Comic Strip Blog

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Created on Saturday, 01 September 2012 21:17

Written by James Cahill

Comic Strip Blog

My previous blog, left up far too long--more than two weeks--was a serious one, looking back over my past career and assessing my present state. This one will be un-serious; it will begin with a note on a movie and go on to write about comic strips.

I introduce the movie by mentioning a planned video-lecture: it will be titled “Chance Comings-together” and will make the argument that major achievements in art  (including movies and ballet) can come about through happenstance, when people and circumstances fall into place as if directed by providence or auspicious forces to bring into being some highly successful work. I’ve collected images and information for several of these, including (older examples) Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Fitzgerald’s “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’ translation. And for more recent examples, Leonide Massine’s “Tricorne” (Three-cornered Hat) ballet  and Jean Renoir’s “Rules of the Game” movie. So, what if a similar conjunction of people and circumstances happens again--will they all fall into place once more to produce a major, successful work? Last night I watched with high anticipation a 1956 movie, shown for the first time on Turner Classic Movies, that raised that question. The English title was “Elena and Her Men”; the director was the same great Jean Renoir whose “Rules of the Game” is my favorite of all films. Cast included Ingrid Bergman, and as her co-star (along with Mel Ferrer and Juliette Greco) Jean Marais--he who played Orpheus in Jean Cocteau’s haunting movie of that name, and also (with fur all over) the Beast in Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast,” a film that all children should know by heart before they are teens (mine all did). So: with all these coming together, was another great movie produced? My own view: no, it was a disaster--I could hardly stay awake for the whole 95 minutes. Everything went wrong. The people and the circumstances just didn’t fall together into a successfuj work this time. But perhaps being unrepeatable is the very essence of my chance comings-together.

My main topic for today, however, inspired by my secret inner feeling (still present after decades) when I read the NYTimes every morning (“All very well, but where are the comic strips?) is: Why hasn’t any comic strip of the kind that one really anticipates reading at the start of every day, as we used to do, emerged in recent years? For decades I and my children and family would greet the morning paper, wherever we were--not the NYTimes but a local paper--to see some particular comic strip for that day. Most of you will remember them: the ones that somehow went beyond the daily little joke, that really engaged reader-viewers with the characters in them. Just for starters: in recent years, “Calvin and Hobbes,” before its creator stopped doing them; before that, “Peanuts” (Charlie Brown, Lucie, and the crew); before that, “Pogo”--and so on back. Why no successor, no comic strip with characters and situations that one really cares about, becomes emotionally involved with? (Yes, I know, there is “Doonesbury,” but that’s become more political than engaging, at least for me.) In Vancouver I used to buy the Vancouver Sun and other local papers, or read them at the supermarket, partly to read the comics pages. Anyway, let me go back over some of the comics that have been, in this way, seriously engaging for large audiences over the decades--the kind we used to talk about among ourselves (“Did you see what happened to Snoopy this morning?”)

I’ll begin--no, not with “Little Nemo”, I’m not that old--but with George Harriman’s great “Krazy Kat” series, which ran in daily papers from 1913 until the author’s death in 1944. About that, let me only say that I’ve bought pretty much all the “Krazy Kat” reprint collections as they came out, and gone through them with fascination and pleasure--they form a tall pile on one of my bookshelves. If there is a cartoon that rose to the level of high art, this is it. With one simple plot and three main characters, Harriman strung out a rich world of endless invention, crafting a hybrid language for them to speak (New York Jewish/Yiddish played a big part in it) and placing them in a quasi-surreal landscape that changed from frame to frame. (The same Harriman did the illustrations for the early publications of “Archy and Mehitabel,” but that appeared in daily column, not as a comic strip.)

Some I will name without commenting on in detail include “Bringing Up Father” (Maggie and Jiggs, a wife with high-society pretensions vs. a man who kept his low Irish taste for the likes of corned beef and cabbage); “Barney Google” (I can still sing several verses of the song if one pushes the right button); “Mutt and Jeff;” “The Katzenjammer Kids,” which took us back to German Expressionism, Struwelpeter, and Lionel Feininger; “Popeye,” with Olive Oyl, Wimpy the lover of hamburgers and Alice the Goon Girl; the extraordinary “Smokey Stover,” the ultimate surrealist strip--“Nov schmoz kapop” is still part of my inner vocabulary, although I haven’t used it much in actual conversation, and I can never visit a notary without wanting to tell him or her about “Notary Sojak.” “Gasoline Alley,” starring Skeezix and others in a family drama with characters who really aged with the years; “Blondie,” starring the ill-starred Dagwood and his endless troubles with his boss, his next-door neighbor, and people who came to his door. Popular adventure strips included “Prince Valiant,” for which I always admired the drawing (tradition of Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth) more than the story; and “Terry and the Pirates,” with an exciting serial-like story line that intersected with real events.

Then there was ” L’il Abner,” which ran from 1934 to 1977, and introduced political and social commentary to the comic strip. Everybody read it, knew about Sadie Hawkins Day when the girls pursued the boys, and about Mammy and Pappy Yokum (I still find myself repeating his line “It war mainly true” on relevant occasions.) All these have their websites of special admirers and collectors, as I find on Googling them. (I am leaving out the comic-book characters such as “Superman” and “Batman”--I wish I had kept the first Superman which I bought for ten cents at a store in Fort Bragg--I did keep, fortunately, a run of early “Mad” Magazines that my daughter Sarah still treasures.)

Then there was--and still is, in numerous reprints and picture- and song-books, of which my younger children have quite a few--the great “Pogo,” the possum who lived in the Okeefanokee Swamp in Florida along with Albert the Alligator and a rich cast of other characters. It ran from the 1940s until after Walt Kelly’s death in 1977. If there was a strip (other than “Krazy Kat”) that created its own language, this is it; and it created also an endlessly entertaining world of place and characters, rich comic-narrative invention. It carried on the tradition of injecting social and political commentary into the stories and characters, even including a bitterly mocking portrait of Senator Joseph McCarthy. We could all sing, around Christmas, “Deck us all with Boston Charley, Walla-walla Wash and Kalamazoo.”

Coming to more recent times, and strips that will be remembered by those much younger than myself: the great American (and foreign) favorite was of course “Peanuts,” about which I needn’t say much of anything. The trials of Charlie Brown and his friends Lucie, her brother Linus, and Schroder who played Beethoven on the piano, of Charlie’s dog Snoopy who imagined himself a World War One flying ace and led a scout troop of little birds, and all the rest--nothing more need be said. And then, bless the gods, there was “Calvin and Hobbes,” whose daily and Sunday adventures we followed until its creator decided to stop drawing them. My wife Hsingyuan and our twin sons still treasure the Complete Calvin and Hobbes that I bought them as a Christmas present.

So, then, to my question: Why has there been no such daily and Sunday strip in more recent times? OK, I can think of and name a few that readers may call to my attention, such as the long-running one about the Viking warrior and his dominating wife, or the endless soap-opera about Mary Worth--those don’t qualify, in my book. Have we (as I sadly believe) entered an age that doesn’t encourage or welcome the creation of these alternative comic worlds and the lovable characters who used to populate them? Just about the only continuing joke that raises an inner smile in me is the NYTimes editorial columnist’s one about Mitt Romney’s dog riding to Canada on the roof of his car. And that allows me to conclude this long blog by writing: It’s been only a few hours since I watched the owner of that car make his much-admired speech at the GOP convention in Florida, and I’m inspired to worry: have we lost our ability to see through such false posturing, lacking as we do the comic-strip characters such as Pogo and L’il Abner who would have exposed him for the fraud that he is--a cold fish who is misportrayed, with bottomless funding, as a caring individual?  If so, alas for my poor country! And with that, good night. (August 30^th 2012.)

Two Short of Rice Years: Some Birthday Thoughts

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Created on Saturday, 18 August 2012 06:36

Written by James Cahill

Two Short of Rice Years: Some Birthday Thoughts

What follows are thoughts that I jotted down while lying flat on a bed in the old Inverness house that my daughter Sarah and son-in-law John rent every summer. I tripped and fell on the wooden deck outside the house and sprained my foot--nothing serious, fortunately, just uncomfortable--I still can’t walk without limping--and spent several days lying down, reading, looking at things on the new IPad that Sarah gave me for my birthday, and scribbling these notes for a blog.

Back in Berkeley and at my computer, I find lots of Happy Birthday messages to respond to.  Also, more of the appreciative notes that come from readers of this website and watchers/listeners of my video-lectures. I appreciate these deeply, and try always to respond to them. They come from all over, including Japan, Taiwan, and China, snd from all kinds of people. EXCEPT (and now we arrive at the main subject of this blog): EXCEPT (a wide-open hole): except the Chinese art-history scholarly community, especially all those leading figures in it, but also their students. From them, near-total silence. I produce and post video-lectures intended (among other things) to supplement academic courses by providing visual resources far beyond what most scholars and programs have access to. Are they used that way? If so, nobody has told me about it. (I make an exception here of a few of my own former students, from whom I get gratifying messages, but who definitely make up a minority in our field.)

So, why have I become the object of this kind of virtual ostracizing, in my old age? Simply because I’ve lived for so long? That’s part of it. But mostly it’s for the same reason, I think, that I suffered it (although less) during my earlier years as a productive scholar and teacher: (Dick Barnhart once more or less admitted this in correspondence with me.) It’s been because of my persistent and annoying habit of presenting my colleagues with arguments, backed up with strong evidence of the kind that would seem to virtually push them  into agreement, for events and developments in Chinese painting history that they haven’t wanted to accept. How does someone who is put into that position escape from it? He doesn’t; he just looks the other way and pretends that the challenger isn’t there. Let me offer a few examples of papers and lectures of mine that have had this effect, giving references, where relevant, to where these papers appear on this website.

- CLP 64, “Life Patterns and Stylistic Directions: T’ang Yin and Wen Cheng-ming as Types,” a paper given at a Wen Zhengming symposium in Ann Arbor in 1976. Against the then-prevalent belief that Chinese artists of whatever time and situation were free to paint whatever they pleased, as individuals, I argued that certain types, as defined by their positions in society (and identifiable by the ways their biographies were written), seemed more or less constrained--by audience expectations, presumably--to paint within certain boundaries of style and subject. Tang Yin and Wen Zhengming could not have changed places and painted each other’s pictures. (Nor, as I point out in Ch. 1 of my recent Pictures For Use and Pleasure book, could Gu Jianlong and Wang Shimin.) I challenged my audience to find exceptions to the clear correlation I pointed out; none of them could, nor has anyone since then.

- The two landscapes in the Kôtôin in Kyoto, one with a scratched-out “signature” of Li Tang (discovered by Shimada, who published this finding with great excitement.) I argued from the beginning that they were stylistically wrong for Li Tang or his period, and had to be late Song works, post-Xia Gui. But I was almost alone: a whole large book could be compiled of all the attempts (Dick Edwards, Dick Barnhart, Japanese scholars, etc.) to justify the Li Tang authorship  by stretching out Li Tang’s period of activity, or assuming that he had (like Liang Kai) a “fine” and a “free” style--and so forth. Dick Barnhart finally retracted his long-held opinion and admitted that they had to be later, in a little-noticed footnote to an article he wrote. Some major scholars are still publishing the paintings as works by Li Tang.

- Recognizing how much late Ming and early Qing Chinese artists adopted (or appropriated, or whatever) from European pictures they saw, and how important these “borrowings” were for painting of their time and later. The first two chapters of my Compelling Image book presented the visual evidence for this argument; those who believe only in textual evidence (of which, in this case, there can’t be any) still remain skeptical. (Dick Barnhart, honest person that he is, wrote an article, for which I can’t  quickly cite a bibliographical reference, about Dong Qichang’s borrowings, crediting me with pointing this out earlier.) Chinese scholars tend to want their culture to have been insular--except, of course, for the coming of Buddhism from India. What they “borrowed” from Japan in the 19^th and early 20^th century makes up another unpleasant truth with which they are now confronted, recent studies having opened up this area of research in a big way.

- “Pictorial integrity” as a basis for distinguishing originals from copies. This argument is presented and illustrated in Addendum 2A to the PRV series. There I cite Sherman Lee’s use of it in a court case, and elaborate on how I myself have used it in for a number of controversial judgments. The basic idea is: The original artist will represent the thing, whatever it may be, in the “right” way, while a copyist is likely to get it wrong in some way. Go to my lecture for examples. This argument is not, to put it mildly, widely accepted in our field,  since it brands as copies quite a few paintings that some of  my colleagues want to accept as originals.

-  How our acceptance of literati painting dogma as a “central truth” about our subject has impoverished our studies. This argument is laid out as powerfully as I can make it in the opening pages of my recent Pictures for Use and Pleasure book, where wenrenhua theory is seen, not as a doctrine we should accept and propagate without question, but as “the self-serving rhetoric of a male elite minority” which has blocked our recognition of those huge areas of Chinese painting that lay outside their zone of approval,--paintings acquired and used and enjoyed by people on lower economic levels and non-literati, including women. This argument can scarcely be popular among those who have, as I point out, built whole teaching programs around imparting this “central truth.” My attempt at re-direction on this issue was already implicit in my Lyric Journey book of 1996, in which the practice of “poetic painting” was taken away from the literati,  who had always claimed it, and awarded to some of the Southern Song Academy masters who better deserve it.

- And, of course, my piling up of proofs that the would-be “early” painting called “Riverbank” is really a forgery by Zhang Daqian. Perhaps this has become my most heinous crime, for those True Believers who ignore the ever-growing, even overwhelming evidence. But readers of these blogs need no further introduction to that large and fascinating issue. We can only wait and hope that the World At Large wakes up some time and takes notice of these proofs: the resulting explosion should be at least as sensational as the van Meegeren-Vermeer affair of some decades back. How long will we have to wait?

- And behind all these, or most of them, lies the basic Visual/Verbal controversy: Anyone making good use of a visual approach (informedly, judiciously) should usually be able to come to right conclusions about the materials in front of them, and arrive at well-founded decisions on these issues. But few of us really do that. As early as my essay for the 1976 Levenson memorial volume  ("Style as Idea in Ming-Ch'ing Painting”) I was pointing out the inadequacies of, for instance, studies of the practice of fang or creative imitation by Dong Qichang and others that depended only on texts, Any effective demonstration of how fang really worked, why it is not at all incompatible with originality, needs to be illustrated with actual examples that the reader can see. (And if anyone besides myself has done that in all the years since then, I would be interested to learn about it.)

- Articles of mine that I think should have had some impact on our field, and were hailed as ground-breaking by their audiences when they were first presented as symposium papers but seem to have attracted little notice since then, include:

"Continuations of Ch'an Painting into Ming-Ch'ing and the Prevalence of Type-images." In: Archives of Asian Art L/1997-98, 17-41.  And:

“Some Thoughts on the History and Post-History of Chinese Painting.” In: Archives of Asian Art LV, 2005, 17-33.

This is partly my own fault: I should have made them accessible in illustrated texts on this website, and failed to do that. I’ll try to rectify that omission.

- As for my video-lectures: they have deliberately adopted an old-fashioned, virtually obsolete “narrative” mode of art history, as it  was defined by Gombrich and Kubler and others, and throughout have continued to use the above arguments--and others, such as my belief (which underlies Lecture 5) that some artists of the Five Dynasties created intricate spatial schemes that went beyond anything earlier and were not really followed up later, or (Lectures 12b-d) that there really is (as some have denied) an identifiable and important body of Chinese Chan/Zen Buddhist painting. An old movie (“The Loved One,” very funny, about Forest Lawn Cemetery in L.A.) was advertised as offering “something to offend everybody”; my lectures could be advertised the same way.

Why is all this so important to me, so that I risk alienating so many of my colleagues by taking these unpopular positions and arguing fervently for them? Partly (as others have recognized) because of my Irish pugnaciousness; but also, and more importantly, because I believe they are true, and believe that it’s better for our field to proceed on a basis of truths than on one of old myths and biases. I’ve sometimes quoted an inscription by Dong Qichang on one of his paintings--I believe it’s a leaf in the album in the Princeton Art Museum--in which he likens himself to the Buddha who wanted to lead all beings onto the True Path before entering nirvana. Dong was lamenting his failure to have done that for painting. I feel the same way, and continue to work toward rectifying this part-failure.

Perhaps art history is more open now than it has been in some past decades. Big Theory (which I write with a capital Thuh) seems to have subsided, and also the neo-Marxist approach advocated prominently by my colleague T. J. Clark, which had so many of our best students pronouncing that no issues interested them except those of  “race, class, and gender.” I admired Tim and liked him, while learning and accepting more from another departmental colleague, Michael Baxandall, taking as a model his judicious use of all kinds of evidence for the arguments he makes, with the visual strong among them. Recent reviews of exhibitions of European art, such as one on some great Dürer figure paintings, suggest an expanding tolerance of openly and unqualifiedly representational painting, after a long period in which we were assured that admiring these betrayed a low critical taste. Perhaps my video-lectures on the great Southern Song Academy masters will help to push our field further in that direction, and open it up again to a fair appreciation of truly great pictorial representation.

And that brings me, at last, to my conclusion. The Japanese (but not, to my knowledge, the Chinese) refer to one’s eighty-eighth birthday as the “rice longevity” year, beijû in Japanese. This is because the three characters for 88 (hachi-jû-hachi) can be compressed (with the first turned upside down) into something resembling the character for “rice.” Tomioka Tessai, when he reached this age, painted a great album that is treasured as his “Beijû Album.” I believe I can, with two more years of good enough health, finish and post enough more of my video-lectures to offer strong models and incentives for the visual approach, and otherwise try to open our field to more of the unpopular but true positions described above. If you agree with me that this would be a highly desirable outcome, wish me a two-year extension, a beijû or “rice longevity.” At least two years, that is--anything beyond that will be a real gift of the gods.

James Cahill, August 15^th, 2012

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Miscellany Blog

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Created on Monday, 06 August 2012 15:17

Written by James Cahill

Miscellany Blog

In a few hours I will be picked up by my daughter Sarah and go with her across to Bay to Marin County, and to Inverness, that idyllic place with easy access to great beaches and scenery, a vacation place for Berkeleyans and others who need to escape from cities, even one that has as many good, anti-big-city qualities as Berkeley has. I’ll stay there until the fourteenth, the day after my 86^th birthday, and then will be back in Berkeley. There will probably be no more blogs during that time, because I will be doing recreational reading, enjoying the pleasures of Inverness, Point Reyes, and the Point Reyes Peninsula (perhaps my favorite place on earth), taking it easy. This blog, then, will be only a miscellany to fill this space until I get back and can post another. So, here we go:

1. News item: Critics rate ten greatest movies of all time, putting “Vertigo” first, followed by “Citizen Kane,” Ozu’s “Tokyo Story” and Jean Renoir’s “Rules of the Game.” Then “Sunrise,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” John Wayne in “The Searchers,” one I don’t know, Dziga Vertov’s 1929 “Man With a Movie Camera,” and finally Carl Dreyer’s “Passion of Joan of Arc” and Fellini’s “8-1/2.”

This is the ranking of the British Film Institute’s critics, who have published such a list every ten years since 1952. From 1962 until this year, the top movie has always been “Citizen Kane.” I don’t argue against that; but putting “Vertigo” first is preposterous. It’s a good thriller (I watched it again recently when I happened on it on late-night movies) but nothing more than that, full of Hitchcockian tricks and unconvincing plot-turns. Putting it above “Rules of the Game” is like putting some Eric Ambler or Alan Furst novel above Proust or Zola. And they have left out a number of my favorites, which I won’t list here (see my “Movie Notes” under “Writings of JC”), any one of which would certainly top a John Wayne western. What, for instance, to name only one popular favorite, became of “Casablanca”? The real question: what has happened to the critics?

It may well be that world events have simply been too crushing for critics, or anyone else, to sustain a balanced perspective on anything at all. But then, having written that (and left my computer for a while), my upset subsiding, I return and continue:

2. The Olympics. On this big current topic I have nothing at all to write, only that I am enjoying reading about them and watching them on TV as much as everybody else. I was never myself seriously engaged in athletics--I was a big disappointment in this way for my father, who was a physical director and wanted me to be a great swimmer or some other kind of athlete. The only Olympics reference I can think of to send you to is: look back at my Responses and Reminiscences nos. 36 and 37, the ones on Avery Brundage, for remembrances of a man who was the Chairman of the Olympics Committee for a time, and had exactly the poisonous racist attitudes that have largely, I hope, been overcome--at least reading about the present Olympics in London encourages me to think so. Maybe there is something in this world that gets to be better instead of worse.

3.  Good news comes by email: From my young collaborators in China, Huang and his wife Liu Shanshan, I learn that the book we have co-authored, on representations of gardens in old Chinese paintings, is about to be published there. I can’t write Chinese on my computer, and can only say that the title, translated, would be something like: “Imperishable Groves and Streams: Garden Paintings of Old China.” It will be a picture-book, offering good colorplates of many Chinese paintings of gardens, beginning with the great “Zhi Garden” album by the late Ming artist Zhang Hong. But there will also be a substantial text--old writings of mine in translation, but more importantly, new writings by Xiao and Liu, based on their research and discoveries. I hope that the publisher, Sanlian Press in Beijing, will do an English-language version--my contact at Sanlian, Yang Le, has told me she will urge her superiors to consider that. Meanwhile, tell your Chinese friends (or yourself, if you read Chinese), to watch for this book. It will be a “first,” in that no book on this subject has (to my knowledge) been published before.

That’s it for today, off to pack for Inverness,

James Cahill