James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Warning Blog

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Created on Thursday, 05 January 2012 18:12

Written by James Cahill

Warning Blog: Some hacker-crook has again been using my name and email address to send out a fake message to lots of my correspondents pretending to be me in a foreign country and in need of money, asking them to send some. I hope nobody is fooled by this--it's in bad English, and I don't travel far these days, barely to Berkeley.

(The real) James Cahill

More About Berkeley

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Created on Friday, 30 December 2011 22:08

Written by James Cahill

More About Berkeley

A previous blog, titled “Berkeley As America’s Cultural Capital,” aroused enough interest to inspire me to continue writing about Berkeley. So this is a miscellany of thoughts of an old and confirmed Berkeley person. I gave up a lot of other things--curatorships and directorships, a University Professorship at Harvard--to stay at Berkeley for most of my life, and have never regretted it. Even while my present project, the video-lectures, keeps me in Vancouver most of the time, I mean to retire to Berkeley before too long and live out my remaining days there.

I still have a house in the north Berkeley flatlands, located within easy walk (back when I was an easy walker) of the small neighborhood that includes the most famous restaurant in the U.S., Chez Panisse--I frequent, not the restaurant itself, but the Café upstairs --as well as Peet’s Coffee (which underlies and inspired, I am told, the Starbucks chain), the Cheese Board, which not only sells great cheeses and pastries but makes, every day, pizzas that people stand in long lines to buy; and lots of others. Alice Waters, when she named her restaurant, needed to be confident, as she could in Berkeley, that enough people would know who Panisse was for that name to catch on; she later opened a Café Fanny and another (something Marius?). And if this is cultural snobbery, why not.

I have long meant to write an essay on “Berkeley grunge”--a special kind of cultivated messiness and disorder in which Berkeley people take pride. I remember reading newspaper columnists in San Francisco fulminating against this idea that Berkeley grunge somehow trumps their kind of elegance. I assume, and hope, that they still do.

And then there are the Berkeley barricades. Years ago, commuters from outside Berkeley would find ways to speed through our residential streets, avoiding the proper thoroughfares with their stoplights and traffic but endangering the locals and their children on these should-be-quiet streets. So Berkeley set up, at a few strategically-located entrances to these streets, the infamous Berkeley barricades: iron-and-concrete posts set in bases, movable if fire-trucks need to get through but not otherwise, with chains extending to the sides blocking passage. The immediate responses from the outside motorists I remember very well--the newspapers were full of them for a while: they were going to bring dynamite and blow them up; they would bring tractors or bulldozers and pull/push them up or down; they would get a law passed in Sacramento forbidding any community to set up such abominations. All in vain: the barricades are there today, motorists are forced to keep mostly to the thorofares. and the residential streets are safe for children, good to live on.

Best of all, for me, is the way the University of California and the surrounding community interact and interpenetrate. One of the reasons I didn’t even consider a Stanford professorship, after spending a day there considering it (before Michael Sullivan was hired), was the insular character of its campus: not much interaction between the university and the city around it. (So it was in Michael’s time, at least, as he told me.) In Berkeley, by contrast--well, I really needn’t continue. Just imagine coming out of Sather Gate, making your way to Telegraph Avenue across Sproul Plaza--where, in my years of teaching, various performers and political groups would be out doing their things every day--I remember, for one, the East Bay Sharks, a Brechtian street-theater commune that performed regularly just outside the Gate.

And don’t get me started on restaurants. The city I live in now, Vancouver, is another that is outstanding for these, and San Francisco has its share; but the pleasures of eating in Berkeley, if you know where to go, are special.

Another theme on which I could write at length, although not with authority, is Berkeley architecture--the comfortably neo-romantic houses of our best architect, Bernard Maybeck, with their large living rooms with walk-in fireplaces (the Great Hall in the Faculty Club, where I performed many times with colleagues, is his work), and his pupil Julia Morgan, responsible for such notables as the Women’s Gym, Women’s (now Berkeley) City Club (with great swimming pool)--and, far to the south, Hearst Castle (no, it doesn’t look like the one in Citizen Kane.) And, apart from these, the whole Berkeley brown-shingle tradition, fine even when no names are attached. I lived for years in one--Duffey’s Boarding House--just south of Dwight Way on Benvenue (and thus close to Maybeck’s Christian Science Church.) Berkeley houses are painted a variety of colors, some that would be virtually banned in other communities, and feature unkempt but comfortable-looking gardens.

And, a blessing for me and my students during my years of teaching there: the proximity of the seashore, which allows day-trips to Marin County and the incomparable Point Reyes National Seashore. Inverness was, and I hope still is, virtually a Berkeley weekend-and-summer community. Trips to Marin County, overnights at the Tomales Bay house belonging to one of my students (Sheila Keppel), the great walk from McClure’s Beach northward atop the ridge between the Pacific Ocean and Tomales Bay (which my students called the Long March)--all these were integral parts of our academic program and our community, and of my life. With all respect to East Coast beaches (from which one watches the sun rise, not set!), nothing there that I know is really comparable. Perhaps more than any other factor, this underlay my determination to resist all temptations from that other institution (the Berkeley of the East, it would like to be) and other Big Guns on the East Coast. It is to Berkeley that I shall return in time and, I trust, live out my last days.

Literary Blog: Sonnets Petrarchan and Shakespearean

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Created on Wednesday, 14 December 2011 20:11

Written by James Cahill

Literary Blog: Sonnets Petrarchan and Shakespearean

(By Neither Frank nor Bill) Part !

Some favorable responses to my previous literary blogs, especially to the Shakespeare-Marlowe parody Hamlet At Wittenberg, encourage me to continue posting from time to time literary blogs presenting, with commentary, non-scholarly literary writings from my past. This is another of those.

While I was still in Berkeley High School in the early 1940s I had begun composing verses in the set forms--sonnets, ballades, triolets and villanelles--to amuse myself and please my English teachers, two of them. I don’t remember the name of the first; the second, and a powerful influence on me during those creative years, was Constance Topping, a maiden lady of British descent who lived in a big apartment house on Benvenue Avenue just east of Dwight Way in Berkeley, next door to Duffey’s Boarding House where I lived with my father. I still preserve in the originals many papers and assignments I wrote for her, with her notations in margins and her grades and comments at the end. I started out badly, writing a satire of Christian Science (I had lived with a family of whom the mother was a C.S. practitioner), quoting Mark Twain’s observation that it wouldn’t fix the broken leg of a chair; her grade was a B+, her comment included the observation that not everyone would find this belief so funny, and my belated realization was that Constance Topping was herself--yes, you guessed it. Far more successfully, I wrote for her a ballade about the squirrels who played in the trees between our two dwellings, which she observed every day as I did, That Ballade of the Dead Squirrels won a prize at the Berkeley Poets Dinner, held at the Claremont Hotel, a great honor for me. I will print that here some time.

I was especially fond of the sonnet, both the more difficult Petrarchan kind and the easier Shakespearean kind. (The latter are so easy that I have twice in my life composed them one-a-day to please women I was/am fond of--once for a girlfriend named Hazel while I was a soldier in the Japanese Language School at Ann Arbor in 1944, again in August this year when my daughter Sarah said she wanted a sonnet for her birthday, and I responded that that was too easy, I would do one a day for a week. And I almost did that, completing six.)

I am going to copy in this and subsequent blogs, with brief introductory notes, a series of the sonnets I have composed over the years, mostly while much younger. I will not include the ones for Sarah, which contain too many private references that would require long explanations. I begin with three-and-a-half (one unfinished) would-be serious ones, all in the more difficult Petrarchan form, composed while I was a Berkeley High student. Some of my deepest feelings at that time were experienced on clear, cold nights when I found myself outdoors--coming back from ushering in San Francisco (as related in a previous blog) or out late on a date with a girlfriend. These sonnets were attempts to capture and convey those feelings.

Night Sonnets (1942-3. Berkeley High School)

(Unfinished—re-used in one of a series of one-a-day Love

Sonnets for Hazel, to be printed here later, at least in part.)

No, thinking further: the Sonnets for Hazel mostly aren’t worth reprinting, and I will dispose of them by copying a single one here at the end, to offset the seriousness (so intended, at least) of the above. This one was composed one Saturday when I was unable to join her, as anticipated, because I was kept in on KP (kitchen police, the Army’s punishment for minor misdemeanors--I can’t remember what mine was)--and I spent much of the day mopping floors, while composing this to send to her: (Now that I read it again, after many years, I see that it isn’t a sonnet at all. I did write Shakespearean sonnets to Hazel, but this isn’t one of them, it’s just a series of rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter.)