my notes and highlights from brian doyle's novel mink river

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A town not big not small. In the hills in Oregon on the coast. Bounded by four waters: one muscular river, two shy little creeks, one ocean. End of May—the first salmonberries are just ripe.
Note: the first "complete" sentence strikes after three periods. poet or novelist?
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stunningtownwise—there

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if it fermented or a mouse died in it or what.
Note: ok so fragmenty + made-up words + negative examples that push further and further into their own imaginary hypothetical worlds + a dark humor and a flare for image.
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the oldest of which finally collapses on page 141.
Note: check this later.
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like to paint for inchoate inarticulate unconscious reasons they can’t explain.
Note: oh to be a geometrist of perspective or a painter in touch with his intuitive side
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shafts

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sheer jungle energy of trees and plants here,
Note: one of the reviewers mentioned the books love affair with adjectives and that reviewer could be right--do we really need "sheer" here?
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but don’t get all fascist and linear and anal like highways do;
Note: though you did mention intersections and angles
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or the black bear who wandered through the recycling shed at the Department of Public Works and tore apart a pile of newspapers and was discovered reading the New York Times travel section, turning the pages daintily with her claws as big and sharp as steak knives.
Note: awesome
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look up, right over there, see the eagle flying low and fast down Curlew Street? Watch: as he sails over the grocery store he whirls and snatches a whirling piece of cardboard, and he flapflopflaps down the street triumphantly, big as a tent, you can almost hear him thinking I am one bad-ass flying machine, this weird flat brown bird didn’t get away from me, no sir, nothing can elude my lightning deftness in the air …
Note: i'm not sure about this book yet, but i do like that eagle...
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that no rumpled sheets will tell tales of their vigorous unclothedness;
Note: so the lack of commas in this list is meant to give it a similar vigor? to passively apologize for your use of semicolons?
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and so many more stories, all changing by the minute, all swirling and braiding and weaving and spinning and stitching themselves one to another and to the stories of creatures in that place, both the quick sharp-eyed ones and the rooted green ones and the ones underground and the ones too small to see, and to stories that used to be here, and still are here in ways that you can sense sometimes if you listen with your belly, and the first green shoots of stories that will be told in years to come—so many stories braided and woven and interstitched and leading one to another like spider strands or synapses or creeks that you could listen patiently for a hundred years and never hardly catch more than shards and shreds of the incalculable ocean of stories just in this one town, not big, not small, bounded by four waters, in the hills, by the coast, end of May, first salmonberries just ripe.
Note: there are so many stories
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capacious shadow
Note: he likes to stick with the same words. repetition is his game. also. eagle!
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The two men are drinking beer and eating salmonberries.
Note: of course they are
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publicworked
Note: nice. ok, ill shut up soon.
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You were going on interminably one day about how one way to defeat Time is by recording every story possible. Not only from people but from everything living.
Note: something tells me this is the theme of the book...
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holding on to his line of talk like a rope,
Note: lame
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I mean, really, to preserve history, collect stories, repair marriages, prevent crime, augment economic status, promote chess, manage insect populations, run sports leagues, isn’t that a bit much? We even give haircuts.
Note: i love your department!
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We have brains that still work so we have to apply them to pain.
Note: the moral imperative
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To speak to her honestly about her behavior is to care about her, Billy.
Note: love = honesty?
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This is me, Worried Man, making a tape for my grandson Daniel,
Note: draculalike use of multiple mediums
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fat half-ton animal is no easy matter, as you can imagine.
Note: ha-some description of horse stealing
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Mink River.
Note: first eponymn
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defeat it for a while. Which we did for a while.
Note: on "learning" to make love
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Her eyes are brown and green and when she is angry the green parts of her eyes flash like fish leaping in a river.
Note: someone who rated the book a one offered this as an example of ridiculously bad writing. i can't decide whether it's good, atrocious, or neither.
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boneheadery and lazitude and punishness and detentionery.
Note: i like these words but i doubt the teacher thinks in these words
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Green fish are leaping furiously in her eyes.

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He makes friends easily because he likes to listen and he is almost always cheerful, even with girls. He thinks about girls all the time. He likes to ride his bike in the woods as fast as he can go.

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out that her boyfriend is a liar in about three weeks.
Note: ack (and also, thats very stream of c there)
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Grace notices that Red Hugh can no longer easily bend over and pick up heavy tools so she patches the tires.
Note: is this repetition really necessary? id omit this paragraph.
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because she packed a suitcase two years ago and walked out the door without a word. The suitcase was enormous. It was far too big for her to carry. The sound of it being dragged down the gravel driveway will stay with Grace and her brothers for ever and ever and ever.

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the sagging couch in the corner. Apples. Wet clothes. Bread. Crow.
Note: a list! i really like his lists, but i sometimes feel that his rhythm is haphazard, which i dont like.
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Owen’s son Daniel recently began a list of the things in this room:
Note: i like daniel.
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help, which he did, to the quiet pleasure of his father.
Note: perfect
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Cedar
Note: and i love cedar, though wasnt cedar short and old? and does he think this will actually work? physical power stopping physical power...
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your daddy has been a capering fox every minute

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It began as a talk about carving holes in wood and then spun into holes in people, things missing; or as she said the feeling that something was missing that you’d never had and hadn’t known you didn’t have until suddenly you knew it.
Note: scary holes
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Does she pay that much attention to you? Sure
Note: smrt kid
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and soon after that we were trading salty kisses in our own language her long hair whirling around us like the salty arms of the salty sea.

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Sentence of the day.
Note: wow.
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There is no real love without fascination.

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[Who are you?]

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Moses, who had been taught to speak by a shy nun who found him broken in the mud, is intricately courteous and circumspect; also he has a dry humor and a corvidian cast of mind, as he likes to say, that combine to make his remarks intriguing.
Note: the crow can converse? wh-wh-what?
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A new crow is an awkward cake from the bakery of the Lord; all angles and bones, half naked still from the shell, hardly feathered at all.

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when she is bent over her desk in the window he floats over from the top of the refrigerator to her desk and says to her pain mud mother. A sentence neither of them ever forgot.
Note: memory is a big theme here.
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A man’s hipbones are handles for his woman’s hands.

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Is this a nutty family or what?
Note: yes (and good summary)
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He loves opera and his favorite opera of all is Puccini’s Tosca, which he knows by heart and plays constantly in the car. She thinks secretly that he will leave her because she is not exciting.
Note: here i think the back and forth works better than with the father-daughter passage a few pages ago, because of the language being parallel--he said... she said...
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forty years times a hundred dinners a year adds up to, let’s see, four thousand invitations. Or maybe eight thousand. And not one declined.
Note: i like friendship.
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awake for hours with his eyes glinting in the murky dark.
Note: a beautiful sad list about eating.
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stop and Daniel flies over the edge of the cliff with his backpack flapping and his braids going in three directions and his mouth open but no sound emerging whatsoever.
Note: ack. well i guess we were given hints that something bad was on the horizon
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The darkness dread & drear. Blake.
Note: i wish i knew blake better.
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young woman in throbbing pain on the deck is his daughter.
Note: yep
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They are sad stories some of them but we are made of joy and woe both.

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hair as black as the inside of a dog.
Note: there it is again. i prefer the black as the back of midnight line.
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He has never walked on the beach because he believes the roaring ocean is a bear of incomprehensible size.
Note: i love bears.
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and about the father who died and when the doctor opened him afterwards they found he’d eaten nothing but bits of skins of potatoes for months, giving all the potatoes to his wife and children.
Note: good or bad decision?
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The man who lied in court is kneeling on the beach praying.
Note: i like how he shows the multitude of stories by just showng fragments of this story. i wonder whether these fragments will bloom into more.
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The man who beats his son is on his knees by his bed praying.
Note: two "bad" guys praying; one "good" guy praying.
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walks with it upright uphill to where the doctor is waiting.
Note: um.
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meat in holes.
Note: ah
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the salmonberry bushes. The word for salmonberry is eye of spring.
Note: bear language is rad
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Let’s have another baby so we can name her Albina.
Note: opportunity...
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If you have a true story and some good water you will be all right,

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Funny the things you remember: I remember their feet had exactly the same rhythm as the sea.
Note: stories stories stories
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Where and what is Neawanaka? Maple Head poses this question to her class. In one page or less explain our position, character, and/or unique properties. Extra cr for imagination. No copying. I’ll give you ten minutes. Ready? Begin. Answers:
Note: good idea
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Neawanaka is the muddy fiefdom of two old men who have for many years manipulated county and state public works budget allocations to fund an endless series of foolhardy and very probably criminal enterprises, that’s what my dad says.
Note: that sounds true but theyre rad enterprises
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for he is a man of great imagination, and each cigarette during the course of his day has taken on the flavor of the man for whom it is named. For example his first cigarette of the day, which is called Peter, is the foundation for all else to come, raw and headlong and rough and wonderful, and his fourth cigarette of the day is sweet John, gentle and best loved, inhaled peacefully right after lunch, and his seventh of the day is Thomas the Doubter, which he usually smokes late in the afternoon, when he is tired and riven with the pain of his patients, and fully aware, painfully aware, uncomfortably aware, that the specific assigned mission of the twelve apostles themselves, the real men who walked the earth long ago, fishermen and tax collectors and laborers and such, prickly and confused and exhilarated, was to cure and cleanse every disease and every illness, and drive out the demons in the minds of men and women and children, and accept no coin for their belts, nor sandals, nor walking sticks, but to be sheep in the midst of wolves, shrewd as serpents and simple as doves.
Note: note to self or to dana:the next time youre smoking twelve cigarettes, think of the disciples
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south.
Note: whats with the geo directions all of a sudden
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Judas son of Iscariot. This man purchased a field with the reward of his iniquity. How very many fields have been purchased with blood money through history, mm?
Note: good point.
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We are all war stories.

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and then he lies awake for hours with his eyes glinting in the murky dark.
Note: again. poor doctor (?)
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Red Hugh has needed his stick to walk properly since he was twenty years old and was lost in the mountains for three days and lost both of his fecking big toes to frostbite.
Note: surprise
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as he had half expected would happen when he died,
Note: nice
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they sing, a kind of a cheerful prayer or chant of musselness and musselhood,

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I know you, says Grace. You’re the kid whose dad beats him up.
Note: um...
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They say a lot of things that make you laugh if you listen carefully.
Note: like your gfather
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lions speaking in a wet brown language he has always known, its words kelp and salt in his mouth, its verbs the whispers of the sea.
Note: beautiful
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Declan stares at his battered boat dead on the shore.
Note: everything is so perfectly connected. it may be gimmicky to do the switchwitheachline thing but it al fits together so well and then this. as if the boat and his father red...
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and falls asleep.

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supplice a tuoi piedi, on my knees I beg for mercy.
Note: wow
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te.
Note: the italics are gone
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and Owen never tired of playing it.
Note: quite the song
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She was as free as anyone ever could be and so she was trapped.

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We’re all a step from the abyss, he thinks. One slip and it’s all over. We’re all a car wreck or a disease or a wrenched back or a black funk or a badly hurt child or a bitter divorce away from disaster.

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From long bilingual habit he translates silently in his mind sentence by sentence as he goes.
Note: thanks.
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.
Note: on rain
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On Rachel taking off her shirt with both hands in the deft graceful crosshanded way that women pull their shirts over their heads
Note: i need to see me some of that deft grace
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.
Note: list of various perceptions of time.
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noon Mass.
Note: a noon mass eh
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for each of us, man and woman alike, is a seething sea of desires and shadows, of illusions and dreams, of courage and cowardice, and we arrive in peaceful harbors only by sailing ourselves true, by finding and wielding our talents as tools to help others. In a real sense we arrive home only by leaving the island of I.
Note: we must serve others. nicely homilied.
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not knowing quite yet whether or not to take your glasses off when you kiss intensely or where to put your hands exactly or whether to keep your eyes closed all the time or not
Note: whats the answer
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eyes locked their loins locked her fingers locked in his hair.
Note: well i guess thats an answer
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away that he thinks she doesn’t see him but she does.
Note: whyd he go to church?
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Lock the door, she says.
Note: mass leads to sex. hmm...
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She desires my joy. I desire her joy. That’s the point of being married. To want the other to be joyfully at peace.
Note: the point of marriage
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evil.
Note: not just bad or not well nut evil
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sees Rachel flash past as leggy and free as a young deer and Rachel sees Sara as strong and wise as the sea.
Note: ah misperception
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I’m not her father or brother or lover. I am no one to her. I’m no one. I have no right. You have to love someone before you can say something searing. Isn’t that right? You have to love people to hurt them. Isn’t that right?
Note: wow. on inflicting pain.
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here I am, Kristi. Here I am.
Note: so biblical
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One time an old man who used to be a track coach brought a stopwatch to the beach and timed her and did some calculations and then threw his stopwatch into the sea. That really happened.

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I wish only to see her again. Her face is now my food.
Note: love
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the sound of lost, the sound of empty, the sound of alone.

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Part of Sara wants to bolt back up the path
Note: indeed. i would bolt.
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of the burly broken mewling world.

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These things matter to me,
Note: perhaps i should make this list...
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The way that frozen dew outlines every blade of grass. Salmonberries thimbleberries cloudberries snowberries elderberries salalberries gooseberries. My children learning to read.

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Book marginalia written with the lightest possible pencil as if the reader is whispering to the writer.
Note: my marginalia is more like screaming
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That young guy on the island, Nora, he told me he ran out of bullets and hope on that island. He wanted to die. But he got himself back, Nora. He started again clean. He was born a second time. He used to say that his old self died on one island and his new self was born one island over. I disremember the name of the second island but he used to call it Resurrection Island. He used to wonder if there were lots of resurrection islands. I think maybe there are. I think maybe they are all over the place. I think maybe we don’t even see the half of them.
Note: Cedar on resurrection islands.
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end over end a tiny silver bird flying toward the sea.
Note: i did not expect that.
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and enters the ancient endless patient ocean, where all stories end, where all stories are born.

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and wondered at the wander of her life.

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Blake.
Note: blakes back!
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There’s a story in everything and the more stories I hear the less sad I am.

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Tu tu tu, says Nora, and they howl with laughter, howl so loud that the loon at sea turns to look at what it takes to be two new loons on land.
Note: nice
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Cows smell the smoke and do nothing.
Note: ha
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Two yellowjacket wasps linger by the grill where shreds of meat adhere until Cedar says something quietly to them in their language and they rise quietly into the air and go home.
Note: he speaks wasp
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yellow
Note: not sure why teres so much yellow recently
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One thing he has learned in his practice is to hear what his patients don’t say; which is, he has often thought, more telling than their tales. He cuts another pear.
Note: this is interesting in light of the fact that we read a lot of stories or tales inthis book, so its almost as if in this one sentence the doctor offers cause to reread and reconsider all that has preceded this...
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They smelled like grandfathers, she said once to her husband, who never forgot anything she said to him, and often turned her remarks this way and that in his mind long afterward, looking at them from different angles, wondering.
Note: rad
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Most definitely he is getting into the next county and then he will figure it out from there.
Note: why didnt he already do that then?
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Sometimes something changes you forever and often it’s the smallest thing, a thing you wouldn’t think would be able to carry such momentous weight, but it’s like playground teeter-totters, those exquisitely balanced splintery pine planks with a laughing or screaming child at each end, where the slightest change in weight to one end tips everything all the way; and what tipped the doctor into a new life just happened a minute ago.
Note: life can be teetertottery
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now; but the doctor stood at the sink like a stone.
Note: not a scene one would necessarily teetertotter one
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The guy feels everything on his face, the wild holy world, the salt and the wet wind and the wheel of the birds, the hot sweet fingers of the sun, and then he stops thinking, he loses thought, he sifts down below where thoughts are, the last images in his mind as his lights go dim are his children when they were very small, the squirm and wrestle and tumult of them, the very last picture in his mind is them tumbling on a brilliant wooden floor, and then he’s gone, and Declan is holding what used to be a man.
Note: a death scene
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wrestle with each other and then alder totally wins the day.
Note: :)
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like a baby asleep under the maternal jaw;
Note: int image tom because jaw somehow sounds ver masculine to me.
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Time in its motley colors. It has color as well as speed and pace. Of course there are blue times and gray times, black times and golden times, times of red rage, time with russet edges, etc. Time held me green and dying though I sang in my chains like the sea. Dylan Thomas. Should write this down. Be a great project. Measure color spectra over time duration in coordination with perception of same. Owen can make a machine. Also examine perceived color of time in concert with reported emotional state: nostalgia, sentimentality, melancholy, romance, frustration, etc. Public Work. Imagine the report! Colored filters, film spools. Spoor of time.
Note: Pete and Bendan, look time and color!
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what to make of this new liquid noise in the world.
Note: nice
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roiling
Note: i think he likes this word.
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Sometimes we were ill and hungry and the rain was relentless and I couldn’t see any way we would ever get out. Love doesn’t save anybody.

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The Boys, we hated that, the three of us labeled genderically,

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Final project, says Maple Head to her class. In the last fifteen minutes of class today, write down some things you believe in that don’t make sense.
Note: Interesting thing to consider?
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There are some things about even the people you love the best and deepest that you will never know. That’s just how it

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My friend Kristi thinks that our town will become famous for storytelling. She says maybe we will build a storytelling factory and people will come to hear and buy and trade stories and there will be story festivals and contests and etc.
Note: k is wise
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Human people, says Moses, think that stories have beginnings and middles and ends, but we crow people know that stories just wander on and on and change form and are reborn again and again.
Note: crows are wise
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Because stories keep going and going. They are a sort of food, I think. But what do I know, Owen? I am only an old crow person who used to have wings.