Media Coverage
LA Times - "James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art"
New York Times - "James Cahill, Influential Authority on Chinese Art, Dies at 87"
The Daily Californian - "Professor Emeritus James Cahill, Chinese art expert, dies at 87"
LANDsds Sustainable Voice News - "Loss of Guru Voice James Cahill Leader in Chinese Art"
SFGate - "James Cahill, Asian art expert at UC Berkeley, dies"
CLP 157: 2006 "The Pleasures of EAL: An Art Historian's Recollections." Talk for fund-raiser for East Asian Library, U. C. Berkeley
If I say that I'm happy to be speaking here, I mean that as more than a conventional opening. This room has lots of pleasant associations for me, During my late undergraduate years the Griller Quartet, which was in residence here for several years from 1947, gave free public rehearsals in the Morrison Library in late afternoons—a lovely break from academic pressures. During my thirty years here as a professor, quite a few receptions and other elegant events were held in this room. And these were in addition to Morrison's main function, as a quiet place to read. The last thing I would have guessed is that I would find myself here speaking to an audience of such distinction. But I'm very pleased to be doing it, because my subject is close to my deepest feelings about Berkeley, East Asian studies at U.C., and the East Asiatic Library.
With that opening reminiscence I've already begun to establish my credentials as an old Berkeley person, and I'll continue in that direction for a bit before arriving at my proper subject. I was born and spent my early years in Fort Bragg, up on the Mendocino coast, when it was a lumber and fishing town of some 3,500 people without much of cultural refinements. Mendocino then was an even smaller town, almost a ghost town, that one drove through without stopping, on the way, perhaps, to the big cities. After living in other parts of the state, I came to Berkeley around 1940 and was at Berkeley High for my last two high school years; I was president of the Manuscript Club of aspiring writers, won a prize at the Berkeley Poets' Dinner, and, along with a friend, spent my graduation night in the Berkeley jail. Those are only three of a hundred more or less entertaining stories I could tell but won't. Another is about how another friend and I, after enrolling at U.C. Berkeley only a few months later, made our contribution to the annual Freshman-Sophomore Brawl by hanging a forty-foot-long sign with the Freshman motto on the Campanile. That's another of the stories. Later, when I was a professor, I would see latter-day sign-hangers attempting the same thing and making a mess of it, and I was always tempted to go up to them and say "That's the wrong way to do it! You have to hang it from the first window below the clock, so it doesn't get tangled in the clock." But I never did.
Now, getting closer to today's subject: This friend and I, needing money, worked as shelvers in Doe Library, spending long stretches of time within the huge nine-storey structure of glass floors and metal shelving that used to occupy the central space in this building, more recently gutted. Since it wasn't a mentally challenging job, we used our time memorizing long stretches of Lewis Carroll and Gilbert and Sullivan—another story to be passed over quickly. (Please, don't push the buttons for the Walrus and the Carpenter or the Major General's song or we'll be here all day.) We also devised ways to get into locked cases, especially the notorious Case B, where the erotica was kept. I won't divulge our secret—useless anyway, since all that has long vanished, and much more lurid things than Case B contained are easily available now—except to say that it involved climbing perilously down window wells from one floor to another. As for monetary reward, I remember the happy day when our pay went from fifty cents an hour to sixty-five.
Moving still closer to my proper subject: after two years at U.C. I was drafted into the army in 1943 and sent to the Japanese Language School in Ann Arbor, having prepared for this by taking a single course in Japanese language in my last semester as a sophomore here. Since all Japanese people had been moved inland to the relocation centers, the course was taught by the great Peter Boodberg—of whom more later—a philologist of numerous Asian languages, including ancient and obscure ones; if he hadn't known Japanese already, he must have taken off a weekend and learned it. He taught the course together with the only available help he could recruit: a Korean, Mr. Choi. whose wife had a Korean restaurant, and a red-haired American young woman who had grown up in Yokohama and spoke an American children's Japanese. When I arrived later at the school in Ann Arbor and talked to the true Japanese teachers there, they were fascinated and appalled by my pronunciation of their language: they could detect the Korean, and echoes of the American young woman, but the Russian threw them (Boodberg was a White Russian from an aristocratic family.)
I took this course in Japanese, in the midst of being an English major who still wanted to be a writer, on the advice of this friend who was a few months older than I, so that he was drafted earlier into the army. He had been raised in China and, because he had a headstart through knowing Chinese, had been sent to the Japanese-language school. He wrote me letters about how comfortable the life there was, and how we would be commissioned as officers after a year—such was the ignoble beginning of my career as an Asianist. Leaving aside my years in the Occupation in Japan and Korea—lots more good stories—I end my long preamble with my return to Berkeley in 1948, when I enrolled as a student, still an undergraduate, in the Oriental Languages Department, to continue studies of Japanese and Chinese. By that time, East Asiatic Library had come into existence, and we come closer to my proper subject.
East Asiatic Library (or EAL, as I'll call it for short) was founded in 1947 by bringing together all the East Asian-language books in the U.C. Berkeley library, which had been acquired through several large donations and miscellaneous purchases and gifts, and hiring a librarian to head the new entity. By great good fortune, this was a remarkable woman named Elizabeth Huff, who is the real hero of my story: the present eminence of EAL owes a lot to her. She had taken her MA at Mills College and Ph,D, at Harvard. Like myself, she seems to have been powerfully drawn back to the Bay Area after some years away—in my own case, I described it to friends as feeling like a fish back in water. She had her office on the fourth floor of this building (where the Art History Dept. is now), and since the Oriental Languages Department held some of its seminars and classes there, I saw her often.
Especially important for my theme, how an art historian has used EAL, is the fact that Elizabeth Huff had majored in Chinese art history at Mills, and had taken courses at Harvard with Langdon Warner, a pioneer scholar in the East Asian art field. As it happened, neither of my two predecessors as Chinese art history professors at Berkeley, Otto Maenchen and Yvon d'Argencé, was properly an art historian by background or inclination. Maenchen was another eminent philologist—scholar of old texts. that is--best known for his studies of the Hsiung-nu or Huns in and around ancient China. He sometimes remarked that he didn't really like art, and since I took several of his courses, I can testify that he taught the subject as someone who didn't like art. And d"Argencé was a general cultural historian. Neither was seriously engaged with images in art, and neither took much part in acquiring for EAL the expensive kinds of art books with lots of plates that other kinds of art historians such as myself can't function without. It was Elizabeth Huff who pursued those, spent lots of money on them, and built up the impressive holdings that now make U. C. Berkeley one of the best places in the world for doing research in East Asian art history. I remember her with fondness and gratitude. The acquisition of East Asian art books continued under later heads of EAL—I certainly encouraged it and took part in it during my time here as a professor--and it continues today.
Another notable episode in the history of EAL was the acquisition in 1948-49 of the hundred-thousand-volume Mitsui Library. This was the achievement principally of another remarkable person, Elizabeth or Betty McKinnon, who was hired only a few months after Elizabeth Huff to take charge of Japanese materials. She had been born and educated in Japan and was as close to being perfectly bilingual as anyone I have known. She made several very successful buying trips to Japan, on at least one of them accompanied by Professor Denzel Carr of the Oriental Languages Department, whom she was shortly afterwards to marry. As it happened, I was taking a course in early Japanese literature with Denzel Carr, and heard of these exciting events as they were happening, in the way students love to be "insiders" in the private affairs of their professors. We began this course by reading through a brief chapter of Genji Monogatari, "the Tale of Genji," which existed in translation; but then, as our other major text, turned to Yamato Monogatari, which didn't. Professor Carr assigned us to prepare five pages of this text by the next meeting. We almost killed ourselves doing that; but Carr, very fond of digressing into the many areas of his erudition and experience, took us through so many by-ways (very educational; in themselves) that by the end of the semester, if my memory is correct, we had made our way through three pages of Yamato Monogatari. But we learned a lot else along the way. Betty McKinnon came often to our classes; I endeared myself to her and Denzel Carr, not by exhibiting any brilliance in deciphering early Japanese texts, but by producing a full translation of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" into rhyming Japanese in the original meter, which I had made during three otherwise idle months waiting for a military assignment in Tokyo. (A sample: the stanza beginning "The Walrus and the Carpenter/ Were walking close at hand/ They wept like anything to see/ Such quantities of sand" I rendered as: "Kaizô to Daiku, futari-de/ sampo shite ita/ Kaizô wa "Kono hama ga/ Suna-darake da./ Sôji shitara, donna ni/ Kirei deshô ka na!" The acquisition of the Mitsui Library, to return to that, is not irrelevant to EAL's holding in art materials, since it included a major collection of rubbings from Chinese stone engravings, some of them pictorial, and the unique collection of old Japanese maps, some of which, as you see today, are themselves works of art. (James Cahill talk for EAL fundraiser, May 21, 2006)
The Oriental Languages Department faculty in the late 40s was a gathering of giants, led by the great Peter Boodberg, whom I mentioned earlier, but including also the linguist Chao Yuan-jen or Y. R. Chao, Ferdinand Lessing, Ch'en Shih-hsiang, Edward Schafer (famous among many people outside Chinese studies for books such as The Golden Peaches of Samarkand), Denzel Carr, and for a time Leonardo Olschki, who gave a course about medieval travelers in Asia. In more recent years, photos of some of these have been hung inspirationally in a departmental meeting room called the Chaos Room, after a well-known anecdote (which many of you know, but I'll tell it for those who don't): Y.R. Chao and his wife were good friends with the English philosopher Bertrand Russell; and once when the news reached Russell that they had had another child, he responded with a postcard on which he had pasted a newspaper headline reading: "The Causes of the Present Chaos in China" –which, since their name was spelled Chao, could also be read as "The Causes of the Present Chaos in China."
To study with these people was to be lifted beyond one's earthly capacities. ¥ears later, coming upon a long paper I had written for Boodberg in the semester before I graduated, I found that its borrowed erudition and density of argument made it very difficult reading for my later self: I could scarcely follow it. It was the work, not so much of James Cahill as of a high-level but short-lived Boodberg disciple. Still, the examples they set, however far out of reach for the rest of us, have continued to inspire us.
During those years I used EAL constantly, but was working for pay in another book-lover's heaven, or haven, located just outside the campus. This was Creed's Bookstore, one of the row of shops that stretched at your right to Telegraph Avenue as you came out of Sather Gate, in the space occupied now by the ASUC complex. Creed's, as I hope some of you will recall, was an old-style, rambling multi-roomed, somewhat disheveled store, hung with the special fragrance of old books, that was also a hang-out for literary and artistic people from the larger Berkeley community. I was the librettist, and a friend from Berkeley High days the composer, of a comic chamber opera about Creed's and Berkeley intellectual life more generally. Five of us performed it, taking thirteen parts and playing the piano accompaniment when not onstage; after several performances in the rented house where we all lived, we did it once on campus and finally on Radio Station KPFA. It is still remembered, and a recording occasionally played, by a diminishing few old Berkeley people. KPFA, which I believe was the first listener-sponsored radio station in the country, was then in a fledgling stage, dependent in large part on volunteer help: For a time I disk-jockeyed a weekly program of classical French music, based mainly on records I had acquired while stationed in Japan and Korea; the detective story writer Anthony Boucher did a program of rare opera recordings, and so forth. In more recent times my daughter Sarah carried on the tradition with her own program, familiar I hope to many of you.
All this proves relevant to my theme, however much it may seem to have wandered, when I reveal what my talk today is really about, which is why Berkeley and its great university are the spiritual home for a great many who have studied and worked here; why its East Asian programs, in the broadest sense, are ones that I and my colleagues are very proud to have been associated with, as are the legions of students they have trained; and how East Asiatic Library has been, and will continue to be, an underpinning for all this. I am invoking, perhaps, and unashamedly, a Berkeley mystique, one that many of us cannot help slipping into whenever we talk about our times here.
I took my Bachelor's degree in Oriental Languages in 1950, and fifteen years later, after taking higher degrees at the University of Michigan, studying in Japan and Europe, working as a curator at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and authoring a popular book on Chinese painting, I returned to Berkeley as a professor, with the aforementioned feeling of fish-back-in-water. (Soon after arriving here I was informed that some malicious person had looked into departmental files and found that I had received a C+ in my first exam in Maenchen's Chinese art course. Well, if you can get Cs at Yale and still become president, anything is possible.) Boodberg, Schafer, and Chen Shih-hsiang were still teaching when I returned; Elizabeth Huff was still Head of EAL. The successive losses of these people in later years tore holes in my comfortable feeling of continuity with my past. But there were new bright stars in Berkeley's East Asian faculty who became good friends; several in the Oriental Languages Department who, it turned out, were in charge of Faculty Club Christmas Party performances, and who invited me to join them. We did these for several years; Our most ambitious production was in 1967, a Gilbert-and-Sullivan style operetta using G&S songs with new lyrics set in a libretto by myself, titled "Dan Destry's Dilemma, or Publish or Perish, or Both." Cyril Birch, an eminent Chinese literature specialist, was Dan Destry, and Ed Schafer, no less, was Phoebe Grindsby, the Oldest Grad Student in the Department. In 1983, when Berkeley was in the midst of a financial crisis, we offered "Dan Destry's Return, or the Academic Beggar's Opera: An Entertainment for Academic Beggars," based on the 18th century Beggar's Opera of John Gay. This time we enlisted our Chancellor Mike Heyman to play the part of his ancestor Mike Highwayman, leader of an outlaw band that was turning the university's special skills and resources to making money in illegal ways. Still later I joined Berkeley's world-class early China specialist David Keightley in doing funny songs for the Center for Chinese Studies New Year's parties. For the 1990 party our assignment was to write songs supporting the funding drive then underway for the new East Asiatic Library building. I certainly won't try to sing mine through, but will offer only two brief excerpts. Set to the music of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," it began with a reference to the ephemeral nature of digitized texts: "We live in the age of the micro-computer/ But books are what a scholar reads,/ Your Mac with its mouse, though it couldn't be cuter/ With its smiley face/ It may erase/ your database. . ." A later verse referred to the necessity for EAL, cramped as it was for space, to store much of its holdings in the storage facility out in Richmond, to be recalled only with a two-day wait. The lines went: "E A L/ Would serve us well/ With a building that suited its needs,/ But meanwhile they're sent in/ From out near San Quentin,/ The books the Asian scholar needs."
We have returned, by another roundabout route, to our subject. The great strengths of EAL in East Asian art books was one of the factors that drew me back to Berkeley; working in other libraries of the kind over the years had made me aware of what a remarkable asset it was. I and my students made heavy use of it during the thirty years I taught here, up to my retirement in 1995. Students in my lecture courses were expected to spend two or three hours a week in EAL, reading and using the reproduction books laid out for them (all this has changed, of course, in our digital age), and I often held graduate seminar meetings there.
The art book strengths of EAL are in both Chinese and Japanese art, and to a lesser extent Korean—lesser not by choice, but because the art-historical literature on Korean art is still less developed, and because Korean art, for historical reasons such as warfare and the forty-year occupation of that country by Japan, has been less well preserved. I discovered this when I spent nearly two years in the occupation in Korea, 1946-48, and spent a lot of time searching out surviving Korean art collections and monuments. Japanese art is far better preserved, especially the sculpture, painting, and architecture of the Buddhist temples, which are among the glories of world art. The Japanese buy more books per capita than do the people of most other countries, and are especially fond of art books; publishers love to put out multi-volume series of large, heavy volumes under such titles as "Complete Collection of Japanese Picture-scrolls" (Nihon Emaki-mono Zenshû) or "Japanese Art in Full Color" (Genshoku Nihon no Bijutsu). Well-off Japanese families display these proudly in glass-fronted cases in their reception rooms, but they are also of scholarly substance, since established specialists are engaged to write the texts for them. Large sets of this kind can be a problem for libraries, first because they are expensive, but also because on the one hand their contents can largely duplicate what is already available in other publications, and on the other they contain enough new material to be necessary for a complete study collection. An older series was devoted to the Buddhist temples of Nara, with a large volume of superb gravure plates devoted to each of the major temples. EAL, I'm happy to say, has a complete set of that important series, and most of the others as well. More recently, as China's economy has produced a class of affluent and upwardly mobile bookbuyers, publishers there have been producing similar series, and EAL continues to acquire them.
I taught Japanese art history as well as Chinese for my first ten years or so at Berkeley, but at last we were granted a separate position for Japanese art. I used to take candidates for this position around EAL both to tempt and to test them—I would show them the strengths of the collection as an inducement for those we hoped to lure here, and would judge the seriousness of their engagement with different areas of Japanese art from their responses to the books. One modernist whom I took around showed no interest, for instance, in our remarkably full holdings in Buddhist temple art and other traditional Japanese art, and was dropped from my list. I should add that for people we really wanted, in whatever field, I would sometimes, if time permitted, take them on day-long outings to Point Reyes and its beaches in Marin County, in the belief that anyone who, after viewing that sublime and spirit-lifting scenery, chose to live anywhere else was not someone we wanted anyway. Day-trips to the Point Reyes beaches, and sometimes overnights (one of the older students had a cabin on Tomales Bay), were a regular feature of our graduate program in Chinese art, well remembered by those who went through it—I used them to foster a spirit of community among us. One particular walk, northward from McClure's Beach to the tip of the peninsula, with Tomales Bay on the right and the Pacific Ocean on the left, often seen through fogs and on less fortunate occasions through downpours of rain, came to be known among the students as The Long March.
So, what were my students and I up to during these three decades, apart from going on great outings? We were, collectively, carrying the study of Chinese painting into new areas of scholarly inquiry. Others in other places were doing the same, but we were generally recognized as being on the forefront of these new approaches. Berkeley in 1965, when I began here as a professor, was still in the middle of the FSM or Free Speech Movement, with all its ramifications. From the balcony of my office upstairs I could look out over Campanile way, and between Wheeler and Dwinelle Halls, past Sather Gate to Sproul Hall Plaza, where demonstrations were often going on; or I could watch processions of protesters carrying banners and shouting slogans making their way along one or another of the campus avenues. There were times when tear gas fumes made it difficult to stay outside, even so high up; at other times I would join the demonstrations as a faculty observor, presumably able to give a neutral account of any clash between students and police.
One of many positive side-effects of this politicizing chapter in U.C. Berkeley's history was in turning the students, and some of the faculty, in new directions of humanities research and writing. More than before, students were saying: We don't want to go on hearing about art as a self-contained system, about style and iconography and so on; we want to learn about it in a social-political context. One of my best students in my early years—named, coincidentally, Suzanne Cahill—I always referred to her, when announcing exam results, as Suzanne no-relation Cahill—she's now a professor at U. C. San Diego—married a radical young man who was contemptuous of her studies of art, asking: when did art ever put food into people's mouths? and she wrote me asking: How can I reply? I did the best I could, but I had little respect for Marxist art history as it was practiced at that time, and I was still basically committed to the kind of stylistic studies I had learned from my teacher Max Loehr, so I wasn't of much help. But by 1971, when I held a seminar leading to a notable exhibition at our University Art Museum titled "The Restless Landscape: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Period," I was ready not only to turn loose the remarkable group of eight graduate students who made up that seminar—all women, as it happened--but to encourage and advise them in the new directions they were determined to take. The highly innovative essays published in the catalog included Yoko Woodson's on "The Problem of Western Influence," Patricia Berger's on the paintings in the light of late Ming intellectual history, Judith Whitbeck (from the History Dept.) writing about "Political Culture and Aesthetic Activity" in late Ming, and Marsha Weidner, who had come to us from Mills College, on "Regional, Economic, and Social Factors in Late Ming Painting." With virtually no support or models in previous writing, but with considerable help from Berkeley faculty in other areas of Chinese studies—I remember that Fred Wakeman was especially supportive and helpful--they explored these new aspects of our subject in ways that are still recognized as ground-breaking. Yoko Woodson has for years been a curator at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco; Judith Whitbeck has had a career of teaching and curatorship, most recently at the Chinese Scholar's Garden on Staten Island in New York; Marsha Weidner (now Haufler) holds the prestigious professorship at the University of Kansas and has herself organized ground-breaking exhibitions on such themes as Chinese women painters and later-period Buddhist painting; and Patricia Berger is my distinguished successor here at U.C. Berkeley.
{breal}
I should add that we were able, with very modest funding, to make a trip to the East Coast to see collections and choose pieces for our show. Because of the leftward leanings of several of the seminar members, and the general reputation of Berkeley in those years, East-coast colleagues were referring to us, as I learned later, as "Cahill and his Red Detachment of Women."
Another, similar seminar-exhibition project carried out a decade later, in 1981, produced an exhibition and scholarly catalog titled "Shadows of Mt. Huang: Chinese Painting and Printing of the Anhui School." Again, there were eight highly qualified graduate students who wrote the catalog essays on this important regional school in 17th- 18th century Chinese painting; and again, five of the eight students have gone on to professorial or curatorial careers—Cheng-chi or Ginger Hsu at U.C. Riverside, Hiromitsu Kobayashi at Sophia University in Tokyo and Haruki Yoshida as a curator in Ashiya, Julia Andrews at Ohio State U,, and Scarlett Jang at Williams College. Their essays related Anhui-school painting to the merchant culture flourishing then in that region; to painting theory of the time; to the spectacular scenery of Huangshan or Mt. Huang, the subject of many of the paintings, and to the technically and artistically high-level pictorial woodblock printing for which the Anhui region was famous in Ming-Qing times; again, these essays were recognized by scholars in the Chinese art field as well as in other fields as innovative and exemplary. Moreover, a colleague in Chinese history carried a copy of the catalog to Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province, where he was to spend a year doing research, and it caused quite a stir. In fact, the first international symposium on Chinese painting held in China, in Hefei in 1984, devoted to the Huangshan or Anhui School, was a response by the Chinese specialists there to the surprising news that foreigners were seriously interested in their local school of painting. It produced in itself a major exhibition, which supplemented ours by showing works in Chinese collections that had of course been unavailable to us, and it generated a new wave of activity and publication.
For roughly the first half of my three decades as professor, I lamented the lack of a special seminar room for East Asian art history and archaeology, similar to the ones that most of my colleagues and their students enjoyed at Michigan, Harvard, Princeton, and other universities, where specialist reference books could be quickly available, rare and fragile books kept safely, and large folio volumes of plates spread out on tables. During that period I and my students made do with a room adjacent to my office, room 419 in this building; this was the now-famous 419A, connected to my office by a closeable window. The walls of 419A were lined with books from my own library for the use of grad students in East Asian art, along with boxes of exhibition catalogs, offprints, and xeroxes; also in the room were our photo archive for Chinese painting, and a big collection of old and rare Chinese collotype reproduction books of Chinese paintings, which I had assembled in bookstores in Japan and China over many years. (These last I gave last year to EAL, to fill out their already-rich collection of them.) To speak of the importance of these may seem old-fashioned in this digital age, and the time may come when one can call up all these images on one's computer screen. But that time is still far off, and meanwhile there is no substitute for spreading the books open on a large table to consider together the works of an artist, or pictures of a given subject, or whatever other visual materials your research sends you to.
419A is now only a memory, Camelot-like for some of us. But around 1980, largely through the efforts of David Keightley, I was at last given my seminar room—partly as a reward for turning down an offer from Harvard. (I don't say that to boast; many Berkeley professors have been tempted in this way. I once suggested that we should form a group on the model of Alcoholics Anonymous in which those undergoing the temptation could be counseled by those of us who had gone through it and resisted, or gone there and come back.) The new seminar room was located first in the basement of Durant Hall, home of what is now the East Asian Languages Department (Oriental having become an unpolitic word) and is still the home base of EAL. Later the East Asian art seminar would be moved to the basement of California Hall and combined with what was the newspaper and periodical room in much more spacious quarters. I'm happy to say that an East Asian Art and Archaeology Seminar is an important feature in the plan for the new building; it will receive heavy use from my successor in Chinese art history Patricia Berger and her students, our Japanese art history specialist Greg Levine and his students, and a great many others from inside and outside the University. It will be, I believe, the largest and finest facility of its kind West of the East Coast, and it will draw researchers in East Asian art studies from all over the world as a place where they can work on the highest level, surrounded by a remarkably complete assemblage of the materials they most need—and, nearby, a community of eminent scholars in related fields with whom they can consult.
Among those who deserve our gratitude for the support and planning up to now of the new EAL building, foremost probably is the late Changlin Tien, with whom I had the pleasure and honor of working for some years on our China exchange program and others--a wonderful man. David Keightley and David Johnson of our History Department devoted a lot of their time and energy over some years to heading the planning committee, and many others have played important roles in it.
If my talk today has sometimes slipped into a kind of elegiac tone, as if lamenting a bygone past, I can only protest that that's a common failing of old people, who turn their pasts into golden ages. Some student or professor who is active here now will no doubt slip into a similar tone when reminiscing, a half century or so in the future, about the great days of U.C. Berkeley and its East Asiatic Library in the early two-thousands (or whatever people decide to call these years.) That person's fond reminiscences will no doubt be about the exciting time when EAL, after years of planning and through the great generosity of many good friends, was able at last to move to its new building, and about the golden years that followed. That will be a really good story, and I'll end by thanking everyone involved for their help in making it a true story.
Thank you.
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