James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

30.Missed Dylan Thomas

Corresponding with Julia White about whether the Maud Fife Room in Wheeler Hall was going to be big enough to hold all the people coming to our "Returning to the Shore" symposium on April 28, and asking whether we might switch for a bigger room if not, I recalled a situation from the past:

Wheeler Hall anecdote from Old Sensei: Sarah always asked me why I failed to hear Dylan Thomas when he did a famous late-life poetry reading at U.C.B. I didn't have an answer, until I read somewhere what had happened. The main Wheeler auditorium was booked that evening for one of the series of talks Peter Boodberg had arranged for Joseph Needham to give--this was 1949, several years? before Needham's Science and Civilzation in China series began coming out. Dylan Thomas's reading had been booked that evening for a smaller room upstairs. You can guess the rest: the smaller audience for Needham was moved upstairs to the smaller room so that Thomas could read to a huge crowd in the main auditorium. And so I missed hearing him.

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