James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Blog 2/12/2112: More American Funnies

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Created on Monday, 06 February 2012 15:44

Written by James Cahill

Blog 2/12/2012: More American Funnies

About the above title: I recently recorded one of my video-lectures--in the second series, to be posted later this year--under the title “Old American Funnies” (about Gelett Burgess, Clarence Day--his Scenes from the Mesazoic--and the main subject, the great George Price). I think I will continue using the word “funnies” for catch-all collections like that one of materials by myself and others that seem to me funny and worth making public. “Funnies,” by the way, used to mean what we now call the comics--when the newspaper came, I might shout “Give me the funnies!” And there I would find the Katzenjammer Kids, Maggie and Jiggs, Mutt and Jeff and the like. (No, not Little Nemo--I’m not quite that old.) (Is anybody else alive who can still sing “Barney Google”?)

This collection I’m doing now could be sub-titled: Jottings While Semi-watching the Superbowl. I spent some hours today doing that, feeling some kind of cultural obligation and a certain curiosity about what I would see after all the hyped buildup. I’ve watched a number of Superbowl games over the years, some of them with my two pairs of children--I could have watched all 56 if we’d had a TV back in 1956 (how symmetrical!) and if I wasn’t too busy traveling and doing other things back then. Anyway, today’s was intermittently absorbing, even exciting--by the end of the first quarter I had figured out who the guys in red and the guys in blue were, and had been introduced to a young man named Brady who came from what used to be, for me, nearby San Mateo and looked like he could have been one of my undergrads--and who has a good throwing arm. One bit I still don’t understand is when one of the players carrying the ball made a mistake? by falling back over the line into the endzone. (No, don’t write and explain.) I wrote my daughter Sarah tonight, among other things:

“Today I watched some of SuperBowl 56, with all the accompanying stuff. Not for long--I’m not a football fan, really. Madonna’s halftime show wasn’t bad--she looks OK for her age, and still sings with a real voice, unlike the three who did “America the Beautiful” & “Star Spangled B.” at the beginning, all using the new mode of singing, through your nose with a kind of country-music twang and rhythm. I’m old enough to remember when it was the fat lady Kate Smith who always sang that at the opening of major occasions. (“It ain’t over until the fat lady sings.”) She really did it right. As for the commercials: ads for current and upcoming TV shows, all done in the super-fast new mode, no image on screen for more than a second--they drive me crazy, make me feel I’ve lived too long. I’ve been so pleased by the responses to my video-lectures from people who appreciate their leisurely pace. I’m sure there are others who find them boringly slow, but they don’t write to me, and it wouldn’t bother me if they did. Before I started my series I wrote, on somebody’s advice, to that commercial company that sells sets of lectures, the Teaching Company, which has all those full-page or half-page ads in the newspapers & magazines advertising their latest series--with phony “special savings” all the time. Their lecturers, good people, all have to do half-hour lectures, never longer--well, those on music get three quarters of an hour so they can play some music. That would have driven me crazy. They never responded. Thank god.”

Anyway, I had lots of time while semi-watching the game to jot down ideas for things to put into another catch-all blog, to join quite a few random memories that I’d already listed for future use in my “Blogs In Progress” (mental echo: “Progs in Blogless”) folder. So, here we go.

- How to Eat Pomegranates With Children

No, I’m not being a learned sinologue--yes, I know about how pomegranates symbolize lots of children (lots of seeds, get it?). I’m offering, from my own distant past, advice on how children can have fun while eating pomegranates. You get some large plastic drinking straws and after biting the pomegranate seeds (of which you hold bunches in your mouth) and drinking the juice you shoot the leftover bits at each other through the straws. Advice: Yes, this really works, I’ve done it. More advice: wear old and easily washable clothes because the seeds leave tiny pink stains.

- Advice for the Mischievous Young, from Old Trickster

I’ve meant for some time to recall and relate some of the tricks that we used to play on each other in Duffey’s Boarding House, where I lived for several years as a high-school student and UCB undergrad--it’s a big old three-storey house on Benvenue Ave. near Dwight Way in Berkeley, which was a boarding house run by Mrs. Duffey. Here are a few, for starters:

- Sitting at a long dining table with a plastic tablecloth hanging over the sides: if those seated on one side conspire to do this, they can lift up the edge of the overhanging part in their laps in such a way as to form a trough, and somebody at one end pours a glass of water into it and all the others raise their parts of it so that the water spills down into the lap of someone unaware seated at the other end. Believe me, this works.

- The steps leading up to the porch at Duffey’s Boarding House were directly under a third-storey window, and anyone mounting them who was unaware of what DBH boarders enjoyed doing was in danger of being water-bagged--a paper bag filled with water, that is, dropped on him as he came up the steps. I could relate some waterbagging stories, but won’t.

- My close friend Stephen Green, who didn’t live there but came often to see me, was waterbagged once by my roommate Eugene Ainger. Stephen’s revenge, typically devious and literary, was to have printed many thousands of little cards, each about ¾” square, with green lettering on one side saying “PRAISE EUGENE” and on the other, “PRAISE HIM.” These we placed everywhere so that Eugene couldn’t get through an hour without finding one--in his bed, his desk, his books, his clothing--I worked in the kitchen, and put one in his mashed potatoes. They are probably still to be found sometimes in that old house (which is still standing.) Another of Stephen’s plans--I don’t remember whether he ever carried it out--was to buy a huge stone lion from a monument sales lot in Oakland and have it delivered and carried up the stairs and put in the middle of Eugene’s study--I think this was only an idea.

- It was Stephen also who found a pharmacy in Oakland where he could buy metal canisters with spray valves of ethyl chloride, which dentists used to use as an anaesthetic--it was called Laughing Gas, and when you sprayed it onto a handkerchief and inhaled it, you would get a sudden high, feel exuberant, and start laughing. We all had fun with this for a while until Eugene inhaled too much and passed out on the floor of his room, where he was found by Mrs. Duffey, who called the police, who hauled us all off to the police station to receive a lecture on how ethyl chloride, harmless as it might seem, sometimes led the unwary young to go on to try marijuana, which in turn would lead to . . .

(Some time I will relate how Gordon Cyr and I spent our graduate night from Berkeley High in the Berkeley jail. Also how Stephen Green and I hung a sixty-foot sign down the front of the Campanile, during our first semester at U.C. Berkeley. You will find some of that, and similar stuff, on this website under CLP 157, "The Pleasures of EAL: An Art Historian's Recollections.")

I think I related here already, so shouldn’t repeat, how Stephen and I were sign-alterers, adding letters and lines to signs to alter their readings. The sign on the BAND HOUSE at the Music Department on campus we altered to read BAWDY HOUSE--only a few strokes of the brush & ink--it remained that way for many years, may still be there.

Others, from my jottings:

- Some early American humorist, I don’t recall who, it could have been Robert Benchley, wrote an essay dividing all of mankind into two great groups according to the way they ate their breakfast cereal--this was back in the days before pre-sweetened cold cereals, when you still had to put sugar on your cornflakes or Rice Crispies or whatever. The Milquetoasts (there was a comic strip character then named Casper Milquetoast) poured the milk on first, and then sprinkled the sugar over it--they were the cautious and ineffectual types. The Wozzlers, by contrast, sprinkled the sugar over the cereal first and then wozzled it all down with the milk--they were the bold ones, the high achievers. I used to watch people at breakfast and amuse them--or offend them--by explaining this distinction.

This is running quite long--I still have some jottings of old jokes and comic memories to be expanded into other Funnies, but will save them for a Part Two.

2012/1/28 Blog

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Created on Sunday, 29 January 2012 02:46

Written by James Cahill

My good intentions about writing frequent blogs for this site, so that those who drop by (in cyberspace) to see what’s new here will be rewarded, haven’t been fulfilled much lately--I’ve been hard at work on the video-lectures, finishing up the first series (A Pure and Remote View) with a Postlude and two Addenda. Still, we have ambitious plans for big additions to this website coming soon, and I want today to call attention to a few of those, to set up a sense of anticipation in some of you.

First: I promised when we first launched our Pure and Remote View lecture series that notes for it, the ones I prepare and speak from, would be made accessible on my website. The Institute of East Asian Studies at U.C. Berkeley, under the direction of their publications editor Kate Chouta, is preparing cleaned-up versions of these with all the Chinese names properly in pinyin spelling and with characters added, my abbreviations (LS for landscape, etc.) spelled out, and my incomplete sentences finished. I appreciate this effort, and the version of my notes that she is preparing will be the official one, to be used by serious students and others not satisfied with scholarly sloppiness. (I mean by that, of course, looseness in form and language, not sloppy scholarship.)

But I have also given my aide Barry Magrill a set of old printouts of lecture notes, messy as these are, and they will be put into some kind of order-- by lectures, basically, but also, within each, original sets of notes followed by c&c (changes and corrections) “talking heads” (my term for me-on-camera openings etc.) and AddAudios--inserts in which I need to talk to accompany newly-inserted images, usually. These should be posted here before too long. Even though I make no claims for completeness or neatness or total accuracy, they may be of interest to viewers and users of this series.

Second: I have decided to “publish” here, chapter by chapter, the shorter book on Chinese erotic painting that began as a long sixth chapter of my Pictures For Use and Pleasure book on vernacular painting, then was split off (mostly so that the book wouldn’t embarrass owners who would feel awkward about leaving it around the house where their children would find it, etc.)--separated into a shorter book, tentatively titled Scenes from the Spring Palace: Chinese Erotic Painting and Printing. It was taken on for publication by the U.C. Press--it has in fact gone through all the process of outside readers etc. and in principle I should be going ahead with publishing it through them. But most everyone I knew there has retired, no one seems eager to proceed with it, they have reduced drastically the number of color plates I was to have allowed, and I am simply too old to submit to all the editorial minutiae and endless correspondence that a book publication requires--I did my share of those earlier in my life. All and all, I feel it will be better to “publish” it here, where I can use as many color illustrations as I want to, and where it will be accessible to everybody free of charge, like my video-lectures. The first chapter should be posted soon; it will lay out a general introduction to the subject, survey the old Chinese literature on Chinese erotic painting, and do all I can to set right van Gulik’s mis-direction of the whole topic into his beloved areas of esoteric Buddhism and Daoism--a misdirection that has been accepted and followed by too many Western scholars, even though it has no basis that I can find in Chinese writings. I will also find a way to “publish” the image library of high-quality Chinese erotic albums that I have assembled over the decades.

Third: For those of you who have been following the Pure and Remote View lectures as they have been posted on the web (and you are quite a large company by now, with many in China): the final lectures in this series, which follow the 12A-D treatment of Jin and Chan painting, will soon be posted: they are three. A Postlude titled “Arguing the Aftermath” treats the big problem of how we understand Chinese painting after Song, and why the great Song tradition of ink-monochrome landscape as practiced by great masters of the Academy, Xia Gui and others and a few of the Chan masters, was not really continued significantly in China in the post-Song period, but had important followings in Japan and, I believe, probably Korea as well (although I am less clear on this.) How are we to understand this failure of the Chinese to build on that great beginning? Watch the Postlude to see/hear my arguments about that. Then there will be two Addenda: A, which is my Freer Medal acceptance address, and B, which is a lecture on problems of authenticity and dating in Chinese painting, how to tell the best and earliest version of a composition from the later copies, and all that. And each of these Addenda will have a Part 2; and about those I can only say that they will be revelatory, maybe even explosive. I hope writing that will induce more of you to watch them, if only out of idle curiosity: what is he revealing, that he hasn’t already?

And Fourth: Work on our second series of video-lectures, titled Gazing Into the Past: Scenes from Later Chinese Painting, is already very much underway. The opening and closing credits for these will be accompanied by appropriate music, the “Forlane” from Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin--evocative of older music in much the same way our paintings evoke old styles--played divinely by my daughter Sarah. And I plan to incorporate somehow other music from this suite, in Sarah’s performances, into the lectures, when I want to present images without talking. (Yes, there will be such times, even for me.) We have several of this new series already finished in draft, and I have mapped out, collected images for, and even recorded the soundtracks for, another dozen or so already. It will be a while before my collaborator Rand Chatterjee can turn these into a form finished enough for posting; my intention, based on my own perception of my precarious state of health, is to get as many finished in draft as possible, so that they will live on, so to speak, after I can no longer continue working on them, and end up being posted even if it has to be posthumously.

So, those are the things you should expect to find posted on this website in the near future, things that some of you can anticipate, and be confident that your anticipation will be rewarded. And I wish a happy Year of the Water Dragon to you all. (I must do a lecture on dragon paintings, a subject I’ve neglected up to now, in my new series, to celebrate the year!) I will, by the way, be spending about two months in Berkeley from late February through March and most of April. I fly down on that day before the day on which, if children are both then, they will be like Frederick in The Pirates of Penzance. So there is a final puzzle, which G&S fans will know the answer to immediately; others can look it up.

Cahill’s Rule on Generosity

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Created on Sunday, 15 January 2012 05:44

Written by James Cahill

Cahill’s Rule on Generosity

Today’s blog is one for which the title and a draft have been waiting a long time in the Blogs In Progress folder on my computer screen (which I can never see without thinking: Progs In Blogless--that’s the way my mind works.) Opening the file, I see that I’ve put off posting it, partly out of a resolve to avoid moralizing, but partly also because I wrote out at different times several ways of introducing my theme, and couldn’t decide between them. This morning I’ve decided to use them all, so as not to lose any good ideas.

Basic statement: I’ve told both my pairs of children over the years, and numerous others as well, what I call Cahill’s Rule on Generosity. It goes:

If you can do something that costs you only a little in time and trouble and material possessions, and that can be of great benefit to somebody else: DO IT. Don’t even stop to think, just do it.

I hope that all my children, and grandchildren to whom I assume they’ve repeated it, have made this a principle in their lives. It has always seemed to me both beneficial and sensible: I’m not advocating any huge self-sacrifice, like that of Mother Teresa or of Albert Schweitzer (see below if that’s an unfamiliar name.) Just the general practice of Cahill’s Rule, at small cost to yourself and great benefit to others.

Now, what are the ways I’ve thought of introducing this idea? I’ll copy them all below, and add still another.

1. A young woman writes to thank me for spending an hour making up a reading list to help her with writing her thesis. I respond:

I taught my two pairs of children (by two marriages) the following rule about generosity: If you can, at small cost to yourself . . . (and so forth.)

2. I remember two notable examples of receiving such kindnesses myself during my student days. One was when I traveled to Boston from Ann Arbor, during my graduate studies there, and at the Museum of Fine Arts met their Japanese art curator, the late Robert Treat Paine (d. 1965, Fig. 1).

When he heard from me about my dissertation topic, the Yuan dynasty artist Wu Zhen, he went into a back room and came out with a copy of an old reproduction book published in Japan of an album attributed to Wu Zhen, and gave it to me as a present. This impressed me deeply, as Paine did generally—he represented the most positive example of the Boston tradition of younger sons of distinguished families (his had come over at the time of the revolution) becoming museum curators. I realized that the album was probably of small interest and value to him—he must have acquired it long ago in Japan—but was important to me: here was a good example of what would become my principle. The other was during my Fulbright year in Kyoto, when my growing enthusiasm for the works of the great Japanese artist Tomioka Tessai (a photo of him was in the previous blog) led me to visit his grandson Tomioka Masutaro at Tessai’s old home. (Fig. 2--Tomioka Masutaro is the person at far left--this is a photo taken many years later.) He presented me, an unknown foreign student, with a small but genuine Tessai painting, a picture of a rock, simple and unmounted but genuinely from the artist’s hand. Again, it was a small gift for him, a big one for me. And again it exemplified my principle.

3. The philosophical argument (this also copied from an old draft, never published):

When asked about my religion or basic philosophical belief, I used to say, somewhat facetiously, that I was Neo-Confucian. That was largely a joke, but with some truth to it. I have always used the Confucianist-Legalist distinction in my relatively few moralistic admonitions to my students and children. These two systems were antagonists in pre-Han China: the Legalists, with the First Emperor of Qin as their champion, tried to eradicate Confucianism by killing Confucian scholars and burning Confucian books. Resisting them, preserving the canonical texts and other early writings, and more generally working to preserve the wisdom of the past and pass it on to the future, became the mission of the Confucianists.

(PICTURES: FIRST EMPEROR’S TERRA-COTTA ARMY--he was a notable Legalist--VS. FU SHENG, an equally notable Confucianist.) (Later: no, I won’t reproduce those again, they are well-known, and can be seen in my video-lectures among other places--the picture of Fu Sheng ends several of them, including the last.)

Their representative image is this one, of the old scholar Fu Sheng, who survived the Legalist purge and spent his last energies lecturing to an emissary sent by the new Han emperor on a Confucian text that he had preserved by hiding it in the wall of his house.

One of the Legalist mottoes was: You win by doing things that your opponent would be ashamed to do. I used to quote that, and mention my candidates for Legalists in their particular fields, people who had won, for a time at least, by doing what their opponents were ashamed to do. In semi-popular music, it was Andrew Lloyd Webber; in recent Chinese painting, Fan Zeng, whose pictures featuring aggressive males striking poses and thrusting out their bearded chins made him popular among certain kinds of collectors. IMAGE OF FAN ZENG PAINTING (No, again I will save this for a future video-lecture--I don’t have a digitized image of one of his paintings handy.) And I used to cite the Han philosopher who was reputedly so un-generous that it was said of him: if he could save the whole world by giving up one hair of his head, he wouldn’t do it. He obviously represents the opposite extreme, within what might be called a system of proportional morality.

So, with these as examples, I would argue for a certain principle for determining whether or not to do some generous act. I  never advocated giving up a great deal of one’s time and possessions to save the less well-off, although in an abstract way I admired those who did that: an extreme example was Albert Schweitzer, who gave up his career as philosopher, musicologist, and organist to found a hospital in Africa and devoted his life to helping the people there. I admired that without wanting to follow his example; I made my charitable contributions without ever feeling the urge to give up everything for the less fortunate. My principle, which I have told over and over again to both my sets of children, always was this: (and then I repeated Cahill’s Rule.)

My firm belief in this principle, and my practice of automatically carrying it out when the occasion arises, has led me to take the time to respond as helpfully as I could to numerous notes from students of Chinese and Japanese art who wrote me about problems they were encountering in their research. I always shared all my research materials freely—that was a practice inspired also by the example and teaching of the Freer Gallery director Archibald Wenley (Fig. 3) who believed that the Freer and its curators were obligated to do that by the fact of the Freer being a public institution—he had been trained as a librarian, and brought the librarian’s principles to his job. I would come back from China with slides that I knew would be valuable for some colleague’s research, and make them freely available, or simply send them to her or him.

4. Applicable today: If Cahill’s Rule could be impressed on the one percent, the super-rich who have managed to secure for themselves a huge proportion of our country’s wealth, making the lives of the 99% a lot harder, they would voluntarily give up some part of their super-wealth to help out the less fortunate (who are not necessarily the less capable, or even the less smart.) I have told my boys, now young men, Julian and Benedict: that what we are seeing today is a breakdown or abrogation of the old social contract, by which those with more give up some of it to those with less. That has been an ideal, and in varying degrees and places a reality, for several centuries; but now it is being replaced by the principle that I think of (in a British phrase) as “I’ve got mine, now buzz off, chum!” If the 1% followed Cahill’s Rule, that is, they would join Warren Buffet and others in calling for their taxes to be raised so that they would be paying at least their “fair share,” with the loopholes and exemptions given them during the Bush Era dropped--they would accept this or even advance it, instead of spending huge sums to buy congressmen who will block any legislation in that direction.

So, there it is, Cahill’s Rule of Generosity, with four different introductions. And, to alter slightly what a character in Lewis Carroll says: What I introduce four times must be true.