Dear Friends,

I am hosting a Pub Quiz fundraiser for the Jukie Jones Duren Endowment of the Smith-Lemli-Opitz Foundation to celebrate my birthday this coming Thursday night, March 9^th, at 7:30. If you are in or near the town of Davis, I hope you will come by to partake in the fun at the Encounters UFO Xperience Alien Museum at 871 Russell Boulevard, at the corner of Russell and Sycamore, across the parking lot from Trader Joe’s.

Speaking of Trader Joe’s, you could spend $10 on a few containers of Eggplant Garlic Spread with Sweet Red Peppers, which sounds delectable, or you could also spend that same amount to gain entrance into the alien museum in the old Cost Plus World Market, and in doing so, make a donation to the Smith-Lemli-Opitz Foundation, which funds research into the rare syndrome that affects my son Jukie. 

Anyone who drops by Thursday night at 7 or so will support the cause and be invited to participate in the Pub Quiz. If you don’t have a team, come by yourself, and you will be assigned to one. There will be some snacks and non-alcoholic beverages available for purchase, and I promise that you will be able to hear the questions over the sound of all the laughter, and over the gasps of awe from those examining the cinematic alien exhibits.

Prizes aplenty will be awarded to the winners, including swag bags of art and comic books created by Steve Oerding, an amazing local artist and illustrator who created the Ranger Ralph line of comic books. Steve will be attending this event, offering some cartooning lessons to the young and the young at heart who don’t want to engage in the trivia competition. In addition to the cartooning lessons, video game consoles will be available to entertain the kids, as well as a station where people can film real or invented stories of alien abductions.

If you don’t know, a Pub Quiz is a trivia contest made up of 30 questions and a tiebreaker. Teams of up to six compete with each other by writing down their answers on scorecards. A Pub Quiz can be a raucous experience brimming with frivolity and good cheer. Expect questions on a variety of topics that you should have learned about in school and science fiction movies, including history, books and authors, current events, popular culture, technology, and science! We will review the rules, which include not asking Chat GPT to research the answers via your smart phone, and not yelling out the answers. Over the years, Dr. Andy has hosted hundreds of pub quizzes and written thousands of pub quiz questions. You are invited to subscribe to his weekly Pub Quiz service via Patreon or Substack.

I’m grateful to Michael and Hugh from Encounters UFO Xperience for donating half the $10 ticket sales from Thursday night to the Jukie Jones Duren Endowment at the Smith-Lemli-Opitz Foundation. There will be a donation station where additional tax-deductible gifts of any size will be collected to support the cause. 

Whether or not you can join the Pub Quiz fundraiser (and I hope you can), to help me celebrate my birthday, please consider making a donation by visiting the foundation website at http://www.smithlemliopitz.org – there you can also find out more about the Jukie Jones Duren Endowment. We are hoping to fully fund the $25,000 endowment by 2028, and we are already about 40% there!

Thanks for considering this request and for spending the Thursday night of my birthday week with me in an alien museum. Any intended birthday gift should be a check made out to the Smith-Lemli-Opitz Foundation with the word JUKIE in the memo. Thanks, and see you Thursday!

Dr. Andy

P.S. Here are three questions from my most recent Pub Quiz:

1. Great Frenchmen. Jules Léotard created and popularized the one- piece gym wear that now bears his name. What was his profession: aerialist, clown, pilot, or swimmer? 
2. Unusual Words. What O verb means “to prevent, to make unnecessary by taking action in advance”? 
3. Higher Education. What is s the oldest institution of higher education in New York State? 

P.S. If you prefer to mail checks than make donations via websites on their giving pages, please send a check of any amount to The SLO Foundation • c/o Gretchen Noah • P.O. Box 10598 • Fargo, ND 58106 • USA. Thank you.

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

*Editor’s Note: Dr. Andy is reading from new poetry at his own poetry series on Thursday, March 2^nd at 7 PM at the John Natsoulas Gallery in Davis. Also, he will be hosting an in-person Davis Pub Quiz as a fundraiser on March 9^th. Details to come.*

Do you learn best by listening, reading, watching, or doing? I think I learn best in conversation, or at least that’s what my recent experiences at the San Francisco Writers Conference confirmed for me.

I’ve been serving as faculty at the SFWC for about 15 years, or almost half the time that I’ve been teaching classes writing and literature at UC Davis. In the early days, my University Writing Program colleague Brad Henderson and I helped to run the poetry track at the conference, a track that was created, I believe, because Brad and I volunteered to manage it and to give most of the presentations. 

In those early days of the conference, Brad and I gave talks about putting poetry into prose, running a poetry series, or sound and texture in poetry. We also ran critique sessions where attendees would read a poem out loud before an audience of 30 or more, and get critiques on the spot. Brad was an accomplished cowboy poet with an MFA from USC, while I was a PhD in poetry who kept many poetic examples and micro-lessons in his head.

As many talks as we gave, back then I appreciated the gaps in our presentation schedule, so I could sneak into the back of talks on the book trade, an author’s platform, unleashed shareable content via social media, eBooks, and the pitfalls and advantages of independent publishing. I also got to have long conversations with some important authors, from Davis’s own John Lescroart to perennial favorite Joyce Maynard to the author of more than 430 books, R.L. Stine. By the way, Stein has sold more than 400 million copies, outpacing even his friend Stephen King. I learned so much from listening to those wise and experienced authors, and I’ve written several books (and published three of them) since attending my first SFWC.

I feel adept by now at giving formal presentations. I’ve been doing so since I first presented at the my first academic conference at MIT back in 1992, just a few years after I concluded my undergraduate studies in Boston. But what I love most is the give-and-take of the academic panel, the Q+A session, or the impromptu speech. About ten years ago when the writers conference was held at the International Mark Hopkins Hotel, President Obama was staying across the street at the Fairmont Hotel, so the city halted all the streetcars on California Street, thus delaying one of the speakers. A conference organizer tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I would run that speaker’s session. As we walked to the room, I asked just one question: What was the planned presentation topic? I was told five seconds before I walked in the door, and then gave his talk. What a delightful challenge and resulting triumph.

These days the SFWC puts me to work as a book coach for attendees. I “charge” $100 for a 30-minute session, with all of the money going to pay for scholarships for the subsequent year’s conference. 

While we shouldn’t limit participation only to people who can pay outrageous prices for Dr. Andy’s time, I’m grateful for these brave souls. I love meeting with the aspiring authors, most of them working on novels, and a few of them on memoirs. I learned so much from their pitches and their answers to my clarifying questions. For some of them, I helped them shorten their pitches for agents; for others, I helped them think about their projects from their readers’ point of view. As journalists will tell you, your having written something obligates no one to read it. Some attendees just wanted to know how to get the most out of the conference.

Last year my favorite conferee was a woman whose father was a magician and whose mother was a librarian. I told her that she probably expected to go her entire life without hoping to meet another person in the world whose father was a magician and whose mother was a librarian. Well, I was that other person in the world.

This year I met with almost ten authors, including a winery owner whose novel pitch seemed like that of a romance novel rather than what she called “a serious work of fiction.” I asked her when she had last read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Her response was expected: College. I showed her the way that her plot resembled the book which the critic Daniel Burt called the “first history[y] of the private consciousness.” The novelist before me was thrilled by the realization of the helpful echoes, and then brought me back a revamped pitch an hour later.

I was also thrilled. Rarely does my PhD in English turn out to be helpful in everyday conversations, but of course these conversations were not everyday. That’s why I love them.

I hope you get to have such a conversation this week.

Dr. Andy

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Thanks to all of you who support the Pub Quiz and this newsletter on Patreon, where you can now start a free trial of the service, which typically means a free Pub Quiz. Special thanks to Quizimodo, The Outside Agitators, The Original Vincibles, The Mavens, and others. Artist Steve Oerding recently made a big pledge to keep the newsletter going. Thanks, Steve!

I hope you can join me Thursday at the Gallery and on the 9^th for a big in-person Pub Quiz! Meanwhile, here are some bonus questions:

1. German Names. From the Latin name Ursus, the German name “Urs” means what? 

2. Historic Periods. What historic period (or “age”), lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, was characterized by the presence of writing in some areas and other early features of urban civilization? 

3. Pop Culture – Music. Jimi Hendrix was born the same year as Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Paul McCartney, and Jerry Garcia. Name the year. 

4. Sports – Race Car Movies. In the first scene of what race car film does Matt Damon’s character ask his pit crew if he is on fire before getting back into his racecar? 

Cheers.

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

“The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.” Zora Neale Hurston

If we consider 1990 the last year of the 1980s, then I have spent part of five decades teaching at UC Davis so far, and I may make it to parts of seven decades if I teach first-year seminars in my 70s, as some of my emeriti colleagues do. 

Because I earned my graduate degrees at the same institution where I teach, I have a longer history here even than those faculty colleagues who are older than I am. One exception to this would be my retired colleague Kevin Roddy, who can tell stories about his conversations with Emil Mrak, the food scientist who served as our second UC Davis Chancellor from 1959-1969.

So when I arrived at a celebration of new emeriti at the Putah Creek Lodge last Wednesday, I saw some faces that I knew from previous decades, but which I hadn’t seen for a while. For whatever reason – it might be the “big interruption” of the pandemic, it might be age, it might be that I know so many categories of people – I can’t place faces and names as easily as I once could. 

But at this event, I knew why these distant friends and old colleagues were there. And because our guest of honor, Geerat Vermeij, the esteemed Dutch-born geologist, conchologist, and MacArthur Fellow, was blind, everyone in person and on video introduced themselves clearly.

When it came time for me to read my paean, my poem of praise, I was delighted to see my friend Ralph Hexter in the audience. I hoped the classics scholar and UC Davis Provost emeritus would appreciate the ways that Greek mythology suffused my quirky and poetic discussion of geniuses who famously worked with shells.

Daedalus

Contemporary of Hercules, perhaps Daedalus was our first retired distinguished professor.

After the inventor’s workshop in Athens, 

after the exile from Greece in the palace of Minos, 

after the puzzle of the labyrinth, 

after the open-air cell he and his son shared 

with the birds at the top of the tower of Knossos, 

Daedalus was given time to reflect on his creations. 

Clearly none was more ingenious. 

He had invented carpentry and its tools, each of them a metaphor. 

When Daedalus conceived the axe, he reminded all of us to sharpen our tools. 

With the plumb-line, he taught us to measure a right angle twice before we start to build. 

With the drill, he taught us to excavate. 

With glue, he taught us to make connections, 

to fashion with wood, with fabrics, and even with feathers.

After his flight from Crete, Daedalus hoped to lie low in Sicily

and to give thanks to the Gods for his rest.

But King Minos lured him out with the puzzle of the conch shell,

challenging any man to thread it from one end to the other.

Minos knew that only Daedalus could decode the conchological dilemma, 

and that by solving the puzzle, the genius would reveal himself.

If you know this story, you know that the venerable inventor tied a thread to an ant,

and introduced the eusocial insect to the entrance of the conch.

Round and round the inside of the shell it marched,

lured by the smell of Sicilian honey on the other side.

When King Minos was presented with the threaded shell,

he knew his former court genius was on the island.

Today we celebrate our Daedaluses,

geniuses whose discoveries and creations are known throughout the land,

scholars whose accomplishments approach the status of myth.

The laurels are yours, and well deserved!

But you might also think of yourselves as that industrious ant,

for long have you marched through your personal labyrinths,

hearing the (published) echoes of your own voices in your shell,

as well as those of the people outside the lab who have cheered you on.

Now is the time to liberate yourselves from your tiny harnesses. 

Come out of your shell. Cap your power!

You answer now to no king, to no court, and to no fellow virtuosi. 

It’s time to enjoy all the honey that rewards you for your persistent genius.

You have threaded the conch, and long will we speak of your triumphs.

Thanks to Distinguished Professor Walter Leal for inviting me to participate in this recognition of UC Davis emeriti. I love presenting the sort of “occasional” poems that I wrote often when I was Davis poet laureate (I performed another one to close out the 2023 San Francisco Writers Conference on Sunday), and I’m glad that I could contribute to making this well-organized and touching celebration even more memorable. Congratulations, Emeriti!

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I walked amongst exuberant drummers in Golden Gate Park yesterday, and met a French Bulldog named Lala (as in Ooh La La) who barked ferociously at every dog she saw except for our Margot, whom she saw as a cousin. Evidently Lala is an especially tribal dog. I hope that like drummers, you can invite strangers to enjoy your “music,” even if at the end of the day, when you get home, you play favorites, like our new friend Lala.

Thanks of being members of the tribe, thanks to all of you who support my work by subscribing to my weekly Pub Quizzes via Patreon. Thanks especially to Quizimodo, The Outside Agitators, The Mavens, and The Original Vincibles for providing a lion’s share of the support needed to keep this enterprise going. Thanks also to new supporter Steve Oerding, the genius artist and cartoonist behind the Ranger Ralph Comics. I would love to include you or your team in my shout-outs, so please consider pledging your help.

I myself will be a featured poet at Poetry Night on March 2^nd. I would love it if  you could join us that night at 7 at the John Natsoulas Gallery.

Here are three questions from a previous quiz:

1. Countries of the World. The eighth most populous country in the world shares land borders with India to the west, north, and east, and Myanmar to the southeast. Name the country.  

2. Science. Mustard comes in three varieties: white/yellow mustard, Sinapis alba; black mustard, Brassica nigra, and a third, Brassica juncea. What is the English name for the third kind of mustard? 

3. Books and Authors. With five words in its title, what an adventure novel by French author Alexandre Dumas completed in 1844 is one of the author’s most popular works, along with The Three Musketeers? 

Be well!

Dr. Andy

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Jack Petrash was a conscientious teacher. For instance, because my father was a famous theatre director, having directed over 500 plays in his 71 years, Jack made a point not to show me favoritism when it came to assigning roles. In The Christmas Carol, I got to play Narrator #2. In The Devil and Daniel Webster, I got to play a member of the jury. In that play, I had one line.

My biggest roles were the avaricious doctor in an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Pearl, and in the 3^rdgrade production of Perseus and The Minotaur, I played Daedalus, the genius architect who appears in one scene: he whispers instructions to the Minoan princess Ariadne on how the Athenian hero Perseus could escape his labyrinth with a ball of yarn.

Now that I think of it, I believe I was the only one of my 30 Washington Waldorf School classmates who appeared in either of those plays who went on to earn a PhD, or teach university classes. Put another way, without the avarice or the genius, I went on to become both the “doctor” and the Daedalus of my class. Prescient typecasting.

I’m writing this newsletter on Jack Petrash’s birthday, one he shared with Abraham Lincoln, a fact that my classmates and I thought to be telling and relevant. Jack was born the same year that Casey Stengel became the manager of the New York Yankees, Jack’s beloved home team. They came from behind that year to overtake the powerful Boston Red Sox, starting a decades-long rivalry. In that year’s World Series, the Yankees defeated the Brooklyn Dodgers in five games. What a great year that was for Jack’s parents!

Clearly I need to drop a note to Jack, one of the kindest men I know, kindness that clearly shaped the curriculum chosen for the students he taught for eight straight years. You see, Steinbeck’s doctor was smart and wealthy, but his greed and prejudice distinguish him from the hero of the The Pearl, Kino, the poor pearl fisherman who just wants the best for his family.

Like Kino, Daedalus famously loses his son (spoiler alert), despite all the advantages of being the smartest man in the Kingdom of Minos. A Christmas Carol is about a crafty and successful businessman who finds his soul only when he finds his compassion. Even Old Scratch (the Devil) outsmarts Daniel Webster in the legal drama The Devil and Daniel Webster until Webster’s rhetoric compels the undead jurors to remember their humanity that binds us all together. Even though Jabez Stone sold his soul to the Devil, we the jury found Jabez not guilty.

Some of us may think of ourselves as rich, smart, accomplished, or tactically sophisticated (I may be zero for four, but that’s another matter), but only when we find ways to explore and share kindheartedness, Jack Petrash and the plays we read seemed to teach us, will we recognize the opportunity to live lives of purpose and fulfillment. On his birthday, I send thanks to Jack for directing us in so many fine productions, rehearsals for many subsequent acts of kindness. 

Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon, especially the teams that pledge for the entire team. Special shout-out to Quizimodo, Original Vincibles, and the Outside Agitators. Poetry Night is this Thursday in Davis, and we have some strong writers coming to town.

Here are three questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:

1. Mottos and Slogans. What company whose name in Latin means “Great Voice” used to use the slogan “Smart, very smart”? 

2. Internet Culture. What event is mentioned in most February Smart TV advertisements? 

3. Newspaper Headlines. Did the United States add closest to 5,000, 50,000, 500,000 or 5 million jobs in January? 

Be well!

Dr. Andy

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Recently I learned that during the filming of the 1945 film Brief Encounter, the cast and crew took a day off for the celebration of VE (Victory in Europe) day. The director, David Lean, later famous for Lawrence of Arabia,wanted the people on his set to be festive, but rather because the motion picture cameras were needed to film the celebrations in the streets.

Has the United States or England breathed such a sign of relief since the end of World War II? We thought the “end” of the Vietnam War, then the longest and most unpopular of all our wars, had come after five years of negotiations with the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, but the peace did not hold. In the United States, we knew neither the jubilation of victory nor the satisfaction that comes with the cessation of hostilities. 

The people harmed by Saddam Hussain or Osama Bin Laden (and I suppose that includes all of us) might have been gratified by their executions, but no death brings the relief that comes with the end of a war. 

And some bad news stories seem intractable. The death of former Sacramentan Tyre Nichols reminds us again of another instance of disproportionately brutal treatment of African-American men by police officers. His friends tell us that Tyre loved skateboarding and sunsets. One Black skateboarder tweeted this: “I’ve never been more proud of my Memphis Skate Community. They way Black skaters have been supported & the entire skate scene in Memphis has been front & center with the Nichols family. We’ve lost one of our own. We’re all grieving.” The tweet includes footage of Nichols doing amazing skating tricks that he learned while a Sacramento youth.

Domestic terrorists and insurrectionists have received vocal support from members of Congress. The incremental warming of our planet leads to droughts, loss of habitats, shrinking glaciers, and increasing threats of megafloods here in California. In a world marked by interdependence, the war in Ukraine is worsening the humanitarian crisis in Yemen.

Closer to home (and a problem throughout the world), the ongoing pandemic continues to afflict so many in our communities with new infections, with the health complications associated with long Covid, and with lingering anxieties concerning both gathering with strangers (Is it safe? Probably not), and staying apart. The isolation, alienation, and apprehension we feel colors how we see our lives and the world.

The sudden progress reported in the news is typically technological rather than spiritual or cultural or, dare I say, meaningful. I’m reading a book now titled The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America in which Margaret O’Mara tells us the story of the personal computer being followed by the iPhone and then wafer-think table computers and ebook readers. In the last three month, ChatGPT has made us all aware of the early possibilities of conversational AI. Last week Microsoft announced a $10 billion investment in ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, its new partner.

The problems with these sorts of advancements, and the social media applications and services that drive the conversation about these instances of tech progress, is that they often serve to overstimulate us, and thus to drain us intellectually and emotionally in ways that we may not even notice. We are assisted in communicating, sharing, and accomplishing tasks faster, but we still sense that something is missing. Speaking in the context of “duhkha,” the Tibetan term for “unsatisfactoriness” (is that a word?) or “unease,” the tenth-century Buddhist monk Tilopa said, “It is not the outer objects that entangle us. It is the inner clinging that entangles us.” In our lifetimes, the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh said, “Stillness is the foundation of understanding and insight.” Whether or not you believe that popular technologies and services are “invasive,” as a reporter suggested in a recent piece in The California Aggie for which I was a source, we can be sure that most of these tools do not bring stillness.

So, I thought I would share with you some good news, news that might provide you a pause of stillness and a bit of encouragement during what many would see as a dark time.

• As I suggested regarding movie night that my son Truman organized in our house on this past Saturday, most of the world’s notable films are available for streaming or downloading right now. This is true also for the world’s books. My film critic dad accumulated one of Washington DC’s largest private film libraries because he wanted some control over the films he watched for pleasure. Today all of us can exert some of that control.

• The Giant Panda and the Manatee are no longer on the endangered species list. Perhaps Jack Black and John Lithgow are in part to thank? I hope the numbers of these beautiful creatures continue to grow.

• The nonprofit organization Ocean Cleanup is working to extract the hundreds of miles worth of floating plastic from the world’s oceans.

• The rains of January have enlivened all our Davis nature walks, despite what my wife Kate calls “the tree carnage.” One can smell the negative ions in the air, with the cold afternoons feeling so fresh and clean.

• During the Obama administration, veteran homelessness declined by 50%. Some of those veterans are still fighting the war in Vietnam decades after they came home.

• UC Davis professor Delmar Larsen founded a 501 nonprofit online educational resource project called LibreTexts that provides free and open access to hundreds of online textbooks that have been accessed by about a quarter-billion students from around the world. Those students have spent over a millennium of “confirmed reading.” One of the book projects that I mentioned in last week’s newsletter will be added to this list of OER textbooks.

• In May of 2021, during a fire at the Philippine General Hospital in Manila, two nurses rescued 35 babies from the fourth floor neonatal intensive care unit, including those on ventilators. Congratulations to national heroes Kathrina Bianca Macababbad and Jomar Mallari.

• Costco offers cases of Orgain organic nutrition nutritional shakes in creamy chocolate fudge flavor. I don’t drink coffee, but I reward myself with one of these on most evenings if I got some writing done that day. 16 grams of protein!

• Norway’s last arctic coal mine has been transformed into the 1,000-square-mile Van Mijenfjorden National Park. Imagine the gratitude of the 20 million birds that nest on the islands there, not to mention the 3,000 polar bears that see the park as their hunting grounds.

• In Berlin, Germany, a new place of worship called House of One houses a church, a mosque, and a synagogue in one building, with a communal area that connects them, a place for interfaith dialogue and social activities. The House of One is a place of peace that stands firm against religious and sectarian prejudice and hatred.

• Somehow the three colonies of bees living on its sacristy roof of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris were unbothered by the flames there, as well as by the smoke or the water that followed the fire. The beekeeper Sibyle Moulin, which is a fun French name to speak out loud, says this of the 30-45,000 insects in the three hives: “The behaviour of the colonies is perfectly normal.”

• Bessie Coleman, first Black person to earn an international pilot’s license (in France, in the 1920s), is being honored with her own Barbie doll. Coleman was a widely-popular stunt pilot who nevertheless refused to perform before segregated audiences.

• Up from just 2,000 in 2020, researchers counted nearly 250,000 monarch butterflies in California in 2021. Welcome back, monarchs!

• I love my wife Kate’s sassy new haircut. Not all of these are world news stories.

• Great people model good choices and phenomenal creativity. For example, the poet Dr. Maya Angelou inspired generations of readers, listeners, and viewers with her writings and her performances. I got to see her perform in Boston in 1988, and upstairs at Freeborn Hall (the same building where I host my weekly radio show), about five years later. Angelou once said this: “I’m convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they’re stones that don’t matter. As long as you’re breathing, it’s never too late to do some good.” 

I hope this good news is doing you some good. Feel free to respond with your own encouraging words. Thanks for reading to the end, and enjoy the coming week!

Andy

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If you would like to support this newsletter and/or the Pub Quiz that comes with it, please consider supporting this effort on Patreon. My patrons make all of this possible. Thanks especially to the Outside Agitators, The Original Vincibles, Quizimodo, and the other teams that support my Quizmaster work month after month!

For them, and for you, here are three pub quiz questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:

1. Pop Culture – Music. Lous Reed was part of what rock band that formed in the 1960s, and that was known for their experimental sound and their influence on the development of punk rock, alternative rock, and indie rock? 
2. Sports. What is the national sport of Japan? 
3. Science. William Harvey was the first known physician to describe completely, and in detail, the systemic circulation and properties of blood being pumped to the brain and the rest of the body by the heart. In what century did this physician to James I make his discoveries? 

P.S. Poetry Night on Thursday at the Natsoulas Gallery features two first-time features: Rooja Mohassessy and Teresa Pham-Carsillo. Find the details at https://poetryindavis.com/archive/2023/01/rooja-mohassessy-and-teresa-pham-carsillo-read-in-davis-at-7-pm-on-thursday-february-3rd-2023/

P. P.S. Also, check out these upcoming poets, all starting at 7 PM with an open mic at 8 PM:

February 16: Robert Thomas and Beverly Burch

March 2: Dr. Andy Jones with Siri Ackerman

March 16: Former California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia

April 6th: Maya Khosla and friends

April 20th: Julia Levine and Susan Cohen

May 4th: Pam Houston with Talia Lakshmi Kolluri

May 18th: Lois Jones with William O’Daly

June 1st: New York Times best-selling author Mary Mackey

The writer’s duty is to keep on writing. – William Styron

When my disabled son Jukie and I started our daily greenbelt walking habit in the spring of 2020, I would often don a cloth mask about 20 yards before we encountered people walking towards us, and then remove it again as soon as we passed them. Jukie didn’t understand this new practice, so he gestured at my face to communicate that he wanted me to remove my silly mask.

While he never embraced either mask wearing or Zoom school, I made sure that Jukie would at least get some physical education during quarantine. He and I walked every day in 2020, when I averaged 4.6 miles a day, and in 2021, when I averaged seven miles a day. Jukie lost some of the weight that he had gained as a side effect of his medications, and we both explored the streets of Davis. As if to indicate that he was having fun, about four times a walk he would catch up with me and give me a side hug, atypically looking me right in the eyes.

With Jukie’s help, I aspired to walk 2,746 miles in 2022, or the distance between Davis, California and my birth city of Washington, D.C. That would require me averaging 7.523 miles a day. I’m proud to say that I trounced that goal by walking a full eight miles every day in 2022, a total of 2920 miles. You can imagine that I was eyeing that round number goal of 3000, but a variety of factors killed my averages in the last two months of the year – I would have to settle for eight miles a day.

Still, that’s more than I had walked in any other year of my life, even when I was committed to distance running in high school or during my first year in Berkeley. And although I’ve run greater daily distances – there was that one day in 1989 that I got lost while visiting Orinda from Berkeley on foot, so I just ended up running all day – 2022 taught me that consistency matters most whenever you are trying to complete a big task. As John Quincy Adams said, “Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air.” 

Along with my meditation habit, I found that the regular physical exertion, my time on the tree-lined greenbelts of Davis, and the fresh air supported my mental health and overall well-being. I felt a sense of accomplishment every time I hit my monthly target, even if I had to add a number of late-night audiobook bonus walks on those evenings when I was falling behind my audacious eight-mile goal.

In 2022, I did write a 100-poem book of poetry, much of it dictated to Google Docs while I was out on my walks, but I also glanced often at my list of unfinished book projects, regretful that I hadn’t devoted more time to writing non-fiction as well as poetry. I knew that if I truly wanted to make finishing and publishing these books a priority, I would have to make some sacrifices.

So, while my low-impact exercise regimen has supported my physical health, this writer also needs to write. Teaching the book The War of Art to my Writing in Fine Arts students at UC Davis, I came across this reminder from Steven Pressfield, one that seemed to be written for me: “The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.” 

I shall pump the brakes on my walking obsession in 2023 – I’m aiming for five miles a day, rather than eight – and instead dedicate more time to finishing book projects. I agree with Maya Angelou: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Instead of agonizing over unfinished manuscripts, I shall complete and release them. Perhaps I will see if any of those uncaged birds will sing.

I’m already enjoying the new opportunities that have resulted from my change in schedule. Typically on Sundays I would catch up with my weekly mileage quota by strolling to morning meditation in Chestnut Park, taking Jukie on a long walk, and then later walking with him to an outdoor dinner at a favorite Davis restaurant. As I seek to embrace new experiences, on this most recent Sunday I met with more than 20 new friends to play bocce ball, a yearly tradition for this friend group. Because I spent so much of my boyhood throwing things – Frisbees, , rocks, shuriken – I did pretty well at bocce, or so I was told. My team came in second – 30 points to the winning team’s 32 points – and I was even voted “Rookie of the Year.” I’m now the proud owner of a new gift card to YoloBerry, the best frozen yogurt shop in town.

As I walked to my car – yes, I actually drove to this event – I realized with a laugh that I was the only rookie this year. I look forward to many such realizations in 2023, including realized ambitions. I hope the same will be true for you.

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Thanks to everyone who subscribes to the weekly pub quiz, as I hope you will do via Patreon. You keep me going on this particular writing project. Here are three questions from last week’s quiz.

1. Internet Culture. Starting with the letter H, what toy company owns Wizards of the Coast, the company behind Dungeons and Dragons?  

2. Cars. Starting with the letter S, what full-size SUV introduced in the year 2000 has the longest lifespan of any SUV at 296,509 miles?   

3. Sports. The first African American coach in NBA history, who was appointed as player-coach for the Boston Celtics in 1966?

In my most recent podcast, I interviewed the Sacramento poets Brad Buchanan (who has an incredible medical story to tell) and Frank Dixon Graham. I also chat about ChatGPT with a reporter from the California Aggie. Please listen and subscribe to Dr. Andy’s Poetry and Technology Hour wherever you get your podcasts, or find the show at https://poetrytechnology.buzzsprout.com/. On the first and third Thursdays of each month, I host the Poetry Night Reading Series at the John Natsoulas Gallery, 521 1st Street in Davis. Find out more at www.poetryindavis.com (where you can sign up for the mailing list). 

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

I asked an artificially intelligent chatbot to do some gratitude research in support of this newsletter.

As a result, I discovered a new quotation from Cicero: “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” Speaking of gratitude, my mom has been facing some health challenges, so I’ve been thinking about how much I appreciate my parents, their friends and the shrinking number of people of my parents’ generation.

Recently I told my wife Kate the story of the time I first beat my mom in a foot race. I was about ten years old, and I prided myself in being fast (back then, small and fast). My teacher, Jack Petrash, gamified running and all sorts of physical play such that at recess, we held foot races like the ancient Greeks did. I knew the speed ranking of the fastest girls (such as Jessica Case and Andrea Humphries) and the fastest boys (Robbie O’Hara and Aaron Gilmartin) in my third grade class. I was not as fast as those classmates, I remember telling myself, but I had other skills that came in handy for someone who played some version of tag every day. As I knew how to dodge, to pivot on the fly, I would not be caught.

So I knew that I could provide my mom some competition when we lined up next to each other on the blacktop of Stoddert Park around dusk on a summer evening. I raced as fast as I could, and I could hear that my mom was with me for the entire run, but somehow I crossed the finish line first. I wondered at first if my mom had let me win, but she voiced her incredulity during the entire sunset walk home to Tunlaw Road. As this was the late 1970s, I believe we were both barefoot. Our race was fast, but our time together was unhurried.

As a girl, my mom was athletic rather than social, she once told me. After school and on weekends, she would hang out at the Turnvereine, a German-American gymnastics and cultural center where my mom learned to swim, to do gymnastics, and to play volleyball. I don’t know that the family thought itself as being particularly German, but my mom’s grandfather on her dad’s side and my mom’s great grandfather on her mom’s side both came from Germany (though the great grandfather met a nice woman from Harrisburg named Catharine Jones, so I have Jones’s on both sides of the family).

One time about 30 years ago my mom was visiting our Sacramento apartment, and we happened to walk past 3349 J Street where one can still find one of the oldest extant Turn Vereine center in the United States, founded in 1854, just four years after the city was incorporated. Seeing the place triggered all sorts of memories for my mom, memories that she shared with us as we walked back to our Midtown home.

She’s not able to share such memories today, but she still depends upon the strength of habit and of body that she developed in Detroit back in the 1940s and 50s to sustain her during these more difficult times. As one of the resident writers in our family, I am called upon to keep memories of her memories, sharing them here to keep alive the spirit of our forebears whose dreams and sacrifices provided us the foundations we needed to show them that we turned out all right, and then to thrive in their absence.

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Mostly I was thinking about gratitude because of how thankful I am to the more than 125 people who have donated to my fundraiser for the Smith-Lemli-Opitz Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports research into the rare syndrome that has so significantly affected my son Jukie. As you can see from the Facebook page for the fundraiser, we have reached 82% of our goal of raising $10,000. I really appreciate all of you who have helped out. I wonder if we will make it to $10,000 on Facebook. Many (including some readers of this newsletter) have also given via the Foundation website. Thanks, everyone!

Here are five questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:

1. Horror Actors Named Williams. Who had the female lead in the horror films Get Out and M3gan?  

2. Pop Culture – Music. Dan Reynolds, the co-founder of the LGBTQ+ advocacy group LoveLoud, is also the lead singer of what imaginative band responsible for the hit “Radioactive”?  

3. Sports. What Oklahoma professional sports team plays its home games at Paycom Center?  

P.S. I’ve been researching genealogy on Martin Luther King Day. My dad knew Coretta Scott before she was married, so I wondered if we were related to her. It turns out that she is the “wife of my tenth cousin, once removed.” As Reverend King said, “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.” Enjoy the holiday.

“As there are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.” William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Henry Esmond

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Happy New Year! The rain on New Year’s Eve day kept the people indoors, but today brings the sunshine of a new year. Perhaps, like me, you are making plans.

Now that our kitchen is complete and the presents have been put away – I’m excited about my new socks – we can turn to our plans and resolutions. My plans involve writing projects of various sorts. Like my son Truman, I would like to finish at least one book this year. To have occasions to write is like visiting an oasis, like watching an unexpected rain shower on a summer afternoon in Davis. I agree with Gloria Steinem who said that “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.”

I’m reviving an ancient assignment for the Silicon Valley Journalism class that I’m teaching this winter. The philosopher Seneca said, “We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application–not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech–and learn them so well that words become works.” But what do we do with these “pieces of teaching” after we have found them? We collect them in what Webster’s Dictionary calls “a book in which extracts, poems, aphorisms, etc. are copied down for future reference, often together with one’s ideas and reflections.” We call this a Commonplace Book.

I suppose I work on three such commonplace books every week: I have a huge Google doc where I collect ideas for poems and book projects, I have another huge such repository for all my topics for Pub Quiz questions, and I have the collections of ideas and quotations that appear in these newsletters that I share with you every week. 

David Allen said that “Your head is for having ideas, not holding them.” What method should we employ to have and to hold one’s ideas? In his book Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte explains what he calls his CODE method for building a “second brain” that focuses on holding: the CODE acronym stands for “Capture, Organize, Distill, and Express.” You can imagine how these elements work: first one captures all the data, with a focus on wisdom and not just facts; then one organizes or categorizes the information is such a way that it is actionable; then one distills the most useful information from the whole; and then one expresses it to an audience, such as I do with these newsletters.

Commonplace Books invite tangents. For example, speaking of distillations, I remember now that Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks said that “Poetry is life distilled.” I think of that quotation from my own commonplace book when I try to enrich this one precious life of mine with the distilled lives of others.

I will ask my students to make at least small eight additions to their commonplace book every week, averaging at least 400 words a week. Their entries will come from the following categories, with the first five being mandatory:

1. Two or more quotations and aphorisms
2. Response to a compelling paragraph from a news story concerning Silicon Valley (paste the paragraph)
3. Responses to assigned readings (assigned for our class or for another class)
4. Response to a friend’s or classmate’s blog or commonplace book
5. Response to an original photograph or a royalty-free photograph that you share
6. Responses to topics brought up in class by Dr. Andy, guest speakers, or peers
7. Links to five or more discovered resources (including articles, podcasts, books, websites)
8. Reflection on a digital tool (such as one you use or are investigating) or social medium 
9. Goals for the week and reflections on your previous week’s goals
10. Contemporary analogues to people or phenomena covered in O’Mara’s book Code
11. Responses to non-assigned readings
12. Quotations from your correspondence with others
13. Up to 50 words of redacted writing that you don’t want others to read (you can substitute Lorem Ipsum)
14. Topics and resources that you are researching for a future assignment
15. An anecdote about something you did this week
16. Responses to examples of discovered innovation, entrepreneurialism, or productive collaboration 
17. An update on your path towards professionalism as a writer
18. Meta-analysis of your own work as a blogger, thinker, writer, student, or keeper of a commonplace book.

400 words is not very much (this newsletter already over 800 words so far), so I think the students can handle it. I hope that this assignment will both build writing habits in my students and help them see the connections between the downtime or low-impact writing that they should be doing all the time in order to prepare themselves for any sort of intellectual or journalistic work in the future. Flannery O’Connor said that “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

On this first day of the year, I have so much more to say about 2022, and so much that I plan to say in 2023. As was the case with poets of yesteryear, some of that composing I will do while walking, as I did this year. During his 1831 tour of Scotland, Wordsworth would sometimes walk 20 miles a day. Of course, he did not have access to light rail or tour busses. Whereas I did surpass the 20 mile mark on occasion in 2022, I will save the summation of my yearly miles, of what Wordsworth called “very much pedestrianizing,” in a future newsletter. 

In other news, next week we celebrate my son Jukie’s 22^nd birthday, so that will mean a fundraiser for the Smith-Lemli-Opitz Foundation. Check out the new website now so that you are in the mood to give! In preparation for next week, and my eventual pitch to you, my reads, I will see what persuasive quotations I can find in my commonplace book.

Happy New Year, and thanks for your support and readership!

Dr. Andy

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P.S. Thanks to all the individuals and teams who support this endeavor every week. I continue because of my supporters on Patreon. Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:

1. Mountain Ranges. The San Jacinto Mountains are found in what county that starts with the letter R?  

2. Pop Culture – Television. Netflix on December 12, 2022 disclosed that 60% of its 223 million global subscribers (134 million) regularly watch original BLANK content. What K word fills in the blank?  

3. Another Music Question. Born Brenda Gail Webb in 1951, who had a 1977 hit with “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue”?  

P.P.S. Allegra Silberstein (she’s 92!) is our featured poet with Jean Biegun on Thursday night at 7. Join us! See https://poetryindavis.com/archive/2022/12/allegra-silberstein-and-jean-biegun-read-at-7-pm-on-thursday-january-5th-2023/ for details.

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

We knew that 2003 would be the year of my dad’s last Christmas. When my wife Kate, and our children Geneva and Jukie, and I arrived at my dad and step-mom’s Las Vegas home, decked out with familiar holiday finery, dad offered to help me with the suitcases. I politely told him that we would carry our own bags. After he gave me a hug, dad complimented me on my new green wool sweater, one that I happened to wear while wrapping presents this afternoon.

As an actor and magician who focused on mentalism, my dad had amazing powers of concentration, memory, and willpower. Harry Houdini was a hero of his, though I never saw my dad escape anything more death-defying than an exuberant conversation with an inebriated fan on the streets of Washington D.C. Instead, my brand of dad’s magic depended upon audience participation, humor, and his powers of suggestion. With his ability to amaze (and perhaps deceive) an audience, my dad could have been a con man, but as a civic-minded artiste, he made sure that all his “marks” left his performances with much more than whatever they brought to his shows.

Soon after the initial diagnosis, a Halloween conversation in which doctors told my dad that he had only a few months to live, he learned that a cancerous tumor was applying pressure on his diaphragm, triggering a case of hiccups. As the hiccups kept him from catching his breath or from resting, the oncologists and nurses were concerned. One never knows what will exacerbate a fatal condition and end up hastening one’s end.

Reading the room and the sensing the implications of his hiccups, my dad knew that he had to do something, especially if he was going to see his sons and his young grandchildren later that month for Thanksgiving. He asked if the doctors and the nurses would give him a couple dozen minutes without interruptions. For one of his last magic tricks, and summoning his innate power as a wizard, my dad calmed his breathing, settled his stomach, and ended his hiccups.

When we visited him that Thanksgiving, dad was well enough to see his son Oliver get married to his longtime girlfriend Sarah, and to spend time with visiting family. As always, he was dressed formally and impeccably – sometimes we wish to make memorable first impressions, and sometimes memorable final ones. We were also impressed with all the “get well soon” cards dad was receiving from professional musicians, from friends at the TV station where he worked throughout my childhood, and the actors in the more than 1,000 theatrical productions that he directed over his lifetime.

One of the more histrionic cards (understandably, from an actor) asked the question how American theatre could continue without Davey Marlin-Jones. When asked how we should respond to such concerns expressed about the cancer diagnosis of a man who had inspired and guided so many actors, my dad responded with four memorable words: “Tell him, ‘All shows must close!’”

My son Truman was born a year and a half after my dad died, but in many ways, he has sustained my dad’s legacy. As my dad was, Truman is taller than me, he’s an actor, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of films, and he’s a writer. Truman also dresses formally – I don’t know that any of his high school friends have seen him in a T-shirt – though I haven’t yet taught him how to tie a tie.

Ties play an important part in my family traditions, and not only because my dad knew how to dress ceremoniously for every gala he ever attended. Thinking about whether Truman was expecting any neckties under the tree this holiday, I recalled something that my dad said to Oliver and me during the week of Christmas, 2003: “Sons, it’s time to play King Lear with the ties.”

Unlike King Lear, we did not come from a wealthy family. My dad had no kingdom of property that he wanted to divide among his children, as Lear did, nor did he want to divide the portions of his gifts to his children according to our professed affection for him, as Lear did, asking, “Which of you shall we say doth love us most? / That we our largest bounty may extend / Where nature doth with merit challenge.”

My dad was renown instead for his collection of ties, many of which he wore on television while reviewing movies in the 1970s and 1980s. His fraying ties from the 50s and 60s he once gave to seamstresses he knew and asked them to create two quilts, one for each of his sons. Though the quilts long since fell apart due to overuse, they comforted us, connecting us with dad when he was out of town directing plays or movies.

Perhaps the quilt commission was a rehearsal for that evening in late December when dad invited Oliver and me to pick out 30 each of our favorite of his ties, each of us alternating so that the colorful “kingdom” would be fairly distributed. Dad compounded the giving by telling us the story of each tie, such as who gave it to him, or on what occasion he wore it. Today I have in my closet the especially fine necktie that my dad wore to his interview at the Department of Theatre at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he would go on to win numerous teaching awards, despite the fact that he had a mere B.A. in Theater from Antioch College, having taken classes there with Coretta Scott (later, Coretta Scott King) while Harry Truman was still U.S. President.

Having reviewed films on TV for two decades, my dad spent more time being filmed than anyone else I know, but I wish we had filmed that interaction among a beloved dad and his two sons – he passed away three years before the first iPhone was released. I think of that night often. I still have all 30 of those ties dad gave me, and over the years, I have shown them to my three kids, but without my dad’s mesmerizing theatrical gusto. As I look at our tree in the living room, and prepare for our own holiday reunion, I think fondly on Truman’s Grand-Davey and what he shared with us that evening. The Christmas memories, like the colorful neckties, will stay with me for the rest of my days.

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Thanks to all of you who have supported this Pub Quiz endeavor this year with your subscriptions via Patreon. I miss the days when we all used to gather together.

Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:

1. Internet Culture. Who or what is Elden Ring: An AI startup CEO, a book titled by Kim Stanley Robinson, a video game, or a wearable technology?  

2. Tunnels. The first ever international vehicle tunnel starts with the letter D, sharing a name with what city?  

3. Sports. Born in 1947, what athlete-turned-actor’s films have grossed over $4 billion worldwide?  

Merry Christmas!

Dr. Andy

P.S. I tweeted about the 92 year-old Davis poet Allegra Silberstein yesterday, and for some reason, it earned over 60 likes. Allegra reads in our poetry series on January 5^th, 2023.