as in xi and xu (WG hsi and hsü--that u or ü is pronounced like the French u) and the back one with sh, as in sha and shou (WG same). The Chinese linguists who devised pinyin distinguished, that is, two slightly different sounds that English doesn’t, since it uses the same initials for she and show.. That is, they reflected a phonetic difference that was not a phonemic difference--a difference in sound that doesn’t make a difference In meaning.  

How do I come to know about phonetics and phonemics? Because I took a course of that title given in the Oriental Languages Dept. at U. C. Berkeley back ca. 1949, given by a remarkable woman named Mary Haas. The chairman of the department, the great Peter Boodberg, had hired her as (he felt) a necessary addition to a department that was heavily philological--devoted, that is, to the reading of old texts. He told us the difference: “Linguists go out and capture an informant, philologists go out and capture a text.” Mary Haas, an energetic red-haired woman, specialized in Thai and in American Indian languages and dialects--she told us one Friday that she was going off for the weekend to talk with the only other living speaker of their common tongue. And she taught us about such matters as the joining of words and compound words--the difference between “weeknight” and “weak knight.” (I embarrassed her by suggesting another in a paper: “catch it” and “----“ (meaning cat shit--proper ladies were still embarrassed by such vulgarities in 1949.)

Boodberg also taught us about the origins and development of the Chinese writing system. It isn’t a “pictographic” system--the Chinese don’t (as Symbolist poets once imagined) write in pictures; nor is it, properly, an “ideographic” system--the characters don’t write ideas. They write words--so it’s properly to be called, as Boodberg taught us, a logographic system. Most graphs or “characters” consist of a semantic element, a “radical,” that indicates a general range of meaning (water, fire, person, tree, etc.) and a phonetic element that indicates how it is to be pronounced. Each graph stands for a monosyllabic word, which consists of a vowel or dipthong that can stand alone or be preceded or followed, or both, by a consonant--in standard or “Mandarin” Chinese the final consonant can only be n or ng; in Cantonese words can end in other consonants. Monosyllabic words are commonly combined into bi-syllabic, or even tri-syllabic, compound words. The Chinese do not have (as the Japanese and Koreans do) a properly phonetic script, so they have to use characters for their sounds, for instance in the name Meiguo for America--mei country--the mei isn’t there for its meaning (“beautiful” but for its sound: the second syllable of A-mei-rica.. (Adopted into Japanese, it becomes Beikoku, inescapably “beautiful country.”)

Back to x’s in pinyin: in the early to mid-1970s, when this system was introduced in what we then called Communist China, scholars of Chinese had the option of beginning to use it or sticking with Wade-Giles; and of course the more progressive (such as Fred Wakeman) adopted it immediately, while the more regressive (including myself) held out for some years. I was just beginning to write my series of books on later Chinese painting, and when I saw that the first important artist in my Yuan-dynasty book would be (WG) Ch’ien Hsûan, (py) Qian Xuan, I decided that pinyin was too much to impose on my readers and opted, conservatively, for Wade-Giles spellings. On our 1973 delegation trip to China we saw, as we drove through Shanghai, signs reading “PIXIE” and for a time wondered: are they selling pixies? But then we realized that it was the new spelling for what we knew as p’i-hsieh, or shoes. Much later I was to marry someone named Tsao Hsingyuan (WG) who explained that her father had preferred that spelling--part of what got him in bad trouble. And I pointed out (bad joke) that the py version, Cao Xingyuan, started out like a sign in the road reading “Cow Crossing.” (Xing used to appear on road signs meaning “Crossing”)

Now on to Y.

- The Y is about--nothing at all. Or about You, who were fooled--there isn’t any Y. Or if there is, it’s like the old Mickey Mouse Club song on radio--they would spell his name, and when they came to Y, it was: “Y? (Why?) Because we love you!” That isn’t my message--I don’t even know most of you--but it gets us on to:

-Z is for--you guessed it--old Mr. Zhang again, my old friend the artist-forger Zhang Daqian. He has appeared in quite a few of these blogs. So why do I bring him back again? To report and present new evidence that the painting titled “Riverbank,” a would-be antique painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is really one of Zhang Daqian’s many forgeries. You may ask: Why do we need more evidence? What you’ve presented before is overwhelming, decisive. (Thank you.) But, strange as it may seem, the True Believers in “Riverbank”’s antiquity refuse to acknowledge all this evidence, or to confront it in any way. So I can only, with the help of friends, go on piling up the evidence, with a sinking feeling of: surely there has to come a time when they feel the need to respond? But will I live to see it? Two new developments to report:

- A further insert will soon be added to Addendum 2B of the “Pure and Remote View’ series, the one titled “Riverbank: A Closer Look.” It will report, and show, the recent discovery of a “try-out” earlier version of “Riverbank” that has turned up. It’s owned by the prominent collector Gary Ho, and was brought to my attention by Dick Barnhart. Mr. Ho and the painting were both in Vancouver, and he generously brought it to my house so that I could see it and Rand Chatterjee could make lots of whole and detail photographs of it, photos we have used for the insert, along with an audio by me. It proves to be a smaller painting, ink on silk, similar in composition to “Riverbank” but simpler, and painted in the style that Zhang Daqian used for his “Dong Yuan” and “Juran” forgeries. And it exhibits the same manner of “aging” and artificial ripping, done by Zhang with the help of his “ager,” whom I believe to have been the Tokyo mounter Meguro Sanji--the same, that is, as the rest of his forgeries on silk, with the tell-tale “brickwork” pattern. The new insert will appear about forty minutes into Addendum 2B--you can fast-forward to reach it, without re-watching the whole--and will last for about seven minutes. Watch for this--I will try to notify you when this new insert is actually added to the online lectures.

- Another message, with pictures, from my correspondent (whom I know only through emails) John Rohrer--I reported his discoveries about how details in “Riverbank” match up exactly with similar details in old and published paintings signed and acknowledged by Zhang Daqian, in a blog dated to April 19^th this year and titled “More About Old Mr. Zhang and His Finest Production (Or One Of them).” Mr. Rohrer now writes a longer letter, telling me how he had bought and read the “Issues in Authenticity” volume (based on the Met’s 1999 symposium about “Riverbank”--see my Addendum 1B)) and at first couldn’t decide who was right, but later became convinced that I was right in seeing it as a Zhang Daqian forgery. He writes that he agrees with my (and Sherman Lee’s) arguments about the “wrong” treatment of the water, and adds:

“Second, I think I found Zhang Daqian's signature treatment of tree branches in Riverbank. Zhang Daqian trees are at times 'mind trees' that do not really exist, but instead bend and twist into abstract patterns that could not be found in nature. He tended to leave the unpainted media as the base for some of his trees. Examples are attached.

“To quote you: ‘open mind and open eyes’

Your student, John Rohrer”

And later he wrote that this has become, for him, “a project that I have been putting some thought and energy into. Since I found the signature pattern of twisted and downturned branches in Riverbank, i have been looking for other matching characteristics. I am trying to create a detailed study that matches up the placement of 'knots' in the trees, the bark patterns, and the way trees are 'planted to the ground'. The overall placement of branches and foliage is also starting to show distinct patterns.”

I will reproduce below the two new diagrammatic juxtapositions he sent me, in which he matches (and labels) images copied from old Zhang Daqian paintings with those in “Riverbank.” They are, needless to say, entirely convincing, and would convince anyone (as I’ve said many times) with open mind and eyes. But “Riverbank”’s True Believers will, I assume, continue to look the other way and pretend that Cahill, Rohrer, and other anathemized Doubters aren’t really there. So, if you have read this far, which are you? More than the dating of a painting depends on your answer--it’s a matter of--as I’ve been earnestly advised not to say but will anyway--a matter of intellectual honesty.

James Cahill, September 18^th, 2012

September Blog

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Created on Thursday, 06 September 2012 22:08

Written by James Cahill

September Blog

My previous blog, on comic strips, was dated August 30^th, which is when I typed out the original draft, although by the time I had reread and corrected it and sent it off to be posted it was into September. This one obviously has to be dated in September. And that, to an old person lying awake in bed thinking about what to write in his next blog, inevitably--at least for this old person--brings to mind: September Song.

And if naming that doesn’t call up anything in your mind, you are too young to know one of the great American songs, composed by a great German composer who became an American, Kurt Weill. It’s one of the songs in his musical “Knickerbocker Holiday,” The play, and the words of the song, are by Maxwell Anderson, and his libretto is best unremembered--he was an anti-FDR isolationist and conservative. But forget that, think only of the song. It was sung in the musical, and in the original recording, by Walter Huston--the famous actor whose son, the director John Huston, brought him back in his “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” to play the old prospector. (John himself appears in the film as an American tourist who is stopped on the street of a town in Africa more than once by Humphrey Bogart, who asks him for money.) Walter Huston starred in quite a few Hollywood movies of the 1930s--“Dodsworth” was one of them--most of them worth seeing. In “Knickerbocker Holiday,” which played on Broadway in l938 into ‘39, he is the aging Peter Stuyvesant who sings this haunting song to a younger woman he is courting: “Oh it’s a long long time/ From June to December/ But the days grow short/ When you reach September--/ When the autumn weather/ Turns the leaves to flame/ Then you haven’t got time/ For the waiting game--/ Then the days dwindle down/ To a precious few--/ September,/ November--/ And these few precious days/ I’d spend with you--/These precious days/ I’d spend with you.”  Walter Huston made the first recording of the song, and I remember, as a young person, disliking his old voice and wondering why they hadn’t got somebody better to sing it. Now, in a DVD reissue that collects original Kurt Weill recordings, it’s a treasure.

I used to be able to sing it myself, accompanying myself on the piano--the piano part is relatively easy to play--and I remember in those days in the 1980s when Hsingyuan and I were separated before our marriage, me in Berkeley and she in Beijing, recording it secretly and sending it to her on one of the small audiotape cartridges we used for messages. Perfect for someone of my age to send to someone so much younger whom he loved.

I was an early Kurt Weill enthusiast, even fanatic, long before the new production of his great Dreigroschenoper or “Threepenny Opera” in New York in 1953 brought him back to national attention. I had bought a 78 RPM recording, three 10” disks in an album issued by Bost, of six of his songs sung by his wife Lotte Lenya with Kurt Weill himself playing the piano. A dubbing from this, another treasure, is still available on the same DVD of old Kurt Weill recordings--buy it, listen to it over & over! “Soerabaya Johnny,” “Au fond de la Seine,” “J’Attends un Navire,” “Lost In the Stars”--all very poignant, moving, authentic. (The same DVD collection includes a Danny Kaye performance! in which he sings one of his scat songs.)

I was in New York on my Metropolitan Museum fellowship in 1953 when the “Threepenny Opera” opened at the Theatre de Lys in Greenwich Village in the new translation by Marc Blitzstein, with Lotte Lenya starring--I went to it over & over, and introduced it to all my friends at the Met. (I recall one of them, afterwards, beating on my door and saying “Play Mack the Knife for me!”--she couldn’t go another day without hearing it again.) I organized a Kurt Weill evening for those friends, playing the old Bost records and others I had collected.  And I wrote a long, fervent fan letter to Lotte Lenya, telling her about my passion for Weill’s music, asking where to find the sheet music for his songs, speculating (correctly, as it turned out) which song had been the first that inspired the whole Blitzstein translation. She wrote me a long, self-typed reply, several pages, which I treasured for years but can’t find now. (Maybe it’s in the Cahill Archive at the Freer.)

I owned a piano score for the “Threepenny Opera” and used to play and sing quite a lot of it. It’s based loosely on the old Gay/Pepusch “Beggar’s Opera,” which I also used to know more or less by heart, from another great recording. The Brecht/Weill work uses only one song from the “Beggar’s Opera,” with new, German words. The original-cast recording of their “Threepenny Opera” is only of excerpts, unfortunately, but is nonetheless another treasure. If my memory serves, the street-singer who sings the famous ballad about Mack the Knife (“Und der Haifisch/ Der hat Zâhne/ Und die trâgt ehr/ Ins Gesicht--“) was none other than the famous leftist singer Ernst Busch. (My daughter Sarah likes the Louis Armstrong recording, with Lotte Lenya helping; for me it’s all wrong, the outcome of an unfortunate coming-together--see the previous blog--of a great singer & great song for a mis-matched performance--he doesn’t really care about the lyrics.) Unhappily, the original Dreigroschenoper performance was not only never completely recorded, but was never made into a movie that was true to the original- -the Pabst movie based loosely on it, fine as it is in itself, is pretty much an independent creation (Pabst moves it to London and tacks on a new ending, with Queen Victoria arriving in a carriage!.)

Among my favorite songs in the Brecht/Weill original are Mack singing to Jenny about how love either lasts or doesn’t--“Die Liebe dauert, oder dauert nicht/ In dies oder jener Ort” (from memory, probably wrong,) and the great finale of the second act, a rousing leftist angry song calling on the mighty of the world to share their wealth--“Erst muss es möglich sein/ Auch arme Leute/ Von grossen Brotleib sich ihr Teil zu schneiden!” (First it must be possible for poor people to also cut their slices from the great loaf of bread. I’m sure that’s wrong, but it’s close enough.) I used the music for this finale in one of our Faculty Club Christmas Party musicals, the one in 1971, to address the budget-cutters whom Governor Ronald Reagan had sent to our campus. (I had to sing it myself--nobody else in that year’s cast knew the music well enough.) My first stanza--the whole is accessible on pp. 10-11 of the CYCTIE on this website--went:

You gentlemen who come to trim our budget

And show us how we should economize

It’s very clear, however much you fudge it

You’re here to hurt, and not just to advise.

You say that smaller classes have to disappear,

You say that we should auction off our books,

The fate you plan for us is like Procrustes’ bed—

You’ll trim the limbs until the patient’s dead.

A university can surely perish

When they attack who are supposed to cherish.

All this is, I hardly need to say, deeply applicable to the situation we are in now, and my first thought is: where is our Brecht-Weill team to write great songs attacking what Wall Street and the super-rich are doing to our society? And my second thought: Yes, but the Brecht-Weill side lost out, and Hitler came to power. Is that our future? Can we only write bitter songs and think bitter thoughts, and helplessly watch it all happening? And that’s my suitably bitter ending for today’s blog: September, November. . .

James Cahill, September 3^rd, 2012.