James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Pure and Remote Notes

PRV Notes Intro

The official, or “proper,” place to find the written-out notes used in making my Pure and Remote View lectures is on the Institute for East Asian Studies website http://ieas.berkeley.edu/publications/aparv.html, where one finds printed in blue below each of the images for the lectures the words “Click here for notes to Lecture 1” etc. The notes that can be downloaded there have been carefully edited by Kate Chouta, Managing Editor of IEAS. Working with a Chinese-language-reading assistant, she has also turned all the Chinese names into proper pinyin spellings and added characters for the names of artists and some others. All this work I appreciate greatly, and I recommend that as a first place to go for my notes, or “handouts.”

I have decided to post here on my website, however, for whatever interest they may have for viewers of the lectures, copies of the original printouts of my pages of notes, including pages of additions and corrections, changes made after the lectures were first recorded in draft. These are completely unedited, sloppy in many ways, originally intended only for the use of myself and my collaborator Rand Chatterjee, As you will find if you compare these texts with the recorded lectures, they only approximate what I say--I have never worked from completely-written-out texts. And even when I follow roughly the written notes, I try to make my talking sound spontaneous, with momentary decisions and little jokes. My regular viewers know all that.

Anyway, here they are, for what they are worth. I’ve written large identifying titles in the upper right of the first page of each, using my own abbreviations. “Talking Head” means the introductory sections that appear at the beginning ir each with me on camera, introducing the lectures. “C & c” means comments and corrections, pages I would give Rand after looking through the original draft of each lecture, telling him what I thought needed to be changed. And I’ve used abbreviations for common terms--Kate Chouta has spelled all these out, I’ve left them as is. They include: LS = landscape, ptg = painting; I on p means ink on paper, I & c on s means ink and colors on silk. And there are lots of “discuss briefly” etc. notes to myself. Chinese names are given in both the old Wade-Giles spelling and the new pinyin, whichever came into my head. AddAudio is a term we use for when I need to record a new segment to insert into the draft of a lecture.

So, with all that to help the intrepid who decide to try to read these original notes, for whatever reason, here they are, in all their primordial messiness.

James Cahill, February 21, 2012

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