The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: New Directions Books

  • Storybooks

    Sitting outside in the morning lull from our summer heat wave when I look up to see a coyote jogging by in the street. She looks at me but continues running up the hill. I get up and walk to the street and see her now at the top of the hill in the middle of the next intersection, paused, looking right and left, then crosses, continuing north. It’s not unheard of to see coyotes in our neighborhood, but it’s 9:30 – usually the reports we hear of a coyote sighting are from someone up at dawn, out jogging or heading off to work.

    Sitting outside with a stack of Little Golden Books: What Lily Goose Found; The Bunny Book; The Taxi That Hurried. The line of books for young readers began in 1942. I wonder if there was ever one about coyotes, Google it, and find Dale Evans and the Coyote, 1956. I’m not going to tell you here what Lily Goose found, nor am I going to tell you what Helen found, in her husband Edgar’s attic laboratory, in Rachel Ingalls’s In the Act (1987, ND 2023), one of the eight titles in the new New Directions series called Storybook ND, curated by Gini Alhadeff.

    Does the content of the eight Storybook ND titles change when packaged within the iconic Little Golden Books form? It’s a masterful marketing ploy, packaging modern adult stories in the universally recognized and often nostalgically referenced children’s book format. Anyway, I fell for the ploy, buying all eight in a discounted package deal directly from New Directions, answering an email offer, postage included.

    The first book I can remember reading alone, self-astonished at my knowing the words and being able to run them together – reading – was a Curious George book. I don’t remember which one. But the Curious George books were not Little Golden Books. But similar. I remember holding the book, looking at the page, turning the pages. It was a bit like your first bike ride without training wheels. Suddenly you were up and off and riding away. Where you were going was hardly the point. Or why. It was all about how. And movement, flow. But it wasn’t long after that I borrowed a wooden clothespin from my mom and with an old playing card attached to the rear fork of the bike, so that it flapped noisily in the wheel spokes, was now riding a motorcycle. What made it a motorcycle was the sound. That you were actually riding a metaphor was hardly the point. To metaphor is to carry forward.

    And I was astonished too reading my first Storybook ND, picked randomly from the stack of eight, the Rachel Ingalls In the Act. Part of the marketing pitch talks about reading a complete book in one afternoon in a single sitting – like you would a Little Golden Book. I’m not a fast reader, so I doubted this would apply to me, but In the Act, at 61 pages and moving at the speed of sound, proved irresistible. It’s a domestic story, husband and wife relationship, that if I were to summarize, might sound like a Coen Brothers film. Edgar Allan Poe with a sense of humor. The setting, the dialog, the motives, the turning points, the buildup and resolution – every word counts and the flow is like riding a bike. You don’t want to put it down, and you want the afternoon to last.

  • Henry Miller: more on reading influences and touching again on the reading crisis

    One can almost never go wrong with a New Directions Book. We’ve a stack on the shelves, including, among our favorites, Williams Carlos Williams’s “Selected Poems,” (NDP131); Ferlinghetti’s “A Coney Island of the Mind (NDB74); Pound’s “Selected Poems,” (NDP66); Djuna Barnes’s “Nightwood,” (NDP98); Borges’s “Labyrinths,” (NDP186);  Nathanael West’s “Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust,” (NDP125).

    One NDB we haven’t look at in some time but that came to mind when thinking of reading influences is Henry Miller’s “The Books in My Life,” (NDP280). The subject isn’t books though as much as it is Henry Miller, which is fine with us. He makes this clear early in his preface: “The purpose of this book…is to round out the story of my life. It deals with books as vital experience. It is not a critical study nor does it contain a program for self-education” (pg. 11).

    In other words, a book about books for the common reader? Well, maybe, but Miller leads with a double challenge: “One of the results of this self-examination…is the confirmed belief that one should read less and less, not more and more. I have not read nearly as much as the scholar, the bookworm, or even the ‘well-educated’ man – yet I have undoubtedly read a hundred times more than I should have read for my own good. Only one out of five in America, it is said, are readers of ‘books.’ But even this small number read far too much. Scarcely any one lives wisely or fully” (pg. 11).

    Henry Miller is a talker, a conversationalist, so easy reading, but this book is dated and full of obscure references with signs we may not understand pointing down back roads that look like dead ends. There are funny passages, including, we thought, the very title of Appendix III, a long list of “Friends who supplied me with books,” and we were suddenly reminded that a friend gave us our copy, years ago, with the comment, “It’s notable for how bad it is.”

    Our friend had marked this passage, on page 29, characteristically surprising coming from Henry Miller: “The writer is, of course, the best of all readers, for in writing, or “creating,” as it is called, he is but reading and transcribing the great message of creation which the Creator in his goodness has made manifest to him.” Miller may be the least of common writers, if there is such a thing as a common writer, but he’s a perfect match for Woolf’s common reader. He sways back and forth, moving forward in much the same way that Woolf suggests in her definition of a common reader, without regard for anything other than what seems to suit his own needs.