LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 2002

New & Notable Books of Local Interest

Hudson River Pilot: From Steamboats to Super Tankers By Captain John G. Hamilton Black Dome Press, Hensonville, NY $21.95

If you’ve ever wondered about those mighty vessels sliding up and down the Hudson—where they come from, where they’re going, what they’re up to—spend a few hours with Hudson River Pilot. Part memoir, the book recounts the 88-year-old author’s own history navigating tugboats and day liners between New York City and Albany. You learn to respect the tugs Hamilton piloted, boats with names like Perseverance, Hercules, and Jumbo that broke ice, towed flotillas, and moved any big vessel they hooked up to. You share the experience of piloting the day liner Peter Stuyvesant on a typical summer day in the mid-1940s as Hamilton describes passing under the George Washington Bridge, loading passengers at Newburgh, and backing into a berth at Albany to ready the liner for morning departure.
But Hudson River Pilot is more than memoir: Hamilton also documents the commercial traffic of an earlier Hudson. You learn about the grand 19th-century steamboats that lured passengers away from train travel with tiers of staterooms, lofty saloons, and women of easy virtue. You learn about the shifting fortunes of the companies whose business was the Hudson and about the wrecks and collisions that ruined pilot reputations.

A caveat: This is a book so chockfull of information that it’s more suitable for dipping into than sustained reading. That said, there’s probably no better guide to the trade history of the Hudson than Hamilton, who was born with river water running in his veins. His family has earned its living from the Hudson ever since 1712, when James Hamilton built sloops to carry cargo to and from Kingston.

—Jane Smith

Art is Work By Milton Glaser Overlook Press, Woodstock, NY $85.00

If you have an interest in the progression and evolution of modern art, Art is Work deserves to join the ranks of your collection. A word shrouded with insecurity, ‘art’ is analyzed and labeled differently by Woodstocker Milton Glaser. For the sake of argument, he would prefer it called ‘work’, and I couldn’t agree more.

Art is Work is a comprehensive look into the mind and archives of one of the greatest designers in the History of Art. Beautifully printed with the full progression from concept, to sketches, then to final product, This Glaser retrospective gives the reader a look at some of the wittiest solutions that ever faced the design world—graphic or otherwise. Mr. Glaser has seen and done more than most, ranging from his iconic black-silhouetted Bob Dylan poster in 1966, to the oft-imitated ‘I Love New York’ logo that is as much New York as Mickey Mouse is Disney, to the complete graphic overhaul of the Grand Union grocery chain’s generic food brand.

The art community is always looking for the modern masters; I believe that Milton Glaser should be considered in this context. He has contributed so much to our subconscious and conscious conception of design that we are all inspired and influenced, willingly or not, by his wide-ranging talent.
In Art is Work, we finally have a book that gives us a body, name, and story behind some of the most well recognized design of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. You will, by taking the tour of his art, agree with Glaser that art should indeed be viewed as work. This attitude, which seeks to restore a populist streak to the highbrow visual medium, is, like the book itself, in the words of Glaser, “something for which we have been waiting for a long while.” A must buy for anyone who is interested in great ideas and flawless execution.

—Zachary Pullen

Transforming History: A Curriculum for Cultural Evolution By William Irwin Thompson Lindisfarne Books, 2001 $16.95

Education as a force in shaping the evolution of global consciousness lies at the heart of this curriculum reform tract. Cultural historian and philosopher William Irwin Thompson, author of more than a dozen books and founder of the counter-culture think tank The Lindisfarne Association, is one of the foremost advocates of inserting the on-going saga of environmental pollution into the artificial yet necessary “grand narrative” of history. In teaching this legacy, he recommends that educators replace the notion of “civilizations”, “nations” or “empires” with that of “cultural-ecologies.” Drawing on memories of his own early education, his studies in divergent fields of thought, and experiences as faculty consultant to East Hampton’s Ross School (dedicated to preparing children for citizenship in our 21st-century, international community), Thompson presents a history curriculum for children ages five through sixteen. He recommends that students skip senior year and go straight to a good liberal arts college, work, or apprenticeship under a mentor other than parents or former tutors. His audience is mainly those interested in progressive homeschooling, which Thompson views as “a trope for the transmission of history from one generation to another.”

Sketching out his thesis in two prolix, introductory chapters, Thompson divides the history of human consciousness into four cultural-ecologies, further configuring these in “fourfold patterns,” each aligned to corresponding characteristics within six taxonomies: ecology, economy, polity, religion, morality, and works of art. The epoch-encompassing cultural-ecologies he proposes include the Riverine, in which Neolithic villages transformed into cities; the Mediterranean, characterized by the expansion of city-states into empires; the Atlantic, which witnessed the rise of industrial society; and the Pacific-Aerospace, the age of interplanetary exploration. Thompson hopes to promote the understanding that each cultural-ecology “has had its landscape, its form of pollution, its positive or unconscious episteme [ways of knowing or producing knowledge] that united literary and mathematical narratives, and its mode of religious experience, with its characteristic way of encountering good and evil.”

Since Thompson’s integrated study departs from anthroposphic theories developed by Waldorf School originator Rudolf Steiner, as well as from the a-theology of Buddhism, one needs an advanced degree to keep up with his ideas and references, for example to the philosophical works of Heidegger and Foucault, cybernetic-biology promulgated by Gregory Bateson, and advanced communication theory of Marshall McLuhan. But his later chapters, particularly “Homeschooling: An Outline for a New Curriculum,” offer practical advice in more down-to-earth language, such as how to introduce and situate on a cultural-ecology timeline world wars, the rise of technology and mass transit, skyscrapers, and phenomenon such as jazz and Disney. Before attempting Thompson’s praxis (i.e., putting theory into practice), homeschooling parents might read and discuss Transforming History: A Curriculum for Cultural Evolution in study groups.

—Pauline Uchmanowicz

Trine Erotic By Alice Andrews Vivisphere Publishing, 2002 $15.00

What a gem of a book New Paltz writer (and Chronogram editor) Alice Andrews has produced in her debut novel, Trine Erotic. In all ways, Trine Erotic is no ordinary first novel. Composed of a trilogy of stories-within-stories, its content is rich and familiar to us, and presented with a deft hand. Set in Upstate New York and Manhattan, the novel explores the relationships between its characters—a wonderful mix of lively, talkative, well-educated New Agers, artists, parents, professionals, academics, cultural rebels and blue-collar workers—and their sense of themselves, which is shaped as much by place as by cultural milieu.

And this is a novel full of surprises, all carefully shaped and utterly believable, as the main characters (many of them women/writers/mothers)—in the 10 or so separate but interwoven stories contained within the novel’s three sections (or novellas)—wind up, in later stories, being each other’s creators or characters.

Trine Erotic is dedicated, in the author’s words, “To every woman’s desire and the art within her. And for alpha males everywhere.” As such, the novel explores the myriad reasons and ways in which women may come to love—and to write—through the lenses of evolutionary psychology, and more loosely evolutionary theory. (Simply put, evolutionary psychology is the theory that our minds are the products of our ancestors’ adaptations to their environment.) But Andrews makes it clear that it’s not just about what evolution has handed us, say, with respect to how women and men relate today; but that we still have choices to make in our human interactions, for instance, as to whether or not we follow memes. (As Andrews explains in her book, “a meme is the cultural equivalent of a gene—an element of a culture that is passed on by non-genetic means, especially by imitation, like: ideas, tunes, fashions, and customs.”) When, for example, the rather listlessly married Sarah, in the story “Soft Kill,” reads an essay about the sudden cultural shift away from the meme against adultery (the result of Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky), it forces her to reconsider where she stands in relationship to her own husband and an old love.

Perhaps most importantly, Andrews knows—beyond how to fashion language and structure prose, both of which occur playfully yet flawlessly throughout Trine Erotic—that there is always an intimate relationship between writing and romance and sex, although it doesn’t always necessarily occur in that order. The urge to write mostly does come from the same deep, mysterious place as the urge to make love, as a character comments upon in the chapter “Sex Energy.” And it is always words from which love grows, and love out of which words find their shapes and arrange themselves, often simultaneously, sometimes rather messily, but always reaching nearer to and grappling harder with the truth than you could ever do without either one of them.

And, on a personal note (since Trine Erotic is a novel that is, after all, in the words of its author, “alive. It is constantly changing. Your reading makes it change”), I must say that I find it equally compelling and refreshing, not only to see women characterized as creative beings in every possible sense, but to see devoted mommies—albeit mostly of the single, creative, thinking type—portrayed as also being the greatest of all hotties. Who says that after kids and divorce the only meme that’s left for a woman to follow is that of the selfless, two-dimensional soccer mom? Touché!

—Susan Piperato

Sounds of the River: A Memoir By Da Chen HarperCollins, 2002 $25.95

When Da Chen left his tiny town of Yellow Stone for the enormous, cosmopolitan campus of Beijing Languages Institute, he was only 16—a bundle of contradictions, hormones, dreams, and curiosity. China itself was in a whirlwind of change, experimenting with an Open Door Policy that, as one of his new roommates pointed out, wasn’t quite open yet. Students from some 50 nations packed the campus; the Chinese teens were officially forbidden to socialize with them and risk malign Western influences.

Hah. Never is the utter foolishness of Big Bureaucracy more evident than when it tries to reign in contradictions, hormones, dreams, and curiosity. (Think, “Just Say No.”) Amidst a tangle of restrictions aimed at rendering them well-educated Party cattle, young people from all the corners of the globe still managed to connect in a grand cross-pollination of customs and ideas, affairs, and schemes. Into all this, Da Chen brought a consuming dream that kept him afloat and in motion: He would learn English. And out of the aforementioned bureaucratic mishegoss, he wrings spiritual and artistic riches, approaching everything—a hostile teacher, a plate of roast goat, the Chinese equivalent of a keg party—with the same clear-eyed intensity, dry, sly wit, and open heart. He’s great company, which makes or breaks a memoir; he refuses to be daunted, which is the only reason you and I are blessed with the opportunity to share his adventures. (The author now resides in the Ulster County village of Highland.)

While the Chinese government was perpetually vilifying the West and doing its best to prevent any meaningful, unscripted interaction—and many of the scenes will give you a very particular understanding of what’s wrong with life under such a regime, beyond anything any pundit ever dreamed of—the Chinese people weren’t fooled. The desire to get to America, the Beautiful Land, was a fine dream indeed. Making it a reality took the cojones of a matador and the finesse of a diplomat—and the boy from Yellow Stone turned out to have both. It all makes for a great tale, well told—readers who haven’t yet read Chen’s earlier work, Colors of the Mountain, will find themselves compelled to get their hands on it to find out what happened next.

Da Chen will read from Colors of the Mountain on Saturday, February 23, 4 pm at Ariel Booksellers in New Paltz. For more information, call 255-8041.

—Anne Pyburn

Blue Cliff Record: Zen Echoes By David Rothenberg, Foreword by Sam Hamill Codhill Press, 2001 $15.95

A poetic translation of the Chinese Pi Yen Lu, 10th and 11th-century canonical texts in the Ch’an Buddhist tradition that would become Zen in Japan, the name Blue Cliff Record refers to the place where it was written. Compiled from what author David Rothenberg describes as originally “cases” followed by the “baffling commentaries” of Chinese Buddhist masters, replete with “recurring images, obscure footnotes, inclusion of ancient verse and references to distant miracles,” this poetic adaptation may serve as a training manual for rigorous Zen study—or simply a joyous encounter with words. Though Rothenberg, founding editor of the deep ecology journal Terra Nova and contributing editor to Parabola magazine, whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation and Wired, spent years studying classical tales and teachings to arrive at his “echoes”, he offers them as “moods” or “models” of situations rather than solutions to age-old dilemmas.

Of 100 poems compiled here, scarcely any exceed a single page in length. They read like classical koans, which in the forward to this collection poet and translator (notably of ancient Chinese poets) Sam Hamill likens to Zen riddles designed to encourage mindfulness by breaking down “defensive logic” and other “barriers” to the awakened life. As with much classical Chinese poetry, Zen Echoes draws from elemental symbology and the natural world in rendering imagery. The so-called five elements of life—water, earth, wind, fire and iron (metal)—visit these pages at nearly every turn. For example, in “The Iron Ox,” depicting a would-be clash between swordsmen and poets, water and wind meet as “billowing whitecaps fill up the sky,” just as “[m]ix dirt in the river,/ shock the body awake” in “Cold Cloud Swim.”

Among the fauna readers encounter here are a turtle-nosed snake, famous dead cat, roaring tiger, elks and rhinoceros. Rain, weeds, moonlight and snowflakes merge with human sustenance in poems such as “Snow in a Silver Bowl,” “What’s for Lunch?” and “Flip the Teapot.” Disguised as “peach flowers floating on water,” “wild ducks coming together,” or “one hand uplifting and one pressing down,” philosophical questions permeate Rothenberg’s verses, leaving one to ponder: Which way is the correct one? Where does peace reside? Of what use is my life?

A refreshing change from dense, bombast poetry penned in what versifier David Budbill (likewise championed by Hamill and published under the editor’s Copper Canyon Press label) calls “An Age of Academic Mandarins,” Zen Echoes embraces ordinary language—clear and companionable. Poems to be pondered like lines of a hymnal or contemplated with the attitude of daily zazen (awakening consciousness through posture, breathing and meditation), Rothenberg’s lyrical study will reward the body, mind and spirit.

—Pauline Uchmanowicz

The Saga of the Empire State Music Festival: A Personal Recollection By Harold Harris GreyCore Press, Pine Bush, NY $29.95

In the 1950s a musical miracle happened in Ellenville, of all places. For four magical summers, the Empire State Music Festival came to town and so did world-class conductors, composers, musicians, and dancers. Their names read like a Who’s Who list of cultural heavyweights in the mid-20th century, like: Leopold Stokowski, Leonard Bernstein, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Earl Wild, George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins.

How in the world did this happen—in Ellenville? As author Harris explains, it was partly because the old NBC Symphony of the Air, at loose ends, was looking for a permanent summer home like the one the Boston Symphony Orchestra established at Tanglewood. And partly because the residents of Ellenville simply willed the festival into life. In under three months, the town transformed an old farm into a performing space where thousands could watch and listen. Local contractors built blacktop roads, ran plumbing, and installed power and telephone lines. Arts and entertainment bigwigs from New York City attended, but so did ordinary folks from the Hudson Valley. They bought scores of tickets, welcoming the chance to give their children a taste of high art.

The musical miracle didn’t last long, sadly. But the tale of the brief life of the Empire State Music Festival makes for absorbing reading, especially the many New York Times reviews and reproductions of the festival programs Harris uses to tell the story. The author, a longtime Ellenville resident, donates all profits from the sale of this book to the Ellenville Public Library, which houses these primary documents.

—Jane Smith

The Fish Are Laughing By Will Nixon Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Award Series, 2001 $6.00

Winner of the Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Award for 2000-01, this collection of 19 narrative poems celebrates the beauty of the Catskill Mountain region beloved by its author, as usual, with a dose of politics sprinkled over the terrain. A freelance environmental journalist, Will Nixon has merged these concerns in past feature-writing he has completed for The Adirondack Explorer, Mother Jones, Utne Reader and New Age Journal, as well as in his previous poetry volume, When I Had It Made (Pudding House Publications). Trenchantly rendered autobiography, another familiar characteristic of the poet’s style, likewise laughs in his newer poems, as deliberately self-conscious as they are expansive.

The titles alone nudge readers as to what’s in store, for instance: “Mad Chemist,” “Eskimo Pie,” “The Leak” (a double-entendre) and “Please Don’t Eat My Painting.” As a basement scientist during childhood, the narrator of “Mad Chemist” reckons with the bacteria of a “pooping” cat, bad odors, and swamp water mixed with Mountain Dew. Embracing as he typically does all five senses, Nixon turns the comedic drama on its head, arriving at an apocalyptic, environmental epiphany in “the secret of the snapping turtle:/ sipping chemicals, glowing green, breathing fire.”

“The Philosophy of Margaritas,” with its “winter thistle locked mouths,” “icicle daggers” and “garbage sack like a bean bag chair,” rambles in drunken wordplay while heading for the mysteries of the cosmos, “shooting past Jupiter, racing for the stars.” But the truer philosopher lurks in more straight-faced entries, such as “After the Playhouse,” which contemplates loss of spirit suffered in the aftermath of Vietnam. Similarly, “Lucky”, which tells the story of a brother returning from Vietnam, recalls the emotional intensity of musician John Prine’s classic ballad “Sam Stone.”

The poems that satisfy above all here are those concerned with what Nixon knows best, rural landscapes graced by mountains, trees and waterfalls. “Strange Mountain,” which like Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” presents lines composed from a mountainside looking down, weds a studied view of nature to the intervention of human objects, as in “yellow warblers singing under the power line,” “two turkey vultures/ on the fire tower with blistered red heads,” and “a prison town” visible below the timberline.

A painstaking yet whimsical record of personal landscapes that border rural environs threatened by our human intentions, The Fish Are Laughing doesn’t “pretend to paint the sacred,” though offering a hopeful vision in the midst of “wav[ing] in the turkey vultures to polish off the remains.”

—Pauline Uchmanowicz

Bridging the Hudson: The Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge and Its Connecting Rail Lines, A Many-Faceted History By Carleton Mabee Purple Mountain Press, 2001 $24.00

The Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge took decades to create, and for decades afterward it defined and shaped life in the Hudson Valley. Completed in 1888, the bridge was employed as a commercial traffic route until 1974, when the financially troubled Penn Central Railroad abandoned it after a disastrous fire. The bridge has stood unused ever since, recently coming under the aegis of the group Walkway Over the Hudson, which is in the process of attempting to turn the span into a pedestrian thoroughfare.

Railroad Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Carleton Mabee, seduced at an early age by the sound of the whistle, takes the bridge as his protagonist and draws together the tales that surround it into an epic that deepens and broadens the reader’s understanding of what it’s like to live around here, how it got that way, and why.

In Mabee’s hands, even subject matter that could have been as mundane as a stack of tax forms for anyone without a great interest in engineering lives and sweats, and bleeds; you can feel the excitement, intellectual challenge, hubris, and occasional bouts of despondency that radiated from the creation of the first-ever bridge across the lower Hudson. That good old golden rule of writing—show, don’t tell—is too often neglected in the writing of history; Mabee never forgets it, letting the long-departed folks who were there speak through him without condescending or imposing himself. And he ferrets out the details that make it sing: the power struggles and personalities, the sideshows and the ironies, the grandiose processions and the youths hawking “pieces of the cornerstone” to the gullible crowd.

The building of the bridge is an epic tale in itself, from the first surfacing of what was considered an outlandish notion to the first train crossing 34 years later. Eight men died on the job, a dynastic marriage was made between the dashing young engineer and the daughter of one of Poughkeepsie’s more prominent families. Mabee doesn’t shortchange either the hoi polloi or the Italian migrant laborers, and he’s got a way of extracting the really gorgeous quotes from long-ago accounts. In the winter of 1877, the air resounded with the “musical clink of stone cutters tools”; some young rowdies whose shenanigans endangered bridge workers were persuaded to desist by “smart applications of leather laid on hard and rubbed in well.”

From that distant era to the post-abandonment wrangling over the monolith’s fate, there are gems on every page. Whether you love trains, the Mid-Hudson Valley, the river itself, or just good stories, the book’s a treat.

—Anne Pyburn

Hooray for Love! A Lyrical Journey to the Source By Frank Crocitto Candlepower Communications, 2002 $16.95

Author Frank Crocitto’s latest book, Hooray for Love!, begins with a laugh and ends with a call to action. Working the room with the eloquence of a Shakespearean suitor, the sly cunning of a confidence man, and the fervor of an old-time tent revivalist, Crocitto leads the reader on a tour of the many types and guises of love, lulling the reader with sweet words awakening them to unexpected possibilities. How very much like Frank.

Part memoir, part poem, part allegorical play, part vision of a new world, part explication of the teachings of George Gurdjieff, and part celebration, Hooray for Love! is broken up into seven small chapter-length sections, each standing alone—attentive readers will be familiar with some of the pieces, which were originally published in Chronogram. Together, however, the chapters add up to more than the sum of its parts.

The book opens with the plain-spoken poem “She”, about his wife playing with their grandson in the garden, as Crocitto confesses that he’d rather live in a deceit of love than none at all. “Just yesterday/ she left me a note/ saying how she loved me/ and how she is me./ And though/ I know it to be so,/ I also know/ that if it weren’t true/ I would have wanted her/ to write it anyway—.” Crocitto, while aiming for “a practical way to love and magnify that love throughout a hungering universe”—his description of Gurdjieff’s work—knows that love, like charity and the other virtues, begins at home.
Reading the diverse chapters of Hooray for Love! is like listening to an album by a singer who is comfortable in a variety of styles and tempos: jazz, opera, Gospel. Frank is equally at home in verse or prose, and his story, “May I in the Merry Merry,” about two young lovers—a debutante and, of course, a young Italian Casanova from Brooklyn—is a gem, recalling O. Henry’s breezy wit and Joe Mitchell’s pitch-perfect portrayals of sidewalk life in New York City.

Toward the end of Hooray for Love! Crocitto writes, “As for myself, I’ve been in love with the idea of love for a long time. Since I was a kid. And when you dwell on something for a long time, good or bad, eventually there’s an outcome.” The outcome, in this case, is a book modeled on experience, written with wit, and aiming toward the triumph of love.

—Brian K. Mahoney

Dyed-in-the-Wool: A Hudson River Poetry Anthology By Elizabeth McGuffey, editor Vivisphere Publishing and WetPaint Publishing, 2001 $14.00

Twenty-three writers who live in or have lasting ties to the Hudson Valley showcase the evolving genealogy of the regional poetry scene in this anthology of their work. Editor Elizabeth McGuffey, who did the watercolor cover art for the book, comes from a background of painting, music, and literature, and is known for producing readings and spoken-word events in the area.
Much sparkles in Dyed-in-the-Wool, with a few dull spots. Alongside strong selections from Ulster County denizens J. J. Blickstein, Dina Pearlman, Sparrow and others who performed at the first annual Woodstock Poetry Festival last August, one finds poems by contributors related to McGuffey by blood or long-lasting friendship, the inclusion of some a stretch in terms of literariness or ties to the region. Still, enough readers reconciled these editorial decisions to nearly sell out the volume’s first printing.

Influenced by European and South American poets, the work of Blickstein, a native New Yorker and editor of the award-winning Hunger Magazine, merges lyric, hermetic and surrealist traditions, causing images to simultaneously expand, pause and leap, as in this stanza from “Vision of Salt & Water”: “Everything corrodes here,/ the peach, the car & kidney—/even the concrete is brittle.” Dina Pearlman, visual designer at Bard College and mainstay of the Woodstock Poetry Society, travels from the Caribbean to Mexico, China to Turkey in her poems, posing questions about cultural identity as a historical force: “Was it Genghis Khan or pogroms/ That added to the soup of ancient blood?” (“Multiculturalism on the Silk Road”).

The best-known writer in the anthology, Phoenicia resident Sparrow has published in The New Yorker and other notable journals, while his 1998 release Republican Like Me: A Diary of My Presidential Campaign (Soft Skull Press) remains popular with jaywalkers, anarchists and other cultural dissidents. His anti-poems collected here—part fortune cookie wisdom and part political critique—recall the sly hermeticism of Nicanor Parra. Dispensing with the form it names altogether, Sparrow’s “Dinosaur Haiku” resembles a variegated string of beads, with rain, ants, an egg, two pinecones, a white cloud and fog dotting made-up names for the beasts—hyperodapedon, albertosaurus and dropsonisaurus, which singularly occupy intermittent lines.

Less than objectivity permits me to see my former student Nate Kassel as the most promising writer in the pile here. The twenty-two-year-old creative writing and painting major at SUNY New Paltz from Honeoye Falls, New York, brings fascination of the natural world accompanied by rural knowledge to his solid verses. His fine ear and eye congeal best in landscape pieces like “Sparrows and Jays,” in which attention to melody and detail sing: “He laid fine stone to beat the weeds,/ and still, underneath a wide piece of slate/ his footprint stands cold and long,/ pressed through trails of worms/ and sprouting yellow plants.”

McGuffey, who plans to release a collection of poetry by women on the Straw House label in the near future, deserves credit for her debut outing in the poetry-publishing arena.

—Pauline Uchmanowicz