Reading in Bed, Updated Edition
Page 1
Praise for Brian Doyle’s Writing
With three Pushcart prizes and a national award in literature, Doyle brings a steady hand to his craft. Even more delightful is the playful generosity he offers readers and his revival of a smart, invigorating American Catholic voice.
Publishers Weekly on Grace Notes
Brian Doyle’s writing is driven by his passion for the human, touchable, daily life…. His sweet lyrical reaching is a gift to us all.
Mary Oliver on Spirited Men
Brian Doyle’s ability to praise without fawning, his Irish ear for lyric and wit, and his nose for the mythic dimensions of Everyman lend these portraits a collective power I associate with fine novels…. In an era of critical portraits bent on stripping men of genius down to their Homer Simpson idiocies and boxer shorts, these intricate celebrations of flawed by genuine heroes are a delight.
David James Duncan on Spirited Men
A unique and beautiful book written in celestial prose.
Cynthia Ozick on The Wet Engine
An abundance of words (witness the book’s subtitle), run-on sentences, rhyming, alliteration and stylized dialogue all contribute to a bacchanalian use of language that reflects Portland Magazine editor Doyle’s joyful view on…life.
Publishers Weekly on The Grail
Miraculous prose, world-besotted language, joy in the miracle of living….
Kathleen Dean Moore on Mink River
READING IN BED, Updated Edition
Brief headlong essays about books & writers & reading & readers
by Brian Doyle
Interior drawings by Mary Miller Doyle
Cover design & typesetting by Harvest Graphics
Cover image by Jessy Paston on Unsplash. Used with permission.
Copyright © 2015, 2017 by Brian Doyle
Published by ACTA Publications, 4848 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL 60640, (800) 397-2282, www.actapublications.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher. Permission is hereby given to use short excerpts with proper citation in reviews, church bulletins and handouts, and scholarly papers.
Library of Congress Number: 2017958072
ISBN: 978-0-87946-653-4 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-87946-654-1 (ebook)
Printed in the United States of America by Total Printing Systems
Year: 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17
Printing: 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 First
Printed on paper with 30% post-consumer waste.
to the avid omnivorous ferocious reader Joe McAvoy, with thanks for many years of friendship & debates about books & writers
Contents
A Note from the Publisher of the Updated Edition
Introduction by Jeff Baker
I. NOTES ON READING
Books in Cars
On Reading in Bed
Your Life List: or, What to Read When
Reading the Refrigerator
The Beauty of the Book
On the Habit of Reading
Smelliterature
A Note on Surreptitiously Reading Other People’s Bookshelves
Summer Reading: a Note
A Note on Finally Being Ready for Some Books, Thank Heavens
A Note on Public Literature
Why Portland, Oregon, Is the Coolest Literary City in the West
A Note On Seriesousness
Booklessness
A Note on How We Slow Down Near the End of a Terrific Book, Reluctant to Leave That Wondrous World
The Box Scores
A Note on Ceasing to Read
Tenant Lease Agreement (Addendum)
Banning the Ban on Books
The Newspaperness of Newspapers
On the Pleasures of Reading the Port Calendar in the Newspaper
A Note on the Similarity of Books to the People Who Read Them
II. NOTES ON WRITING
Apostrophism: a Note
What Writers Think
Mr Borges
A Finger of Speech
Mr Hillerman
A Note on the Misuse of Adverbs
A Modest Proposal for Poetry Inspectors
How Did You Become a Writer?
On Dining with the Wonderful Writer Gavan Daws
Mister Burns
Mr Soisson
On Noticing a Man Reading My Sprawling Novel on a Train
Playfulnessness: a Note
No
Mr Dubus
Novelizing
Writing Oregon
On Renaming Almost Everything in the Known Universe
A Bogey Tale
Scribbling & Dribbling: a Note
The Dark Joys of the Book Review
Auto Correct: a Note
Selling Stories
Shoshana
The Poem Is Everything Else Except the Lines on the Page
Seantences
Catholic Journalism: a Note
Review: Bin Laden’s Bald Spot & Other Stories, by Brian Doyle
On Failing to Properly Return a Terrific Book by Jan Morris
The New Book
Unpublished Snippets from an Interview with the Author His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI
Józef Korzeniowski: a Note
“…These the Visions of Eternity…”
On Not Saying Yes to the Irrepressible Terence O’Donnell One Night Years Ago When He Said Hey Let’s Get a Beer
The Secretary to the Famous Author Answers the Morning Mail
The Christmas Letter
Acknowledgments
Books by Brian Doyle
A Note from the Publisher of This Updated Edition
Was Brian Doyle the most passionate essayist in America? I don’t know, but he was the most passionate writer I ever worked with. Also one of the most prolific. And most talented. Brian died in May of 2017 at age sixty after a short but determined fight with brain cancer. He was for many years the editor of Portland magazine, the award-winning publication of the University of Portland.
Brian gloried in his many vocations as a husband and father of three, a son and brother, a friend of multitudes, an editor and writer, a coach and mentor to young people. He wrote about daily stuff, mostly: the world of work, family, church, community, and nature. In this book in your hands, he wrote simply about reading and writing, two of my favorite subjects.
I have been publishing books for over thirty years and have worked with literally hundreds of writers. None have been as much fun to work with as Brian. He made me laugh many times, but then he made me cry just as often to balance things off.
Brian wrote so much and so well and so intensely that publishers could not keep up with him. Just among “Catholic” publishers, he wrote for at least the following book publishers: Ave Maria Press, Corby Books, Franciscan Communications, Liturgical Press, Loyola Press, Orbis Books, Paulist Press, and my own ACTA Publications— not to mention the countless religious and secular magazines and other book publishers he wrote for all over the globe. He would explain to all of us that his three kids insisted on eating and that his wife concurred with them.
When Brian first sent me his proposals for two books of essays that became Grace Notes and So Very Much the Best of Us, I couldn’t say yes fast enough. I don’t get a lot of literary rock stars coming to my small publishing house. But then began my education in how to work with him as a writer.
It’s not so much that Brian had an ego. He certainly did, but it was well-earned. No one could turn a phrase or pull on a h
eartstring or make you laugh out loud the way he could. But my education came from dealing with him as a writer who had definite opinions about editing. I wasn’t used to that. Most of my authors are simply delighted to have a publisher (any publisher?), and they seem to want me to edit their books to make them “better.” Not Brian. For him it was not enough for me to change something to make his writing “better.” I had to prove that it was, in fact, “better” and not just “different.”
So my first efforts with him were less than successful. I’d edit an essay and send it to him with the changes “tracked.” He’d send it back to me with most of my “suggestions” deleted and restored to his original. Then I’d try to explain to him why I had suggested what I had. Here were some of the reasons he would not accept: His writing did not follow my publishing house’s style sheet. (“Who said a publisher had to have a style sheet?”) Some of his sentences were rather long and convoluted. (“So what? Readers are smart and will figure them out!”) He made up words that aren’t even in the dictionary. (“How do you think dictionaries get their new words?”)
Eventually I found a way to work with Brian that we both could live with: I accepted 95% of what he wrote initially. (I realized that he really was a gifted writer and that the people who liked his writing also liked his experiments with language. You will too.) Where I really thought a change was needed, I would show Brian the change and explain why I wanted to make it. (The main arguments that seemed to work with him were either that it made what he was trying to say clearer to the reader or that it was funnier than what he had written.) And when I couldn’t convince Brian that a change was needed, I deferred to his judgment. (This made the entire editing process go a lot easier and quicker. And besides, he was usually right.)
It was after I started editing him this way that Brian once announced (not publicly) that I was a “good editor.” In this updated edition of Reading in Bed, originally published by Corby Books, I didn’t have to do much editing. It had already been done, in large part by Jeff Baker, then the book editor for The Oregonian where many of these essays were first published, whose original Introduction to this book I have left intact, although it carries a special poignancy now. Even so, I did find a few typos (at least I think they were typos, although maybe Brian was creating new words or grammar, as he was wont to do) and corrected them, putting me forever in Brian’s category of “meticulomaniacs.”
I miss Brian. The world does too. But he did leave a body of great writing for all of us to enjoy, including the list on the final page of this book containing 30 titles by him that are presently in print. Brian would be pleased if we all read every one of them, preferably but not necessarily in bed.
Gregory F. Augustine Pierce
Publisher, ACTA Publications
Introduction
by Jeff Baker
When Brian asked me to write an introduction to what he called his “bookishness collection of bookish essays almost all of which you published, you poor nut,” I knew it was the perfect time to exact revenge for all those times I had to defend his run-on (and on) sentences against the copy desk.
Sure, I told Brian, no problem. And by the way, I’m on a bit of a Hemingway kick. I just finished Paul Hendrickson’s wonderful Hemingway’s Boat, and it took me back to Green Hills of Africa and Men Without Women. I’ll write the intro in Hemingway’s early style, as a contrast to yours. How’s that sound?
I didn’t have to wait long for a response: “Hahahaha that poor man, deluged by periods. Periods are fascist.”
There you have it: in three words, surely the shortest sentence he’s ever written, is Brian’s artistic credo, and a better title for this book than whatever 93-word monstrosity he came up with. Periods are fascist. It should be on a plaque on his desk. It’ll surely be on his tombstone. Say it, and you owe him a nickel.
Periods are fascist.
There, another five cents to Brian. But don’t worry. He’s not in this for the money. He once told me that too, right after he asked why his payment was late. (It wasn’t.) If you read the correspondence of any writer — the complete letters, not the selected — you’ll find that 87.4 percent of it is about money, asking for it, worrying about it, complaining about it, asking for it again…
But I digress, and I just wrote a sentence that’s a poor imitation of one of Brian’s. Once his essays caught on in The Oregonian, I began getting queries from freelancers suggesting a short essay on this or that offbeat topic. Nobody mentioned him by name, but the implication was clear: if Doyle can do it, so can I. (They couldn’t.) It’s not easy writing a sentence that starts in Ireland and ends in Australia, two of Brian’s favorite places, and has three semicolons, a parenthetical digression about Van Morrison or Ursula K. Le Guin or Dwayne Wade (or all three, compared and contrasted) and an ellipsis at the end.
But never a period: periods are fascist. (Cha-ching!)
Brian started writing for The Oregonian years ago as a regular reviewer, reviewing regular books. One day he sent in an (unsolicited) essay about apostrophism or reading in bed or reading refrigerators or something. I fought off the copy editors who really, really liked it but just wanted to make this one long sentence into seventeen short ones, and we published it pretty much as written. People liked it. Brian liked the response he received. We did it again, and again. He asked if he could send one whenever the mood struck him, and I could run it whenever the mood struck me. The word “transom” was used, as in “send it over the transom.” (How charmingly old school is that expression? Does anyone even have a transom anymore?)
The next thing I knew, I had five bookish essays in the queue, and plenty more where those came from. Brian occasionally asks how many I’m holding (the answer is always four), then sends another one. People love them. The copy desk loves them. You’ll love them, once you accept that the respected editor of an award-winning magazine and the author of all sorts of weirdly delightful books really does believe that periods are fascist.
In the old days, back when doors had transoms and editors wore green eyeshades, reporters ended their stories with this notation:
It means that’s it, end of story, stop right there. It says a lot about Brian and his work that he would blow right through it, laughing all the way.
Jeff Baker is a freelance writer and editor in Portland, Oregon.
I.
NOTES ON READING
Books in Cars
While rummaging in my car the other day I discovered Eudora Welty and James Herriot pressed together intimately in the trunk, which I bet is a sentence never written before, and while of course my first thought after finding them face to face was who would win a fistfight between Eudora Welty and James Herriot’s wife Joan, the Mississippian being one of those sinewy wiry country types and the Englishwoman being a strapping beefeater, my next thought was I wonder if anyone other than me carries books in their cars in case of reading emergencies and unforeseen opportunities, so I took it upon myself to ask, being a responsible literary citizen, and the answer turns out to be pretty much yes, which is really interesting, as is the vast list of books themselves, which included dictionaries, novels, atlases, cookbooks, phone directories, comic books, histories, biographies, audio-books, manuals of all sorts, bibles, wine-tasting notes, books of knitting patterns, books of sheet music, books about breastfeeding, and a handbook on vipassana meditative practice.
A naturalist in Hawaii had two notebooks of her own research into how one in five albatrosses is gay and only female frigate birds are thieves. A man in Vermont had a scuba diving manual. A novelist had Evelyn Waugh and The Rules of Golf. A chancellor had comic books. Zane Kesey had a copy of his dad’s glorious novel Sometimes a Great Notion. A dentist had books about railroads and circuses. A publisher had twenty copies of one of the books he had published. A doctor had only books by doctors. A great novelist had forty pounds of string quartet music. A bookseller had exclusively books by Sherman Alexie. A woman in Alaska had every single book she owned b
ecause she was moving from one apartment to another. A winery owner had wine-tasting notes which he noticed were all garbled at the end. A poet had a book about Athanasius Kircher and photocopies of every poem written by William Stafford between the years 1937 and 1948. A baseball maniac had David Shield’s oddly hilarious Baseball Is Just Baseball, the gnomic sayings of Mariners’ outfielder Ichiro Suzuki. A friend in Australia had The Story of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, which she discovered belonged to an early husband. A fine novelist had James Welch, Flannery O’Connor, and copies of two of his own books to give away on the spur of the moment. The greatest travel writer in the world, Jan Morris, had dictionaries in French, Spanish, German, and Italian. The great novelist Tony Hillerman had Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. One woman in London had books about Margaret Thatcher and rats, a fascinating juxtaposition, and another had Baby’s First Catholic Bible and Salmon Fishing on the Yemen, another interesting juxtaposition. One priest carried a manual on how to preside over last rites and another priest had books about how to preside over weddings and how to grow camellias. A friend in Canada had books about tractors and sake. Another friend in Canada had Nietzche’s Ecce Homo. Another friend had a book by H.P. Lovecraft and a book about learning Latin. A friend in Belize had a novel in Belizean English, as he said, which began with a man being tied to a pole on the beach. A great poet had Junior the Spoiled Cat and Teddy Bear of Bumpkin Hollow in her car, maybe for her grandchildren but maybe not. A young father of triplets had three copies of Pat the Bunny by Dorothy Kunhardt, which has sold six million copies since it was first published in 1940. A historian in Texas had a book on the history of zero and another book about the square root of negative 1, which makes you wonder about historians and Texas. A friend in California had books on alcoholism and Lutheranism. A friend in Oregon has Backpacking with Mule or Burro, which he liked especially, he said, because it had a chapter on how to persuade your wife to backpack with a mule or burro. A friend in Ohio had Doctor Seuss and a book about dismembering deer. A woman in Louisiana had Batman comics and Hiking with Jesus. Another woman in Louisiana had a copy of The Encyclopedia of U.S. Army Patches, Flashes, and Ovals — “don’t even ask,” she said, so I didn’t.