Why Climb? Victorian Mountaineers and Mountains
By Catherine W. Hollis, Ph.D.

Leslie Stephen, Victorian intellectual and father of Virginia Woolf, was one of mountaineering's early pioneers. His collected essays on mountaineering, The Playground of Europe (1871), answer the question—why climb?—by exploring the intellectual and aesthetic pleasures of mountain climbing.

"Where does Mont Blanc end, and where do I begin?" Stephen asks in the essay "Sunset on Mont Blanc." When Stephen considers his relationship as a climber to Mont Blanc, he is thinking of the mountain less as an inert object to be conquered, and more as a part of the same network of natural objects and forces that make up his own body and consciousness ("not the less interesting because a part which I am unable to subdue to my purposes"). Although Stephen anthropomorphizes Mont Blanc by identifying a kinship between climber and mountain, he also recognizes its resistance to such an identification: the climber, Stephen argues, must adapt to the mountain (and not vice versa) by learning how to negotiate safely the so-called "upper world." The climber's awareness of the mountain's resistance to the merely human is key to surviving its rigors. The reward for doing so is an "esoteric" knowledge of the mountain unavailable to the Alpine tourists in the valleys below.

Like the Victorians, we too have a cultural obsession with mountaineering, generated in part by the May 10, 1996, tragedy on Mount Everest and Jon Krakauer's best-selling book about it, Into Thin Air. A return to the sport's Victorian origins reframes our own fixation with mountaineering; a fresh reading of Leslie Stephen's philosophy reminds us to approach the mountains with respect and humility.

Catherine Hollis, Ph.D., teaches in the Fall Program for Freshmen through University Extension
and has published articles on writers Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, and Virginia Woolf. She is also a mountaineer with climbs in the Sierras, the Cascades, Alaska's Wrangell / St. Elias Range,
and the Alps.

Come to Our Free Event
Why Climb? Victorian Mountaineers and Mountains
Thursday, October 16: 6:30–8 pm
Berkeley: UC Berkeley Extension Center, 1995 University Ave.
Call (510) 642-4111 to reserve your place and reference EDP 018424.

Why Does Umm-Kulthoum Sound Nothing Like Wagner?
By Saed Muhssin

Both western classical and Arabic classical music traditions are sophisticated, rich, and have deep historic roots. They offer extremely different listening experiences, but they did not always sound as different as they do today. How and why did this change?

It's intriguing to ask why western classical music sounds so fundamentally different from Arab and other Asian and north African classical music when they share the same roots in Greek, Roman, and Persian music? Two main departure points in the development of European music eventually led to the extreme difference.

The first divergence began in medieval times and has to do with tones. It was the European preference of polyphony, multiple independent sounds occurring simultaneously in the music, over monophony. As a result of this choice the set of available pitches and the relationships between them needed to be simplified to avoid strong dissonances (clashes) between pitches occurring simultaneously in the music. The last word on the western tone set was said by Bach, who developed the modern western tonality (known as equal temperament) and composed a series of works demonstrating its critical importance to the evolution western polyphonic harmony: the twelve compositions for the "well-tempered clavier."

Arabic music still employs monophony, and its aesthetic sophistication relies on the intricacies of the tone set, which is not limited to 12 pitches, but actually has over 96 distinct pitches.

The second choice is in performance practice. Western music gradually moved away from memorization and improvisation, toward thoroughly composed, written, orchestrated, and eventually conducted music. This made possible the grand works of Beethoven and Wagner and many others. The ability to perform the written music with great accuracy is demanded from the performer.

In the Arabic as well as many other Asian traditions, the performer is required to interpret a composition, learn it, and make it her own. It is an entirely different approach that produces an entirely different and individual sound.

Saed Muhssin, M.F.A., is a translator, instructor, and musician. In addition to teaching Arabic, he translates film, print, and Web media, and works as a consultant on Arabic language and culture.

Come to Our Free Event
The Traditions of Arabic Music
Thursday, October 23: 6:30–8 pm
Berkeley: UC Berkeley Extension Center, 1995 University Ave.
Call (510) 642-4111 to reserve your place and reference EDP 018416.

 

The New Thieves
By Thaisa Frank

One night my husband said: You must learn to be like one of the new thieves—they never steal, they add. They enter rooms without force and leave hairpins, envelopes, roses. Later they leave larger things like pianos; no one ever notices. You must learn to be like that woman in the bar who dropped her glove so softly I put it on. You must learn to be like that man who offered his wife so gently I thought we'd been married for seventeen years. You must learn to fill me with riches—so quietly I'll never notice. After saying this he took a few of my scarves, put them around his neck, and lay back in bed. What can I give you? I said, what do you really want? Nothing, I can tell you about, he said.

The next day I brought home a woman in camouflage and made her lie her on top of our bed. She looked just like me and talked just like me and that night while I pretended to sleep, she made love to my husband. I thought I'd accomplished my mission, but as soon as she left, he said to me: I knew she wasn't you. I knew by the way she kissed.

I tried other things, but nothing fooled him—new shoes just like his old ones, scuffed in the same places, photographs from his mother, books he'd already read. He recognized everything and one rainy fall afternoon, when I was sure I couldn't find anything else to give him, I went into an bar with leather chairs and soft lights. I ordered a glass of chilled white wine, and suddenly, without guile, there was an instant understanding between me and the bartender. That night, while my husband slept next to us, he and I made love, and the next morning he hung up his clothes in my husband's closet. Eventually he moved in with us, walking like a cat, filling our rooms with his books and shoes. My husband never noticed, and now at night he lies next to us, thinking that he's the bartender. He breathes his air, dreams his dreams and in the morning when we all wake up, he tells me that he's happy.

Thaisa Frank, a two-time PEN Award winner, teaches in the graduate creative writing program at the University of San Francisco. Her third collection of fiction, Sleeping in Velvet, was published in 1997. She is the coauthor, with Dorothy Wall, of Finding Your Writer's Voice.

 

American Born Chinese: Gene Yang's Autobiographical Comix
By Hertha D. Sweet Wong, Ph.D.

UC Berkeley English Professor Hertha D. Sweet Wong reveals how the comic form can address serious content, including enduring concerns about identity, coming of age, and multiculturalism. Drawing on her book in progress on visual autobiography, she will focus on American Born Chinese, the best-known graphic novel by Bay Area comic artist Gene Yang. Discover how the interwoven narratives in Yang's autobiography in comic form frame, reframe, and unframe possibilities for Chinese American subjectivities—and why American Born Chinese was the first comic book to be nominated for the National Book Award.

This presentation is part of UC Berkeley Extension's Humanities Lecture Series examining the complex concept of identity in today's diverse society.

UC Berkeley Associate Professor of English Hertha D. Sweet Wong, Ph.D., is working on a book on visual autobiography. She specializes in American literatures, Native American literatures, autobiography, and visual culture.

Come to Our Free Event
American Born Chinese: Gene Yang's Autobiographical Comix
Thursday, October 30: 6:30—8 pm
Berkeley: UC Berkeley Extension Center, 1995 University Ave.
Call (510) 642-4111 to reserve your place and reference EDP 018408.

Faith and Creativity
By Linsey Crittendon and Eva Bovenzi

When St. Paul (or whoever wrote the letter to the Hebrews) wrote that faith "is the conviction of things not seen," he could have been describing the creative process. What writer has not faced the blank page, what painter has not come to the blank canvas, without—if not a conviction of—at least a very strong hunch about things not seen?

There is a common notion that believers hold certainty about what they believe. But the word "faith," as the writer of the letter to the Hebrews used it, would have meant something closer to what we call faithfulness—that is, an attitude, an action.

When we begin a poem or a painting or a short story, we don't know where we're going. As E. L. Doctorow wrote, writing a novel is like driving in tule fog; we see only as far as the headlights show us, but that's OK. That's as far as we need to see. By the time we've made it those three feet, the next three will be shown. Beginning a spiritual practice is similar. We may not have conviction, we may not know what we believe (or if we believe). We begin as if. Little by little, experience acts like those headlights, leading us on. Keeping faith, to a writer or painter or composer or musician, means showing up at the desk or in the studio or at the keyboard or in front of the instrument every day because, as Annie Dillard says, what if the muse showed up and you weren't there?

One evening some years ago, while on residency at an artists' colony, a writer went to a photographer's open studio. She and the photographer had both been at the colony for three weeks, and as she admired the finished prints mounted on the wall, she thought of her studio, where she'd yet to finish a single story. The photographer had accomplished so much! A wave of competitive jealousy, mingled with self-doubt, washed over her. And then she glanced at a heap of prints on the floor. The photographer said, "Those are all the wrong turns."

"Unseen" doesn't mean "invisible." Lindsey Crittenden started writing about a boy in a blue windbreaker standing in front of a carved wooden door and found she had a novel. Eva Bovenzi, when she began the paintings that became her series "Messenger," thought of angels' wings. Each woman "saw" something—or a piece of something—and set about to portray it in a process of discovery like that which leads each of them in their separate spiritual practices. If they'd seen through the tule fog to the finished thing, there would have been no point in undertaking the process, in trusting in what lay beyond those headlights. "Unseen" doesn't mean "nonexistent."

Eva Bovenzi, M.F.A., is a painter living and working in San Francisco. She is represented by Toomey Tourrell Fine Art in S.F. and has had her work shown nationally and internationally. Her show "Messenger" will be at the Graduate Theological Union in 2009.

Eva Bovenzi teaches several courses at UC Berkeley Extension this term. Drawing Fundamentals starts September 16. Color Theory for the Visual Arts starts September 18. Painting Workshop starts September 18.

Lindsey Crittenden writes and teaches fiction and creative nonfiction in San Francisco. She is the author of two published books, The Water Will Hold You: A Skeptic Learns to Pray (Harmony Books) and The View from Below: Stories, as well as essays, stories, and articles in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Best American Spiritual Writing, East Bay Express, and other publications.

Lindsey Crittenden teaches several courses at UC Berkeley Extension this term. The Craft of Writing begins September 15. Writing Skills Workshop begins September 18.

Come to Our Free Event
Faith and Creativity
Thursday, November 6: 6:30–8 pm
Berkeley: UC Berkeley Extension Center, 1995 University Ave.
Call (510) 642-4111 to reserve your place and reference EDP 018390.
For a copy of this lecture, please e-mail Ramu Nagappan.