Richard Bailey - The Enjoy Agenda: At Home and Abroad

Full of food and music, longing, and curiosity, The Enjoy Agenda is a collection of brief illuminations where each essay arrives like a good friend with a story to tell. With generosity and sincerity, Rick Bailey is a writer who wants to share the world with you, and his book is one of discoveries, small marvels, and celebrations.

Matthew Olzmann, author of Contradictions in Design

Knowledgeable, funny, and utterly curious, Bailey comes off as everyones favorite uncle, who returns from far-flung reaches to share wise tales and good wine. And though this book teems with quirky asides, curious tangents, and plenty of self-deprecating humor, what comes through strongest is a decades-long romance that is worthy of study and emulation.

Joey Franklin, author of My Wife Wants You to Know Im Happily Married

Clearing out the parental home, finding the best gelato in an Italian village, using photos to purchase (sans language) a screwdriver in Shanghai: Rick Baileys reminiscences are enhanced by research, literary references, and the simple pleasure he takes in the world around us. This is engaging, thoughtful work.

Terry Blackhawk, Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellow

Hooray for miscellany, for odds and ends gathered between covers, designed to charm and surprise! Rick Bailey launches right into his quirky thoughts on myriad subjects (music, art, food, travel, health, language, etc.) and doesnt let up for the duration of this wonderfully original, unpredictable book. The Enjoy Agenda subtly and insistently suggests that life is a gift to be enjoyed, a goal the book itself fulfills for readers.

Patrick Madden, author of Quotidiana and Sublime Physick

In this startling new collection of mini-essays, Rick Bailey re-creates for us what Virginia Woolf calls moments of being, those bright bursts of beauty, loss, communion, and bewilderment that constitute a life. Here we have everything from a boys first glimpse of the horror of an automobile accident to a grown mans regret that he cannot carry the burden of the anvil he has inherited from his father, brief meditations not only on wine and ragu, but dumplings, dancing, death, gelato, toothaches, ER scares, and the profound mystery of why Europeans can eat pastries for breakfast and still remain thin. I defy you to read one of these deliciously addictive essays without gulping down the entire book.

Eileen Pollack, author of The Only Woman in the Room

Rick Baileys essays overflow with warmth, humor, truth. In this new collection, a woven memoir, we travel with him to Italy, China, and around his home state of Michigan. Bailey invites us to delight with him in food and music, in family and friends, in his zest for life, with all its twists and turns. The Enjoy Agenda offers keen observations, nuggets of wisdom, stories of the heart. Quoting from one of his essaysLife is short. Dont forget to gelato.I add: Dont forget to read Rick Bailey.

Christine Rhein, poet and the author of Wild Flight

Its not often I read a book of essays and fall in love with the writer and the characters in his life. But thats what happened reading Richard Baileys The Enjoy Agenda, a collection of forty short essays. Bailey speaks to us like hes one of our best friends, commenting on everyday items like those old school pictures, jet lag, health changes as we age, where to find the best gelato, and dozens of other amusing topics. The Enjoy Agenda takes us through the stuff of one mans life journey, and, imaginatively, we all end up with a reminder of where weve been, where and who we come from; a reminder of who we loved and who loved us. Read it and enjoy.

David James, author of My Torn Dance Card and She Dances Like Mussolini

Rick Bailey

University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln

2019 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image iStockphoto / Borchee.

Author photo by Tiziana Canducci.

All rights reserved

Beheading originally appeared in First Stop Fiction; Idaho originally appeared in Pure Slush, 2 (September 23, 2014). Excerpt from Dirge Without Music from Collected Poems. Copyright 1928, 1955 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis, by permission of the Permissions company, Inc., on behalf of Holly Pepper, literary executor, the Millay Society. www.millay.org

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bailey, Richard, 1952 author.

Title: The enjoy agenda: at home and abroad / Rick Bailey.

Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018036113

ISBN 9781496214690 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN 9781496215246 (epub)

ISBN 9781496215253 (mobi)

ISBN 9781496215260 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH : Bailey, Richard, 1952 | Older menUnited StatesBiography. | Baby boom generationUnited StatesBiography. | Popular cultureUnited StatesAnecdotes. | Music fansUnited StatesBiography. | United StatesCivilizationAnecdotes. | United StatesSocial life and customs20th centuryAnecdotes. | United StatesSocial life and customs21st centuryAnecdotes. | Bailey, Richard,Travel. |AmericansItalyBiography.

Classification: LCC CT 275. B 225 A 3 2019 | DDC 305.26/10092 [B]dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036113

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For Tizi

I took a guitar with me to England in 1974. My wife never tires of reminding me. At an airport, whenever we see a guy lugging a bulky black guitar case down the concourse or cramming it into the overhead compartment (and taking up all the space), she points at me, shakes her head, and laughs.

That was you, she whispers.

It was a course in Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon. We were a group of thirty theater and literature students with a few senior citizens as well, one of whom had a slightly broken neck and needed to hang in traction every morning in the rooming house where we stayed. The group read Richard II and King John and King Lear, saw the plays performed, and motored around the Cotswolds in a big bus. Mostly we guzzled warm, dark, heavy beer in pubs and acquired English accents. Lovely became my favorite adjective. Lovely beer, lovely performance. Walking down to breakfast every day Id see Jean dangling in the doorway of her room. Good morning, Jean. Lovely day, isnt it?

Really, my wife says. What were you thinking?

I tell her I thought I needed to practice. Writers keep journals. Artists fill sketchbooks. Musicians practice. The rock band I was in would have gigs as soon as I got back. Wouldnt my licks get rusty in a few weeks?

The first few nights I was there, before dinner in our house I closed the door of my room, took out my instrument, and played for a few minutes, feeling mildly ridiculous. In the airport and on the bus to Stratford, wherever I carried my luggage and my guitar case, the theater students would all give me kind of an expectant look. Like, Lets all sing! I wouldnt have thought of playing the guitar for people, not for longer than a few minutes, anyway. I was not a campfire musician. I didnt know any show tunes. Id been to too many parties where an ebullient (self-indulgent) guitarist hijacked the room, which I found unbearable.

The other day at the gym I was invited to think about music, about the eminent strangeness of gratuitous music in particular. A woman on the treadmill next to me, plugged into her personal listening device, was emitting rhythmic, atonal subvocalizations (a.k.a. humming). I didnt want to listen. Who would want to listen? Maybe she didnt know she was doing it or she thought no one could hear. Maybe she was happy.