James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Strong Words from JC

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Created on Wednesday, 20 April 2011 04:19

Written by James Cahill

Blog 4/11: Strong Words from JC

Some of my many correspondents have asked me: just where are you right now, physically and in your life situation? The short c.v. posted on this website (“About James Cahill”) ends with the information that my wife Hsingyuan Tsao and I have separated and are in the process of divorcing, that I am much reduced in general health and mobility, and that I am planning to move permanently back to Berkeley (from Vancouver, where Hsingyuan teaches at the University of British Columbia). All these are still true, but need some amplification.

Our divorce still hasn’t gone through, for reasons too complex to give here, and not entirely clear even to myself. And I am indeed “in the process of” moving back to Berkeley, my real home, where I still have a daughter Sarah with granddaughter Miranda and son-in-law John Sanborn, as well as a house of my own and lots of old friends, colleagues, and former students. But the planned permanent move is indefinitely postponed, and I am, so to speak, suspended in midair between Vancouver and Berkeley—living in houses in both places, flying back & forth every few months.

How do I feel about moving back to the U.S., after quite a few years in Canada? Very ambivalent, to put it mildly. The political situation there appalls me—with my memories of the New Deal and the Great Society, I never dreamed, even in nightmares, that I would live to see a time when one of the major political parties has as its platform: rob the poor to make the rich richer, and is powerful enough to put much of that into practice. In a country where Big Money and Big Business pretty much get whatever they want, because they can buy congressmen who will enact their desires and prevent reforms that go against them. Supported by a totally politicized Supreme Court that has lifted all restraints on huge political contributions (going against principles we thought pretty much everybody believed in) and that enabled this whole mess by handing the 2000 election to the man who had the fewer votes, George W. Bush.  I tell my boys: what we are witnessing is a total abrogation of the old Social Contract, by which the better-off give up some of what they have to enable the less-well-off to live decent lives. What has replaced it is what (if I remember the phrase right) was called: I’ve Got Mine, Now Buzz Off, Chum. That, along with an unacknowledged but very real racism, expressed in their stand on immigration and in their opposition to everything Obama is for, make up the real platform and agenda of the Tea-Party types and others of the Far Right.

But, you might object, you are moving back to Berkeley; surely you will be among like-minded people there? True enough, and that mitigates the sense of disaster a bit, at least until I read the NYTimes again or watch the news broadcasts on TV. Berkeley, always and still that bastion of ineffectual resistance to the wrongheaded directions taken by most of the rest of the country, is still a better place to live than most other places I know.

So, you may ask, what is your situation in Berkeley? I have, as I say, a house there, and can still drive to get around when I take or ship my car down. I have recently had two very good house-sitter/helpers, both advanced grad students in Chinese art history from elsewhere ((Princeton and Columbia) spending some time in Berkeley. But I still need a longtime person or couple to do this, ideally an advanced degree-seeker in Chinese studies who has the time to help me but can also enjoy the proximity to the U.C. campus (easy walking distance) with its libraries and other facilities, and also my own library and presence. An ideal situation for someone in this situation who wants to live in Berkeley with housing and meals provided, in exchange for some work. Should be able to drive. Any applicants: write me ( This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ) or my daughter Sarah, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. , telling us your qualifications and plans.

So, JC, if Canada is that much better, why move back? It’s true, I have found much to admire and be comfortable with during my years here. But here, too, some things are going wrong around me. This house, which we bought to live in with our twin boys Julian and Benedict, we chose partly because it is convenient to UBC where Hsingyuan teaches, but partly also because it was in a friendly neighborhood of modest-size houses occupied by real families that tended to know each other and send their children to the nearby school—Southlands Elementary, where our boys went for a year before they transferred to the (very good but very expensive) St. George’s School. We liked the people at Southlands, but they were so badly underfunded that they were always short of books, classes were too large, etc. As for the neighborhood: the unoccupied house on one side of ours was torn down, and more recently the house on the other side, occupied by friendly neighbors with young sons who helped with mowing our lawn and otherwise to make small money, has also been torn down—both to be replaced by what are called here Monster Houses—huge boxes rising up close to us to block our view, covering every square foot permitted on the land (and probably more, by special permission). And now the house behind us, across the alley, where friendly people lived who used to phone us to say that we had left our garage door open etc., has also been torn down, and another Monster is going up. Who occupies these? People from faraway places, people who are very rich, having made their money in ways you don’t want to think about, buying the houses not to live in now but as refuges against the time when they are in danger of receiving their just deserts in their home countries (I write this, not out of first-hand knowledge about my neighbors—please don’t sue me for libel--but after reading articles about who is moving to Vancouver today, and why.) Vancouver has a well-deserved reputation as one of the most livable cities anywhere. It still is that, but it is changing. . .

Against these negative factors, of course, must be weighed my pleasure over the great reception that our video-lecture project, A Pure and Remote View, is already getting; a major reason why I continue to live in Vancouver is that I can work here with my chief collaborator, Rand Chatterjee, with the great assistance of my invaluable research assistant Barry Magrill. Having these two as regular visitors and helpers is a major reason for my wanting to continue spending most of my time here, so long as I am physically able to move back & forth between here and Berkeley. And I have a few other friends and supporters here, notably Hu Shoufang and Randy Moore, the couple living nearby who have generously taken on responsibility for seeing to my continued well-being, and the collector-dealer Les Wright; and I can enjoy the occasional (not frequent enough) visits of my boys Ben and Julian; these make up for a lot else.

So, there you have it. More than you really wanted to know about the present situation of JC. So much for now; I will write another like this whenever any great change takes place.

Like a Hyper-Active Spider

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Created on Monday, 11 April 2011 22:07

Written by James Cahill

Blog, 4/11/11

Now the first six lectures in my video-recorded series on early Chinese painting, A Pure and Remote View, have been posted on the web, both by the Institute for East Asian Studies in Berkeley (http://ieas.berkeley.edu/publications/aparv.html) and on this website of mine. I trust that many of you have begun watching and listening to the lectures, and I’ve already received quite a few enthusiastic responses from people who have, some old friends and some strangers. All these responses are welcome, and nearly all encouraging. Later, I assume, more critical messages will begin to reach me, correcting points that (the viewer believes) I’ve got wrong, or arguing issues on which I take the wrong side. My collaborator Rand Chatterjee and I have decided that we will not under any circumstances go back and “correct” a lecture already posted. Instead, I will begin to post a file of “comments and corrections” on this website, made up of messages of this kind that I receive, along with my responses to them.

At the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies held last week in Honolulu—the first I’ve attended in some years—a special session was devoted to this project, and quite a few old friends were among the audience. Many more I met in the sessions during the days that followed—I managed to get to four or five of them. Now back in Vancouver, Rand and I are continuing with finishing the remaining lectures of the series, to get them online for viewing before too much more time passes. We will also go on to begin completing and posting lectures in two follow-up series: one devoted to selected later (post-Song) Chinese paintings and titled Gazing Into the Past, the other to lectures on themes that are not about particular paintings or periods in painting, but treat themes of other kinds; this is tentatively titled Pages From My Notebook: Issues, Arguments, and Memories. I have ideas for quite a few of these and am gathering images and materials for them; I mean to keep on producing these lectures as long as I am able to.

Meanwhile, four other old lectures that I gave for the Society for Asian Art in San Francisco have been put online by them; the website is:

http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/the-masterful-brush/id416634357

The lectures were prepared and delivered to accompany an exhibition held in 2000 at the Asian Art Museum, made up of Chinese paintings of the 19^th and 20^th centuries from the private collection of Rick Fabian; my lectures were quick “coverages” of the major artists and developments of that late period. They are standard slide-lectures, with double-screen projection; I didn’t know that they were being recorded, and they don’t make for easy watching—a volunteer, a docent, filmed them from the back of the auditorium, moving the camera from me to the screen, sometimes showing the wrong picture. Still, if you want to hear me talk (very fast) about these late-period artists and see some of the paintings, go to this website and listen to them. There are also two lectures posted there by Jerome Silbergeld.

And if you want to hear what my voice sounded like much earlier—fifty years ago, in fact—and hear a comic opera for which I wrote the libretto and my composer friend Gordon Cyr the music, go to the “Other Minds” website run by Charles Amerkhanian, Music Director for Radio Station KPFA in Berkeley: http://www.archive.org/details/C_1949_XX_XX.

To read about this opera, go to the Responses and Reminiscences on this website and read no. 57, “A Night At the Opera in Berkeley: ‘A Day At Creed’s.’” Briefly: Gordon and I produced this opera in 1949 to be performed by ourselves and two others in the large living room of the house we were renting; later it was performed on KPFA and was recorded. A copy of the old recording—which I had more or less forgotten about, and dismissed as too dated to be of interest today—was presented to my daughter Sarah at a concert by a woman who had made it for her husband, an old Berkeley person who still remembered it fondly. Charles Amerkhanian eventually got a copy and heard it, found it “uproariously funny,” and posted it with my permission on his website. If you want to sample it, try listening to the patter song around the middle of the first section, in which the proprietor of Creed’s bookstore Earl J. Schilling (sung by myself) and his two clerks (all real people, who were in the audience at the first performance) list the books and records they have for sale. I was fond of unexpected rhymes, and wrote such couplets as “All the symphonies of Dvorak,/Psycholgical tests by Rorschach” and “Tchaikowsky’s Andante Cantabile,/Collected works of Francois Rabelais” . . . and many more of that kind. Be patient with the long sections devoted to real people and situations that were funny at the time for Berkeley audiences but may seem obscure now.

I want here to put in a recommendation for one of my writings that still seems funny to me when I reread it, and one that nobody else seems to have noticed. It is the dramatic fragment Hamlet At Wittenberg, written for a performance of the Drama Section at U.C. Berkeley, a club for faculty & spouses that met monthly to read plays. I meant it for insertion into a W. S. Gilbert playlet about Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern (anticipating Tom Stoppard), which actually isn’t all that funny. Mine, based on the idea (why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?) that Hamlet and Faust might have been at Wittenberg U. at the same time, was a big success as performed, filled as it is with bits lifted from Shakespeare & Marlowe and references to student-activist issues then current in Berkeley. You will find it in my collection of non-scholarly writings titled the Ching Yuan Chai Treasury of Imperishable Ephemera (CYCTIE), beginning on page 67. Take the trouble to seek it out and read it.

Still another recent discovery on the web: after completing and publishing An Index of Early Chinese Painters and Paintings (1980), I and several of my students did a lot of work toward a follow-up Index of Ming Painters and Paintings. We never completed it, and this was one of the large projects I relinquished around the time I retired; it was taken over by Eugene Wang and others at Harvard. Now I see that it has been put online:

http://ted.lib.harvard.edu/ted/deliver/home?_collection=ming

I have no idea how much work has been done on it since it left my hands; I haven’t been in touch with Eugene or anyone else there for some years. But it’s good to know about its accessibility—it can send you to some works, at least, by a great many Ming artists.

So, like some hyper-active spider, I appear to be all over the web.

Finally: in an earlier blog I posed a problem and said I would credit the person who first solved it. It was: What rhymes with Ice-water? (Mary Ann Rogers, as I wrote then, got it right after pondering it for two days.) After getting several wrong answers (missing the trisyllabic rhyme, proposing “blotter” etc.), I received a right answer from—can you believe this?—another James Cahill. He wrote:

Name: James J Cahill

Phone: 630-369-0477

Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

what rhymes with ice-water

fly swatter?

here's one for you - why do you never see a square silo?

I responded:

Dear Other JC,

Congratulations—you are only the second in quite a few months to come up with the rhyme.

Why do you never see a square silo? I don’t know the answer to that one. If it were a real question I would try something like: because the grain sticks in the corners, but I assume it’s a riddle with a funny answer. I give up: tell me.

Best, JC

I never received a response from him, and still don’t know why one never sees a square silo.

So, that’s all for this one. My RA Barry Magrill and I will be posting more essays and other texts, some of them illustrated, on this website as time permits. So keep watching.

Best to everybody, James Cahill

New Website

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Created on Saturday, 26 March 2011 02:41

Written by James Cahill

3/24/11 So, now you see it: the new, more beautiful, much improved website. I am much indebted to my research assistant Barry Magrill for urging me to do this, and for overseeing the reworking, done by an expert website designer under Barry’s direction. A lot more pieces of writing, some of them illustrated with large numbers of images, will be added in the near future.

Meanwhile, my great project of recent years, the video-lecture series A Pure and Remote View: Visualizing Early Chinese Landscape Painting, is at last being posted, for free viewing by anybody, on the website of our sponsoring organization, the Institute of East Asian Studies at U. C. Berkeley: go to

http://ieas.berkeley.edu/publications/prv.html

Their presentation on that site still (as of 3/24/11) needs more work—wrong images, too-low resolution, too-small pictures—but that will be fixed soon. Meanwhile, and also later, the lectures can also be accessed from the present website. The first seven lectures, each an hour or two long and carrying us through the Five Dynasties period, are already up for viewing, and two more, about the Northern Song period, will be posted soon. The remaining lectures, which will treat painting of the Southern Song period, especially of the Song Academy, as well as Chan (Zen) painting of the late Song, will be finished and up within a few months. Altogether, there will be thirty-something hours of me talking and showing several thousand images, including lots of close-in details. We expect later to issue the lectures on disks, perhaps both DVD and Blu-ray, to make them available with higher-resolution images for those who will use them for serious study. If you think you would like to order these sets of disks in future, let Kate Chouta know: write her at IEAS,  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

For those of you going to the forthcoming meetings of the Association of Asian Studies in Honolulu: A special workshop will be devoted to this project; it will be held on Thursday, March 31^st, 12:30 to 2:30 PM, in Room 303A, as Session 124. I myself will chair it, and speak about the project; my collaborator Rand Chatterjee will also be there to speak, along with the two IEAS people who have specially worked on it, Caverlee Cary and Kate Chouta, and my esteemed younger colleagues Hong Zaixin and Jennifer Purtle. Try to come.

Much more will follow before long; that’s all for now.