James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Angry Fourth-of-July Blog

Details

Created on Friday, 06 July 2012 01:06

Written by James Cahill

Angry Fourth-of-July Blog

Today’s blog is about something I read this morning that made me angry, and that has been bothering me all day, so that I feel compelled to write a blog and get my anger out into the open. What I read was the lead editorial in this morning’s NYTimes, written by  Kurt Andersen, evidently a popular novelist and essayist whose writings, however, I haven’t read, excepting maybe a stray New Yorker piece or two. His editorial is titled “The Downside of Liberty,” and makes what I take to be a totally misguided, deeply wrong-headed argument. He begins by telling how an audience member at a lecture he gave asked him: “Why had the revolution dreamed up in the late 1960s mostly been won on the social and cultural fronts--women’s rights, gay rights, black president, ecology, sex and drugs, rock ‘n’ roll--but lost in the economic realm, with old-school free-market ideas gaining traction all the time?” Andersen, having what he calls “an epiphany,” answered that it wasn’t contradictory at all, but all of a piece. “For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won.” A kind of “grand bargain” was reached by which “the youthful masses of every age would be permitted as never before to indulge their self-expressive and hedonistic impulses. But capitalists in return would be unshackled as well, free to indulge their own animal spirits with fewer and fewer fetters in the form of regulations, taxes or social opprobrium.”

It’s hard to imagine a more false and pernicious equation than this. I looked up Andersen on the internet, and learned, as I expected, that he was born in 1954 in Omaha, Nebraska, and so was too young to know what was going on in the 1960s, and far away from the action. Nobody who was an active and reasonably open-minded academic-intellectual in Berkeley in the 1960s, as I was--still a fairly young professor, engaged enough with the new movement and close enough to students who were more actively engaged to be able to understand and appraise it--nobody around here then could have made this profound blunder. My own belief about the relationship of the two large trends Andersen writes about, expressed several times in my writings, is that even as we watched with pleasure and approval the new opening up of American society, or big segments of it, we feared also that there would be a backlash--and so there was: Reagan, Nixon, the lifting of curbs on predatory capitalism, and so on, down to George W. Bush and the awful eyes-wide-open blunders and misdeeds that have brought us down to where we are now. This was no “grand bargain,” but the opening up of an age of open warfare.

I trust that a great many other people of a certain age will see the wrongness of what Andersen wrote, and that many will write protest letters, so that the Letters to the Editor columns tomorrow and after will be full of them. This, written rather for my website, is my angry and impassioned contribution to that collective refutation.

The profound difference between the movements or grand phenomena that Andersen tries to equate is simple and basic: the difference between do-your-own-thing attitudes that recognized also the rights of others and were careful not to infringe on them, and the all-for-me, to-hell-with-you attitudes that have motivated and enabled the Wall Streeters and one-percenters to amass their obscene fortunes--favoring (as more and more evidence reveals) gain for themselves and their companies over what is good for their investors--and all the rest. Of course there are exceptions, on both sides; but not enough to disturb the large pattern. Even when not overtly moralistic, the liberated young of the 60s and early 70s didn’t adopt a more-for-me-at-your-expense attitude either. And that is exactly what motivates the big-money people that Andersen mistakenly balance them with. A movement that still keeps some moral sense vs. one that has renounced it in the pursuit of self-enriching: what could be clearer. We could have had one without the other; that we fell victim to the second is the tragedy of our time.

All for now. I have another subject, based on an early-morning waking-up remembrance, that will be the subject of the next one. Hint: they were small, leather-covered, with a distinctive and not-unpleasant odor, and they did a lot to start my intellectual life off in a good direction. And their initials were L.L.L.

James Cahill, July 4th, 2012

P.S. In my previous, “Angry Fourth-of-July” blog, I predicted that the NYTimes would be receiving lots of angry letters from readers of the wrongheaded editorial by Kurt Andersen that appeared on their editorial page on July 4th. And today, sure enough, the Letters to the Editor section on their editorial page is headed by four of them, all making essentially the same point that I did: that Andersen’s argument “that left -wing social movements and right-wing economic greed are ‘flip sides of the same libertarian coin,’ forged in the late 1960s” (as one of them summarizes it) is deeply wrong because it ignores the huge contrast between the relative harmlessness of the one and the pernicious effects of the other. Three of the four are written by academics. They read like cut-down versions of longer letters, and are representative, I’m sure, of many more that could have been printed. I hope that Mr. Andersen and all the readers of his misdirected editorial receive the message: those of us who lived through that time know better than to believe his contention; we know that (as the first letter concludes) “Left and right libertarianism are conceptually similar, but not morally equivalent.”

Back in Berkeley Blog II

Details

Created on Sunday, 01 July 2012 23:18

Written by James Cahill

Back in Berkeley Blog II

I haven’t written a blog for quite a while, and have no clear idea about a direction or a title for one, hence the above.

I suppose I should begin by joining the chorus to say: Bless Justice Roberts. He did the right thing for once. (Maybe more than once, I can’t recall.) This may save his reputation. I remember an old Japanese story that we read when I was in the Japanese language school, about a man who was saved from hell by his single good act, rescuing a spider, whose thread saved him from dropping into the fiery depths. Justice Roberts rescued a great many people from illness without health insurance, and deserves credit for that.

I am more settled in my Berkeley house, sitting at a long desk in the front room facing the street, typing at one computer (the right, or north, or Berkeley computer, which has been here a long time) while at the other end of the desk is my left, or south, or Vancouver computer--I had it shipped down,  not trusting (from experience) people who told me that everything on one computer could be transferred to another. Now I can roll back and forth in my wheeled deskchair between the two, getting different data and images and advancing different projects on each. An old person’s solution, but OK for me. The two computers talk to each other only with difficulty --I have told people that they are like one’s present and former wives--one isn’t sure one wants them to talk to each other.

I am working, of course, on more video-lectures. Now that our first PRV series is pretty much complete (and accessible for free viewing both here--see at right--and on the website of the IEAS, as well as on others that we are trying to expand, especially so as to make it more accessible in China)--now that this series is complete, we will soon launch another, titled Gazing Into the Past: Scenes from Later Chinese and Japanese Painting. Each lecture in this new series will be about an artist or two, and they will mostly be centered on particular works, albums or handscrolls, that require many images for full viewing--images that I have in old slides, and that are not generally available. Much of the value of the lectures continues to be their making these thousands of images accessible for viewing, study, and eventually downloading--we are working on that. The first series will presumably be made available by the IEAS on disks, more convenient for that use, and for teaching. I mean to finish as many of these as I can in my remaining years.

The second lecture in the new series, by the way, will begin with an explanation of why I chose the image and music that begins and ends them--a detail from the “Portrait of the Artist’s Friend I-an” painted in 1799 by Lo P’ing (Luo Ping) that was the last plate in my old Skira book, and playing behind it, the “Forlane” from Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin, played by my daughter Sarah especially for this new series. These, I try to explain, somehow evoke the right mood of highly sophisticated nostalgia, conjuring up the past in a deeply moving way, that is the underlying theme of the new series.  I hope that writing about it like this builds anticipation in many of you. Responses to the first series have been quite enthusiastic, and continue to come in--nearly all, however, from people other than scholars and students in the Chinese painting field in the U.S., who are un-mysteriously silent about it.  I will explain that cryptic comment some other time.

To end today’s blog, an old army story that I can’t recall telling in print before. I recently used, as I seldom do, the word “feasible” in one of my writings, and remembered this event. When I was studying Japanese at the University of Michigan in 1944-5 in the Army Japanese Language School, our unit was made up of educated men, many of them college students and professors, who had been sent to the school because of their special aptitude for learning a language quickly--the Army needed Japanese linguists. Our unit was also, however, a regular Army company with a captain, I forget his name, who was an old Army regular without special educational or intellectual credentials; and this put him at a disadvantage in talking to his “troops,” who were sometimes derisive in a way that made me a bit uncomfortable. Once, standing on the stage before us all and explaining why he was not yet ready to grant us the passes that would turn us loose for the weekend, he said: “Men, I’ll give you those passes when I see feasible.” A long pause, and then someone in the back said, loudly: “Has anybody here seen Feasible?” Much laughter, and cries of “Where’s Feasible?” “Have you seen Feasible?” And the joke went on, to the embarrassment, I’m sure, of the captain--pictures of “Feasible” drawn on blackboards, and so forth. Someone suggested that our supply sergeant, Sgt. Schnee, who was German and spoke limited English but was good at his job, and who was away on leave, might be the Feasible the captain was waiting to see. So when Sgt. Schnee returned, someone asked him, “Sargeant Schnee, are you Feasible?” He looked bewildered, and replied, “Me? No! I’m just fine!”

End of story, and of blog. Soon it will be July 4^th, and I will celebrate it in a place that, unlike Vancouver, shoots off fireworks on that day, or night. I used to go with my family to the top of a building on the Berkeley waterfront to view the fireworks across the Bay. Now I will watch them on TV. But with a deep sense of being back in my real spiritual home.

James Cahill, July 1^st, 2012

Back in Berkeley Blog

Details

Created on Saturday, 16 June 2012 05:41

Written by James Cahill

Back in Berkeley Blog

More than a month has passed since I posted my previous blog, announcing my permanent move back to Berkeley and delivering some other bits of news. I am getting  close to settled in my comfortable old house in the best flatland neighborhood of this great city, within walking distance of the Gourmet Ghetto (Cheezeboard,  Peet’s Coffee, Saul’s Delicatessen, Chez Panisse--where my collaborator Rand Chatterjee, visiting Berkeley from Vancouver to set up the back-and-forth communications system for continuing our video-lecture project, took me and an old & cherished student, Sheila Keppel, to dinner--at the downstairs restaurant , that is. Very much enjoyed, more so that when I ate there before, long ago. As I tell people, it’s great to live in a city where, as recently as when this restaurant was founded (and I remember when),  had enough people in it who knew who Panisse was to allow that naming of the restaurant. (Alice Waters also has a Café Fanny, elsewhere, and for a time had a Marius café or something like that nearby.)

Something new posted for the interested among you to read: the China Review International’s latest issue (vol. 17 no. 3) has as its  lead review one of my book Pictures for Use and  Pleasure, the one on vernacular painting. After reading it with much anticipation and not being as pleased with it as I had hoped (although it isn’t a negative review, and says polite things about the book) I wrote a long Letter To the Editor--which won’t be printed, they  don’t print responses; but you can read it on this website as CLP 198, one of the CLPs under Writings of JC. I recommend it to interested people as another example of a Chinese historian’s reluctance to accept visual evidence as real scholarly data--nothing that isn’t published already in a book, they feel strongly, is really reliable. I cite there earlier examples of this attitude that I’ve encountered, and could have cited another: the early China specialist Noel Barnard complaining, as we worked on the Freer bronze catalog,  that studies of style are all “purely subjective, with no solid basis.”

(But, as noted there, Max Loehr famously used them to chart the early development of bronze décor, against the counter-beliefs of the book-readers, before archaeology proved him right, and them wrong.)

Our new video-lecture series, titled Gazing Into the Past: Scenes from Later Chinese and Japanese Painting, will soon be launched on the web, with the first half-dozen or so  lectures posted on the IEAS  website and on this one, for free viewing,  like the PRV lectures. And another dozen or so are far along in preparation, and should follow shortly. The first GIP will be about a great landscape painting by Wang Meng, shown at length with many details, along with a few related works for context; the second GIP will be a long (slightly more than an hour) talk, with  lots of images both of his paintings and from photographs of him and others, about this recent Shanghai artist who became my good friend, and why I think he merits more attention than he has received as an artist. Then lectures on Huang Gongwang, Shao Mi, the Hikkôen album in the Tokyo National Museum (in two parts, each an hour or so long, showing the  sixty leaves of this remarkable collective album,  with  lots of  comparative material; and everybody’s favorite album by  Shitao, now whereabouts-unknown but viewable in great slides & details I  made from it long ago. And  more will  follow, on a major but little-known Shen Zhou album, Zhou Chen’s great “Beggars and Street Characters” album/handscrolls, and lots more, including several on Japanese Nanga painting. All will feature the treasury of images I’ve amassed over the decades in the form of super-sharp color slides mostly made by myself and not accessible anywhere else. And watch especially for the ten-minute-long, me-on-camera bit that opens the second GIP lecture, identifying the painting and the music used for our opening and closing credits, as well as the major pianist who plays the music, and relates why I chose these.

Other news--and there is more--I will save for future blogs.

James Cahill, June 15^th, 2012

PS. Those of you in the Bay Area who enjoy innovative music and poetry and other performances in a highly unusual and glorious setting (a columbarium designed by Julia Morgan) should not miss Sarah Cahill’s Garden of Memory event on Thursday of next week, June 21st. For information on how to get there, how to buy tickets in advance, etc. go to http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/251984. Children are welcome, dogs not. You will never forget it, and like a great many other people, will keep coming back in future years. You will find me there, although not climbing through its multi-storey spaces, where the groups will be performing, as I once could.