James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Making Jack Pumpkinhead for Sarah and Nick (10/30/11)

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Created on Monday, 31 October 2011 18:33

Written by James Cahill

My daughter Sarah has posted on Facebook, on this night before Halloween, an old photo of herself at age four that was on the front page of the Washington Post; she is standing beside a Jack Pumpkinhead figure that I made for her and her older brother Nicholas, and the caption reads:

I will post that old photo with this blog. The Facebook posting has been commented on by quite a few people--my grandchildren Maggie and Abigail, my son Benedict, old friends such as Joseph Koerner. Nick and Sarah mention in their comments, as I do in mine, that I brought the figure to life, and it got up and walked away. This obviously requires some explanation, more than I can provide on Facebook. So I’m telling the story in this blog; I’ll tell it again, with more pictures (from the book), in one of my video-lectures.

The book The Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum was one of the many I read with the two of them, and they were familiar with the story that opens it: how the boy Tip makes the pumpkinhead out of old bits of wood and old clothes, and stands it up in the road so that his guardian the witch Mombi will see it and (he hopes) be frightened by it. But she recognizes what he has done, and takes out her vial of Powder of Life and sprinkles some on him, bringing him to life. Later he (under the name Jack Pumpkinhead) and Tip go off on the adventures that make up the rest of the book.

So, one Halloween--it must have been around 1960, when I was a curator at the Freer and we lived in Cleveland Park--I put together a Jack Pumpkinhead out of old pieces of wood from the basement, dressed it in old clothes of my own, stuffed it and set it up beside our front steps. It attracted some attention from passers-by, and Nick and Sarah loved that. So next year, I rigged it with a string attached to its right arm strung through a loop above and leading indoors, so they could pull it and make Jack wave to people. This was better, and presented a challenge for next Halloween. This time I rigged a small microphone inside the pumpkin and ran the wires inside, where the two of them could make it talk to people outside. This is what the caption to the Post photo talks about. (It also claims that it was rigged so that it could turn its head from side to side--maybe so, I don’t remember that--it would be easy to do.)

So that left me, on the fourth Halloween, 1964 it must have been, with a challenge: how to top all those? So I hinted to the children, who spread the word to their friends, that this year I was going to bring it to life. Dorothy and a few other mothers (as I remember) made a post-Halloween dinner for a dozen or so children, friends and classmates of Nick and Sarah. After dinner the women herded the children out onto our porch, to the end away from the steps, and stayed there to keep them from moving out toward the Pumpkinhead. I had replaced the porch light with a blue bulb, to make a more eery atmosphere. I pulled on the string, and Jack Pumpkinhead waved his hand, as before. And I produced a plastic vial of the Powder of Life, chanted the magic incantation (made up, as I remember--none in the Oz book)--and, slowly, Jack Pumpkinhead stood up, walked down the steps and down our walk toward the street. The children by now were screaming, trying to get past the mothers, who held them back. Jack crossed the street (narrowly missing being hit by a car), climbed over a fence on the other side into an unused field owned by the Washington Cathedral, and disappeared. Going there next morning, the children found the pumpkin head, nothing else. I told them that Jack had gone back to Oz, leaving behind his somewhat spoiled head.

How was it done? It didn’t really take the children long to guess, although they pretended not to; and two of the little girls at the party, when they got home, made their father let them smell his hair, which indeed smelled like pumpkin, confirming their suspicions. This father, who was tall and lanky,  had come over, by arrangement, while the party was going on, and had disassembled the pumpkinhead figure, putting on its clothes, cutting a larger hole in the bottom of the pumpkin and fitting it over his head; and he was sitting there in the same posture when the children came out. He dutifully waved his hand when I pulled the strong, and so forth. We almost, as I say, had a bad ending when he came close to being hit by a car as he crossed the street.

Days afterwards, Nick’s teacher at school was getting the children to tell their Halloween stories, and Nick told his, and she said “That’s a great story, Nick--now tell us what really happened.” And Nick went on insisting that his story was what really happened--and he had a classmate who had been there and corroborated it. She later told me, “I wish you wouldn’t do something like this without telling me, Mr. Cahill--I’m trying to get the children to distinguish reality from fantasy, and doing this kind of thing doesn’t help.”

So there, the secret is out. Those of you who can go on Facebook can find Sarah’s posting and all the comments it has elicited. And a happy, scary Halloween to all of you.

Berkeley as America’s Cultural Capital

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Created on Wednesday, 26 October 2011 16:17

Written by James Cahill

 

 

Blog 10/25/11: Berkeley as America’s Cultural Capital

This morning’s blog, with the above provocative (I hope) title, is inspired by my reading last night a review in the New Yorker (issue of October 24th) of a new book about the movie critic Pauline Kael. It begins “In the fall of 1965” and writes of her at that time as “a small-time movie critic who had recently arrived from Northern California.”

Oh, the parochial New Yorkers! I subscribe to and read the New Yorker, the NYTimes, the New York Review of Books--Berkeley has never been strong in news publications (the Berkeley Barb? The East Bay Express?)

But otherwise, as a cultural capital and as the place where new cultural movements originated, Berkeley far overshadows New York, whatever they may think. Saul Steinberg, I believe it was, did a famous New Yorker cover showing what New Yorkers gazing westward see: the numbered avenues, one after the other, to the river; New Jersey across the river’ then a great expanse, and in the far distance, as I remember, San Francisco--but no Berkeley.

Back to Pauline Kael. A moment in my life that I have often recalled: I am walking up Telegraph Avenue toward campus, where I will give a lecture as a candidate for a teaching job there, and I pass on the left, several blocks before Sather Gate, the Cinema Guild, new to me; and they are showing two Buster Keaton films I hadn’t seen. It was only with difficulty that I kept walking and gave my lecture; and I decided then that Berkeley was the place to be--nothing like this in D.C., where I was living then (and where I could have stayed on to become Director of the Freer.) I learned later that the Cinema Guild had been founded by Pauline Kael and her then-husband or partner (? from memory) Edward Landlberg. She left later, moved to New York; he stayed on, and the Cinema Guild moved first to a second-floor small projection space on Telegraph south of Dwight Way, then to a theater at Haste and Shattuck. I often went to both--I remember that he had the only copies, and so was the only one to show, certain foreign films, including a great Japanese 47 Ronin film.

And Pauline Kael, as an independent critic and then as movie critic at The New Yorker, had opinions strongly different from those of other New York critics. Our writer notes this in wonderment. Somebody should tell him: because she was a Berkeley girl, stupid! The article gives information on her early life: born in Petaluma (the “egg basket of the world”--I remember well as a child driving through Petaluma on my way to

San Francisco and seeing a huge chicken, built of wood, on the roadside), she moved with her family to San Francisco, and then was an English major at U.C. Berkeley--but, the article goes on, “spent much of her free time hanging out with avant-garde poets,” and left without graduating. After an unrewarding time in New York, she “moved back to the Bay Area to live with her mother”--this was in 1946. So she must have been engaged with the famous Berkeley Literary Renaissance of the 1940s. She may have--probably did--frequent Creed’s Book Store, only a few doors outside Sather Gate then, and a gathering-place for Berkeley and S.F. literary people. And a favorite place for me, from my senior year at Berkeley High to my first years at UCB in the early 40s, and of course in the late 40s when I was a clerk there and co-wrote the chamber opera about it (see below.) Did I sell a book to Pauline Kael? I could have.

And so forth--on and on the writer goes about New York literary circles, no mention of Berkeley. Mentions of the counter-culture: where do they think it originated, for god’s sake? In Greenwich Village? I used to spend time there, during my years at the Freer in the 1950s-60s, often staying with Walt McKibben in his Greenwich Village apartment (with the subway running underneath it and shaking it noisily, interrupting one’s sleep.) Walt, who had been one of the four who sang in our Berkeley opera “A Day At Creed’s” (see http://www.archive.org/details/C_1949_XX_XX for that)--Walt had moved to New York and become a successful stock analyst (!) for a Wall St. firm, besides singing counter-tenor roles and Shakespeare singing-clown parts in musical productions. So I knew Greenwich Village, although not intimately.

But back to Berkeley and the counter-culture: big cultural-literary movements in Berkeley were often shared with particular districts of San Francisco: for the Beat poets, it was with North Beach; for the hippies, it was with the Haight-Ashbury district. But always Berkeley as a center, a place of origin. I tell people who study the Beat literary movement that it originated, as they don’t seem to know, back in the early 40s. A man named George Leite, a close associate and follower of Henry Miller who was then living down in Big Sur, came to Berkeley and hung out in Creed’s--he used to bring watercolors done by Miller, not very good but attractive to some people because of Miller’s notoriety as a writer--he needed the money, and we would put them in our window for sale. (I once did a similar watercolor of my own and put it in the window with a sign reading: “This is by me, Maisie Zilch, age ten, and I think it’s just as good as Mr. Miller’s, and you can have it for fifteen cents.” The sign stayed there until someone pointed it out to Earl Schilling, the manager, who took it out--Creed’s couldn’t be disrespectful of Henry Miller!) George Leite later opened a small bookstore of his own further down Telegraph Ave. He started in 1946 a literary magazine called The Circle--I wrote a verse making fun of it and parodying it, which I will read in one of my video-lectures. Leite and his group were featured, I remember, in an article published in a mainstream journal (The Atlantic Monthly?) under the title “The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy.” These are, as I say, important forerunners of the Beats and other counter-culture movements; but does anyone pay any attention? No.

I could go on: where did the Free Speech Movement, so basic to the great hopeful opening-up of American culture in the 1960s-70s (soon to be shut down again by Reagan/Nixon/the Bushes etc.)--where and when did that originate? When Mario Savio, grad student in English at U.C. Berkeley, stood on top of a car in Sproul Hall Plaza and movingly exhorted the crowd to occupy the University’s administrative offices, which they did. I could go on into academic subjects, with art history of course central to them. I tell young people wondering where to go to study: you find out where the cutting-edge work in your intended field is being done, and go there. In art history, during the time I taught in UCB’s History of Art Dept., it was with us: our grad students could work with the likes of Svetlana Alpers, T. J. Clark, Michael Baxandall--not to speak of, for their/our special fields, such notables as Jean Bony, Joanna Williams, and James Cahill--our students now dominate their/our respective fields. Meanwhile, those who went to Harvard--children of Chinese mothers, for instance (I know one), who make sure that all their children go to Harvard--who went there for work in art history would learn the traditional kind on a high level, and lose out on the New Art History, which was going on in Berkeley. Stephen Greenblatt is now a famous Harvard professor, author of a fine book on Shakespeare’s life; but where did he develop his ideas, including his New Historicism? As a young English Dept. professor at U.C. Berkeley, where I knew him well. Charley Townes, who more or less invented the laser, and was one of the Nobel Prize winners, numbering more than at anywhere else, at UCB. And so forth.

Does any of this impress, or even interest. New Yorkers? Of course not. Their cultural vision stops with the Hudson River on one side and the East River on the other. But somebody should work to establish Berkeley’s real position as the cultural capital of America. The above is meant to suggest directions that study could take.

Literary Blog: Hamlet At Wittenberg, A

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Created on Monday, 24 October 2011 04:42

Written by James Cahill

Literary Blog: Hamlet At Wittenberg, A

The latest New York Review of Books has a review article about imitations, forgeries, and parodies of Shakespeare. This inspires me to dredge out of obscurity--that is, my collected literary works, where it has (I believe) pretty much gone unnoticed--a Shakespeare/Marlowe spin-off of my own titled Hamlet At Wittenberg. The first half of it is below; the second half will be attached to the next blog, posted in a few days. (You can wait with bated breath, whatever that is, in between.) I wrote this for reading in a faculty group that Dorothy and I belonged to, the Drama Group, which met monthly to watch a reading and semi-staging of a play prepared by one of us, with helpers. I did several--I remember especially doing Jonathan Swift’s very funny The Life and Death of Tom Thumb, which has some great lines. This one of mine was written to be inserted into a playlet by W. S. Gilbert entitled “Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern” (decades before Tom Stoppard wrote another one about them)--it isn’t all that funny, but it suited my purpose. This was 1971, when the Free Speech Movement was still on everybody’s minds. And I had this good idea: Why hasn’t anybody ever realized that Hamlet and Faustus could have been at Wittenberg U. at the same time, more or less, H. as student, F. as professor? And since Shakespeare’s play about one of them and Marlowe’s about the other were special favorites of mine, from which I could quote long passages, I ran them together in a way that you will see below. So, here it is, Part I of Hamlet At Wittenberg. (Special prize to anyone who catches a T.S. Eliot echo.)

 

(Bottom of p. 79 of W. S. Gilbert playlet, Guildenstern's speech to Ophelia, replace with:)

 

Guild. We knew him once

In school at Wittenberg. What's he like now?

 

(P. 80, from end of Ophelia's second speech):

 

Oph. . . . with lucid intervals of lunacy.

You say you knew him once in Wittenberg;

That, I suppose, was in his student years.

 

Ros. (nodding) Which ended with his most precipitous

Return to Denmark.

 

Oph. Ah, it was the news

Of Hamlet his dear father's sudden death

That drew him back.

 

Ros. Not so—even before

That news reached Germany, it was ordained.

The truth is that young Hamlet was expelled.

 

Oph. Expelled! But the account that he gave us

Of why he left before matriculating

Spoke of disgust at the irrelevance

Of education there at Wittenberg.

Tell me the truth, what really was the cause?

Perhaps it will explain his present state.

 

Ros. Indeed it may; for, as you know him now,

Moody, rebellious, ineffectual

Imagine then our Hamlet as a student!

 

Oph. My mind reels at the thought, but I will try.

 

Ros. And to fill out your fancy's imagery

We'll now employ the flashback formula

(A stage convention yet to be invented)

Transporting us at once to Wittenberg

Five years ago. You'll e'en participate

(The dearth of players requiring that you do.)

Come, Guildenstern and I shall play ourselves,

Gertrude and you his classmates, Claudius

His new professor of astronomy

In whose first lecture we now find ourselves.

 

(Lights out, chairs moved; these five are found seated as lights come up.

Enter Claudius as Professor.)

 

Prof. Good morning, students; welcome to you all.

I trust you've had a pleasant Quarter break.

This class, Astronomy 6B, for which

6A is the prerequisite, will deal

With ordained motions of the heavenly bodies.

 

Ham. But tell us first, professor, how you come

To give this course, in place of our revered

Professor Faustus, whom we had last Quarter?

 

Prof. Faustus has left the University.

Inquire not after him. Let us proceed.

In this first lecture, which is very short,

I shall outline the questions we'll pursue.

Are there many heavens above the moon?

Are all celestial bodies but one globe

As is the substance of this centric earth?

Leading authorities maintain 'tis so,

And it is not our place to question them.

As are the elements, such are the spheres,

Mutually folded in each other's orb;

All jointly move upon one axletree,

Whose terminus is term'd the world's wide pole.

Nor are the names of Saturn, Mars, or Jupiter

Feign'd, but are erring stars. So much today;

We meet on Wednesday, here, at this same hour.

By then you should have purchased copies of

The new edition of Ptolemy (sound the P to make meter right)

(Available in low-cost paperback.)

Please read the first three chapters. So, farewell. (Exit)

 

Ham. (leaping up) So, Rosencranz and gentle Guildenstern,

Tell me what has transpired while I've been gone.

What has become of Faustus, our dear prof,

Who taught us all that we desired to know

Of sweet rebellion "gainst the established Church,

Who served as Faculty Advisor to

The movement or which I'm the President—

I mean the S.H.S., or Students for

Heretical Society? I do fear

There's something rotten here in Wittenberg.

 

Guild. Have you not heard? The Regents have dismissed him,

With full approval of th'Administration

And the Academic Senate Committee

On Inquisitions.

 

Ham. Oh, my prophetic soul!

 

Ros. He's charged, they say, with having sold his soul

To Lucifer.

 

Ham. So what then if he did?

Where's academic freedom, if a man

Cannot sell his own soul to whom he chooses?

How like those tools of the Establishment

To prate of freedom, only to deny it

To anyone who ventures out beyond

The confines of their narrow orthodoxy!

God has a host of advocates among

The faculty; so why not one for Satan?

 

Guild. They also say he's run off with a girl,

One of his students, who, in his delusion,

He thinks is Helen of Troy.

 

Ham. Why, then, she is!

Pythagoras's metampsychosis, were that true,

Could surely change a student into Helen,

Or Helen to a student. No, my friends,

'Tis obvious a foul conspiracy

Against our Faustus seeks to besmirch his name.

We must prevent it, get him reinstated!

The first thing we must do is learn the truth,

And only Faust himself can tell us that.

 

Guild. You mean that we should go and seek him out?

 

Ham. No—conjure him to us! I wisely kept

A Xerox of his magic diagram. (produces it)

Within this circle is Jehovah's name

Forward and backward anagrammatiz'd

The breviated names of holy saints

Figures of every adjunct to the heavens,

And characters of signs and erring stars

By which the spirits are enjoined to rise.

I'll skip the incantation—that's in Latin,

A subject I was always rather bad in.

Faustus, I charge thee, wheresoer'er thou art,

To fly at once, appearing now to us!

 

(Lights down, then up again; Faustus on stage)

 

Faust. Why have you brought me here? I was engaged

In dalliance with my sweet Helena.

(to Guild.) Were you the one who interrupted me?

I think your name is—Hamlet, is it not?

 

Guid. I'm not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.

My name is Alexander Guildenstern.

 

Faust I never could remember students' names.

 

Ham. I'm Hamlet; it was I who brought you here

To learn from your own lips the truth about

These charges brought against you. Is it true

You've signed a contract with old Lucifer?

 

Faust So what then if I have? Professors sign

Worse contracts all the time. Why, just last month

Professor Kissingerus took a job

As chief advisor to young Fortinbras

On strategies to overthrow the Poles,

Teaching him new and more efficient ways

To smite the sledded Polack on the ice.

If he can sell his soul, why shouldn't I?

 

Ham. A fair reply; we'll use it in our handouts.

But what of Hell? Have you had glimpses of it?

 

Faust (warmly) I have; Lucifer took me on a tour,

And as I had suspected, all one hears

Is foul distortions of a biased press.

There may be certain deprivations now

Imposed on the inhabitants, but these

Are only temporary sacrifices

Which all must make toward the achieving of

A better, healthier society.

They say that in five years they will surpass

Heaven in producing milk and honey—

It's true, technical problems yet remain

In cooling it, and managing to hide

A certain taste of brimstone; but they'll do it!

They're working hard, one has to give them that.

 

Ham. Your words strike to my soul—by which I mean

You tell me what I'm predisposed to credit.

Your motives, then, were lofty—you intend

To fearlessly expose the propaganda

Of the established Church, and spread the truth!

 

Faust Something like that indeed was in my thoughts;

But mainly I intended to escape

The dullness of the academic life—

I think I always was a secret swinger.

And then when Lucifer held out to me

Those honey'd promises of far-out sex,

Even beyond th' imaginations of

The sleazy makers of X-rated films,

And the recapture of my wasted youth,

What could I do but sign? And so I signed.

But now you must excuse me—Helen's waiting.

Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me.

 

(Lights out, then up; Faustus is gone.)

 

Come back in a few days for the thrilling conclusion of

Hamlet At Wittenberg.