Featuring Local Authors & Regional Interests
Hudson Valley Bookshelf

Dreaming Aloud
by Mary Leonard

Review of Liam’s Going, by Michael Joyce. 200 pages, hardcover. McPherson & Co., Kingston. September, 2002. $22.

Liam’s Going by Michael Joyce is not a novel to be read and dismissed with the word, “Whatever . . . ” even though Liam, the college-age son of narrators Cathleen and Noah, uses the word more than his parents can tolerate. Instead, this reader’s reaction was “What a read!” as I entered the journey provided by Cathleen, the poet, and Noah, the lawyer.

The literal journey is a car trip along the Hudson. Cathleen and Liam are driving to Liam’s college, his first year, and engaging in some important life and death discussions. The journey is also Cathleen’s nostalgic reminiscence and exploration of a brief affair she once had with Paul, a farmer who lived along the Hudson, at a time when Cathleen was studying Italian at a summer academy. Cathleen was happily married but crossing between the grief of losing a child and the birth of her son Liam. Twenty years later, she and he reflect together on what it means to love and live.

Joyce’s ability to slice in and out of time is reminiscent of the writing of Virginia Woolf, but Joyce’s technique seems more deliberate, more connected, like a dream that makes sense. At one point in the novel, Noah is reminiscing about a fateful meeting with a French woman who entered his life as a teacher and seductress. Her answer to Noah’s question about why she’s in this country is simply: “dreaming aloud.” In reading this novel, I found myself entering a dream state, interested always in the questions raised about life and death, love and loss, logic and poetry. When Cathleen’s lover asks her “Is there a poem for everything?” and she answers, “yes,” I believe this is also Joyce speaking, and I was pulled in by his lyricism, his poem for everything. Cathleen says, “ I have been blessed to write poems in an age when poetry doesn’t matter, when the purpose of poetry—as if such lofty phrases hold anything—becomes itself uncertain.” (Joyce himself teaches at Vassar and is acclaimed as an author of hypertext fiction.)

The characters in this novel explore the uncertainty of poetry and life with the self-confidence of style and grace. At times I was reminded of another writer who explores the same issues, Raymond Carver, especially in his short story, What We Talk About, When We Talk About Love, except in Liam’s Going, no one gets drunk and conversation is secondary to narration, reflection and language.

If you want to read a novel that unravels a plot or gives clear-cut answers, this is not the work for you. If you want to enter a journey with literate, reflective characters, then enter this journey of language, one where Noah says, “he wished he could know not the words that formed the thoughts, but the words which came along before them.”

Does anything happen in this novel of reflection, memory and language? Well, Liam crosses over into adulthood, as if, as his father says (he had) “gone off to his room as a boy to play video games and then….emerged as a full grown man.” But more importantly, like The Odyssey, this novel is a poetic journey of storytelling and the values that inform it. “Will we ever be done with stories, (Noah) wondered as he drove home to her (Cathleen) through the dawn.” I truly hope not.

FDR Leaves His Mark
by Cynthia Owen Philip

Review of The Stamp of FDR: New Deal Post Offices in the Mid-Hudson Valley, by Bernice L. Thomas. 88 pages, 16 color plates, map, paperback. Purple Mountain Press, 2002. $19.

The Stamp of FDR. by Bernice L. Thomas, an art historian, is a useful book. Laden with vintage as well as contemporary black and white pictures of the six federal post offices in which President Roosevelt was personally involved—Wappingers Falls, Beacon, Poughkeepsie, Hyde Park, Rhinebeck and Ellenville—it also has a sixteen glossy page insert of photographs in color. There are maps locating each of the buildings, too.

The Stamp of FDR is also a nostalgic book, as is befitting Thomas’s theme. As she firmly states in her introduction, these post offices “stand out as a group from the eleven hundred other post offices built during the Great Depression” because they represent the president’s personal and political vision —a respect for the past, especially the distant past of his own heritage. FDR exercised intimate supervision of the buildings’ construction inside and out. All were based on local Dutch Colonial models. All were built of local fieldstone. The Rhinebeck post office even incorporated stones from the 1700 Kip-Beekman-Hermance house after which it was patterned. (It burned to the ground in 1912, but rubble remained.) All of the interiors were embellished with murals depicting scenes of plentitude from the past. In Poughkeepsie, Hyde Park and Rhinebeck, they included references to Roosevelt’s own ancestry and actual scenes from his presidency.

I wish, however, that there were a short section placing Roosevelt’s interest in Dutch colonial architecture in the context of the late thirties when these post offices were built. Casting Roosevelt as one of the first preservationists, Thomas only briefly notes that pre-revolutionary houses in the area were then fast disappearing, either falling down or being torn down. Absent too, for me, was a serious evaluation of the artistic quality of the murals. Those at Rhinebeck and Hyde Park are certainly not among the best work of Olin Dows, the artist and, not incidently, the president’s distant cousin and close friend. They have always seemed to me a bit saccharine. Thomas does say that the rosy prosperous glow dominating all the murals was an attempt by FDR to give hope to an economically distressed people by emphasizing their continuity with a bucolic past. I simply would like somewhat more attention to be paid to the wider aspects of his “stamp.”

These are my small wishes, and, can, perhaps, be taken for an indication of the interest this book arouses. The Stamp of FDR is full of information and visuals that will delight the local history buff as well as the FDR fan.

Cicero, Tivoli, and Old Age
by Sylvia Elias

Thoughts about Essays and Treatises, by Cicero. Harvard Classics, 1914. Out of Print.

Neptune, the Fountains of Tivoli

Driving through the village of Tivoli, I noticed that the library was having a book sale. I have a special passion for library book sales. Sure enough, I found a few treasures: Gosse, 1927, Leaves & Fruits and Thackery in America, 1893, by Crewe. On my way out I noticed a large box on the floor with a set of books—about twenty, similar to an encyclopedia, so I took a minute to investigate. They were the Harvard Classics, published in 1914. I recalled somebody telling me that reading these books was equivalent to a college education. I picked up a few and bought one: Cicero’s Essay and Treatises. I knew of this one—it contained an essay on “Old Age.” I thought that now that I am in my 80s I might learn wisdom from this great Roman statesman who was born 106 BC.

Also, the name “Tivoli” had always interested me—an Italian one that’s so different than the ones nearby with simple names like “Red Hook” and “Kingston.” So I took out my Italy travel book and checked it out. I discovered that Tivoli is a city—once a favorite summer resort of Emperors, and famous for its fountains—not far from Rome. Tivoli was, in fact, where Cicero was born. What a coincidence!

Cicero’s essay on “Old Age,” about seventeen pages, takes the form of a conversation between Cato (the old man) and two young men who want to know of Cato “how it is that OLD AGE never seems a burden to him.” In a surprisingly organized, simple manner, Cato replies that men who have no resources within themselves find old age burdensome whereas. . . men who do have resources have no problem. He then proceeds to tell them how to deal with changes as they approach aging. First: Lack of employment gives one a new freedom to be welcomed. A time to study nature, a time for conversation with friends—enjoy new pleasures. Second: Enfeeblement “in your body will accommodate to other activities—more time for reading, studying, learning new languages.” Third: Lack of sexual pleasure. Cato is dismissive: “never had pleasure. . . glad to be rid of this.” Fourth: Death is not to be feared—your spirit will join loved ones.

Cato grudgingly admits that old men are “fidgety, fretful, ill-tempered, disagreeable and even avaricious,” but insists that these are faults of character and not faults of life changes. What comes through in this essay is Cato’s constant plea for learning—study Greek and Latin, study nature. In today’s terms: exercise your brain. Like a lamp, it needs oil. For some reason—women are not mentioned. Can it be they never get old?

If Cicero came to visit our Tivoli, he would be pleased to know that nearby Bard College offers Lifetime Learning Institute, courses for men and women over fifty-five years in literature, art, history, music, language and other subjects. Surely Cicero would love this town!

Elements of Connection
by Cindy A. Reid

Review of Earth, Water, Fire and Air: Essential Ways of Connecting to Spirit, by Cait Johnson. Probable publication date December 2002. SkyLight Paths Publishing, Woodstock, Vermont. $19.95

Earth, Water, Fire and Air is written to address the most basic and elemental way that we can connect the world’s diverse spiritual paths back to the essential roots of life. As Cait Johnson writes, “When we explore and savor and interact with these elements, we are both remembering a primal connection and forging it anew.”

The book is divided into four sections, one for each element. The author introduces the element and discusses mythology, ancient beliefs and common thoughts and feelings people from all cultures share, as well as beliefs specific to various spiritual paths.

She includes suggestions for self-exploration as well as group activities designed to enhance the reader’s appreciation and connection to earth, water, fire and air. For example in the fire section, she gives a script for a guided meditation/journey that “takes us to the bright and vivid spirit of fire, giving us the gift of revivifying contact with its essential power and warmth.”

Each element figures prominently in the diverse spiritual beliefs Johnson describes and she does a marvelous job of bringing this information to life. Prayers that honor the power inherent in the forces of nature open each section and the ceremonies, rituals and beliefs of many faiths are described and celebrated.

In addition to being a counselor for over twenty years (trained at the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology) Cait Johnson is the author of five previous books, including Cooking like a Goddess, and, with Maura Shaw, Celebrating the Great Mother.

Her passion and depth of knowledge, combined with her skillful inclusion of exercises, makes this a perfect book for those interested in the spiritual path on earth.