Literary Supplement: Briefly Noted Local Books

In Blue Mountains: An Artist’s Return to America’s First Wilderness
By Thomas Locker
Bell Pond Books, Hudson, NY $18

Artist Thomas Locker turned conventional children’s books on their head when he began publishing books of traditional landscape painting and packaging them as stories for children. Since 1984, when Locker, a Stuyvesant resident, published Where the River Begins, he has produced more than 25 books for children that combine luminous reproductions of his paintings executed in the Hudson River School style with simple stories for kids.
In Blue Mountains, Locker’s latest effort, tells the story of an artist who travels into the “blue mountains”—Thomas Cole’s term for the Catskills—in order to rediscover the landscape and invigorate his paintings. The format of the book, with text on the left hand pages and Locker’s reverent landscapes on the right hand of the oversize pages (8½” x 10¾”), catapults the paintings off the pages, transforming a children’s book into a glimpse of the sublime. With In Blue Mountains, Locker faithfully continues his quest to put awe and wonder back into books for kids, and for that we should be grateful.

New Suns Will Arise
By John Dugdale;
Text Edited by Frank Crocitto
Hyperion, New York, NY $24.99

Chronogram columnist Frank Crocitto, in his introduction to New Suns Will Arise, notes the spiritual affinity between the cyanotypes of photographer John Dugdale and transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau. “The spirits of John and Henry David dance through the many-tiered glory of the universe, a confluence that lifts us from the mundane to the transcendental fields where joy is on every flower’s face,” writes Crocitto. Crocitto also chose selections from the journals of Thoreau to accompany Dugdale’s photos.
Dugdale, an internationally-renowned photographer who bought a farmhouse in Ulster County in the late 80s, lost 80 percent of his eyesight to an HIV-related disease, cytomegalovirus retinitis, several years ago, leaving him with only a crescent of sight out of the corner of his left eye. Far from being an impairment, Dugdale’s loss of sight has allowed for greater imaginative scope in his pictures, changing familiar portraiture and landscape into dreamy blue snapshots in cyanotype. Whether shooting posed still lifes or the Ulster County landscape, Dugdale’s photos possess a softness, an acknowledgment of the delicacy of life, human and otherwise, that resonates with the humanism of Thoreau. The cyanotype process used by Dugdale was invented in 1842 and uses iron salts instead of silver developer, giving the prints a distinctive blue hue.

The Catskill Forest: A History
By Michael Kudish
Purple Mountain Press, Fleischmanns, NY $45

Michael Kudish, a professor of forestry at Paul Smith’s College, has spent the last 30 years studying the forest diversity of the Catskills. The Catskill Forest: A History is the result of that research, most of it Kudish’s own fossil analyses and tree species distribution mapping, coupled with the history of the forest industry and human habitation from secondary sources. Kudish’s book is also chock full of maps, from historical maps of bluestone quarries and shale pits to the full-color, 36”x 27” fold-out map detailing the first, second and third growth forests on one side and the past and present forest industries on the other.
If you’re interested in knowing which peaks are capped by northern oaks and which by balsam fir, this is just what you’re looking for. If you want to know what the oldest tress in the Catskills are (eastern hemlocks) and how old they are (only 400 years old), this is also the book for you. If you’re interested in a sentimental history, or light reading about the Catskills, this is not the book for you.
Kudish is a scientific historian—he combines the rigors of both disciplines and creates a meticulously-researched work that deserves to be placed alongside Alf Ever’s The Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock as indispensable reading on the hills in our backyard.

Monastic Gardens
By Mick Hale
Stewart, Tabori & Chang, New York, NY $35

Monastic Gardens is the first book internationally-acclaimed garden and architectural photographer (and Columbia County resident) Mick Hales has both photographed and written. In it, Hales travels behind the mysterious aura and high walls of monasteries across the US, France, England and Wales and into the peace and pleasure of monastery gardening. From honey-making monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky to a kiwi orchard at the Notre Dames des Gardes Abbey in St.George des Garde, France to orderly rows of vegetables at the Convent of the Incarnation in Oxfordshire, England, Hales’s photographs bloom off the page like fruit themselves, accompanied by the words of monks and nuns who piously tend the gardens. As one nun in England explained to Hales: “We are striving for humility in our lives, to draw closer to our God. Gardening and my spiritual life go together.”
In his introduction, Hales notes that from almost the very beginning of Christian monasticism, gardening was part and parcel of the monastic experience. St. Anthony, reported to be the first Christian monk (270-350), became a hermit and gardener in the Egyptian desert after he gave up his worldly possessions. Hales’s book, with 130-color photographs of monastic gardens is like a family album, looking through it, you see the similarities and different strains of the family lineage of where Christianity meets the soil. Except this family album, instead of blurry snapshots taken by Uncle Larry, has a master image maker behind the lens capturing indelible moments from a mysterious world.

In the Valley of the Gods: Journals of an American Buddhist in Nepal
By Steve Clorfeine
Station Hill Press, Barrytown, NY $14.95

Near the end of In the Valley of the Gods, Steve Clorfeine quotes Trungpa Rinpoche: “Let the world come to you.” Clorfeine is referring to the Buddhist injunction to let go of the layer of self that intervenes and interprets experience; instead, letting the world come to you, instead of chasing after it, allows one’s perception to deepen. It might be said to be analogous to the difference between the tourist and the traveler/seeker. The tourist is constantly running after the world, trying to consume and possess it in two weeks time and preserve it in memory like a rare jewel, while the traveler/seeker immerses him or herself in a place and seeks an awareness of it, in that fleeting moment, understanding the idea of possession is impossible. Very Buddhist, that.
Steve Clorfeine is no tourist. After his first trip to Nepal in 1995, where he directed Naropa’s Study Abroad program, Clorfeine recorded Kathmandu Journal, a spoken word narrative of his three-month stay in Nepal’s capital, with musical design and accompaniment by Steve Gorn. Kathmandu Journal comprises the first two chapters of the new book, sort of whetting the appetite for Clorefeine’s return to Nepal three year’s later to study with Venerable Thrangu Rinpoche and make a pilgrimage to Guru Rinpoche Cave in the foothills of the sacred Yolmo valley.
At first, reading Clorfeine’s prose, it struck me as simple. He writes without adornment, recording his impressions in a matter-of-fact way. But these impressions accumulate; Clorfeine slowly draws the reader into the rhythm of life in Nepal, its rituals and its absurdities, like he himself opens up to the awareness of Nepali life.
—Brian K. Mahoney