Cotton Kills
Music Theory
From "The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century," by The New Yorker's music critic, Alex Ross:
Charles Seeger was father to folk legend Pete Seeger. CALIFORNIA wrote about the Berkeley Department of Music here.The story begins, oddly and aptly, with Charles Seeger, the future dogmatician of American Popular Front music, who came out to the University of California at Berkeley in 1912 to start a music department. The idea of teaching music in a university was novel enough that Seeger’s work fell under the purview of the Department of Agriculture. He held classes in a YMCA, in the Hearst Mining Building, and in a “smelly old house” on Bancroft Way. With no curriculum in place, Seeger felt free to introduce unorthodox ideas. He presented his theory of “dissonant counterpoint,” with its anticipations of twelve-tone practice, and also exposed students to early music, folk music, popular music, and non-Western traditions.
Berkeley in Books: Evacuation Order #19
Julie Otsuka has been awarded the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic. Otsuka, a California native who studied art at Yale and later took her MFA at Columbia, opened her first novel, When the Emperor was Divine, in Berkeley, a few months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when, by Executive Order, all Japanese and Japanese-Americans were being removed to internment camps. Here's how it opens:
The sign had appeared overnight. On billboards and trees and the backs of bus-stop benches. It hung in the window of Woolworth's. It hung by the entrance to the YMCA. It was stapled to the door of the municipal court and nailed, at eye level, to every telephone pole along University Avenue. The woman was returning a book to the library when she saw the sign in a post office window. It was a sunny day in Berkeley in the spring of 1942 and she was wearing new glasses and she could see everything clearly for the first time in weeks. She no longer had to squint but she squinted out of habit anyway. She read the sign from top to bottom, then still squinting, she took out a pen and read the sign from top to bottom again. The print was small and dark. Some of it was tiny. She wrote down a few words on the back of a bank receipt, then turned around and when home and began to pack.
Berkeley in Books: From Here to Hollywood
Radiance, the new novel by Louis B. Jones, has as its protagonist a 42-year-old UC Berkeley physics professor by the name of Mark Perdue. Prof. Perdue is past his academic prime (physicists, they say, do their best work in their twenties) is touched by Lyme disease and dread. Thus afflicted, he takes his daughter, Carlotta, to Hollywood so she can experience a three-day ego-building "Celebrity Fantasy Vacation." Imagine.
Los Angeles is a fatiguing, jarring place, during a hectic weekend for a visitor to be deprived of his accustomed daily routine, far from his usual comforts, far from the assigned parking place in the faculty lot in Berkeley, far from his regular pastry while he hides out at Cafe Med off-campus and afterward his own office's tarnished sticky doorknob, far from the pervasive campus air of eucalyptus, the smell of blackboard-eraser talcum in the corridors...
Jones, incidentally, is the son-in-law of the late Oakley Hall, the novelist who directed UC Irvine's esteemed writing program for many years. We ran a story about Hall in the Jan/Feb 2009 issue. (See: "The Writers' Guide").
Berkeley in Books: Brautigan on Upper Sproul
The following passage comes very near the end of Richard Brautigan's 1971 novel, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966. In fact, it is the end, minus the final line. (Can't give it all away.) Brautigan, whose best-known works are the novellas, In Watermelon Sugar, and Trout Fishing in America, died in 1984, at age 49, in Bolinas, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His papers are housed in the Bancroft Library.
I've spent the afternoon at a table across from Sproul Hall where they took all those hundreds of Free Speech kids off to jail in 1964. I've been gathering contributions for The American Forever, Etc.
I like to set my table up around lunch time near the fountain, so I can see the students when they come pouring through Sather Gate like the petals of a thousand-colored flower. I love the joy of their intellectual perfume and the political rallies they hold at noon on the steps of Sproul Hall.
It's nice near the fountain with green trees all around and bricks and people that need me. There are even a lot of dogs that hang around the plaza. They are of all shapes and colors. I think it's important that you find things like this at the University of California.
Berkeley in Books: Whisky Oui Oui
A new title from Berkeley-based publisher Heyday has landed on the desk. It's called Paris Portraits by Harriet Lane Levy, who graduated from the University of California in 1886 and became part a small but influential group of Bay Area Jewish women--including Alice B. Toklas, Levy's O'Farrell Street neighbor, and Gertude and Sarah Stein, from Oakland--who were part of the avant-garde in 1920s Paris. Readers of the magazine may recall Levy's story from last year's Books issue.
This slender volume comprises a collection of sketches long housed in the Bancroft Library but never before published. Among the stories is the delightful one called "Supper in Montmartre," about a drunken soiree thrown by Pablo Picasso in honor of Henri Rousseau. Also attending were the playwright Guillaume Appollinaire, the painter, Georges Braque, and Gertrude Stein, who also described the party in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
Levy's account is more vivid. In it, she describes being hailed by Picasso from across the room as Braque plays the accordion. "You. Sing us a song. A song from America." After some confusion and hesitation, Levy rose to her feet and sang out:
Oski wow wow
Whisky wee wee
Ole Muck I
Ole Ber-kley i
California
Wow!
"The full applause of Montmartre rewarded me," wrote Levy, who died in 1950 and bequeathed her art collection, including Matisse's The Girl with Green Eyes (not a portrait of her), to the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA).
Berkeley in Books: A View from the Hills
It's been a while since we've run a "Berkeley in Books" item, and so high time we did. It was ten years ago that the paperback edition of Dave Eggers's best-selling memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius first appeared in paperback. The still-young Eggers has since gone on to publish other great talents at his independent and iconoclastic publishing house, McSweeney's, as well as many big, important books of his own, including What is the What? and Zeitoun. As if that weren't enough, he has also become a force in education with his now-national writing workshop and tutoring outfit/pirate supply shop, 826 Valencia. In the following passage from AHWOSG, Eggers, a midwesterner, describes the three-bridge vista from his sublet in the Berkeley Hills, a view he calls "lobotomizing."
We are in California, living in Berkeley, and the sky out here is bigger than anything we've ever seen--it goes on forever, is visible from every other hilltop--hilltops!--every turn on the roads of Berkeley, of San Francisco-- We have a house, a sublet for the summer, that overlooks the world, up in the Berkeley hills; it's owned by people, Scandinavians, Beth said, who must have some money, because it's all the way up there, and it's all windows and light and decks, and up there we see everything, Oakland to the left, El Cerrito and Richmond to the right, Marin forward, over the Bay, Berkeley below, all red rooftops and trees of cauliflower and columbine shaped like rockets and explosions, all these people below us with humbler views; we see the Bay Bridge, clunkety, the Richmond Bridge, straight, low, the Golden Gate, red toothpicks and string, the blue between, the blue above, the gleaming white Land of the Lost/Superman's North Pole Getaway magic crystals that are San Francisco... and at night the whole fucking area is a thousand airstrips, Alcatraz blinking, the flood of halogen down the Bay Bridge, oozing to and fro, a string of Christmas lights being pulled slowly, steadily, and of course the blimps--so many blimps this summer--and stars, not too many visible, with the city and all, but still some, a hundred maybe, enough, how many do you need after all?
