Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Most of the poets that I introduce people to when hosting my podcast or my bimonthly reading series write stronger poems than I do, but I have a special poetry talent that most people in the field don’t share: I can write passable poems on the spot.

Most would rightly see this as a questionably useful talent, the way one looks at people who can juggle bananas, braid the stems of sweetbriars, or list the countries of South America in alphabetical order.

I have deployed this talent most often at a Sunday afternoon poetry series that took place at the Davis Arts Center before the pandemic. Hosted by our then Davis poet laureate, the talented, prolific, and genial James Lee Jobe, the series featured poets who I typically knew well because of my advocacy work in the field. Bringing a large hardback journal that was gifted to me decades previously by my actress stepmother, I would compose a draft of a poem while the featured poets read their works, creating a barely-connected series of images, allusions, and associations. Because the varied stanzas strayed in different directions, I would have to prominently number the sections so that when I read these simplified hypertext works out loud, a new and seemingly purposeful order would be presented.

As the featured poets were friends of mine, the speed-poems I presented often became light roasts, opportunities for me to repurpose lines from their performances in such a way that playfully pointed out their patterns of privilege or pretension. Some lines were improvised while I was reading the new poem, sometimes connecting an element of Jobe’s introduction, or the discovered cause of a quizzical look that I was receiving from someone in the audience. Attendees were likely not as impressed by the quality of the poem produced as they were that I had written it since everyone had sat down for that very event.

The paper notebook was crucial for this exercise, for its large pages allowed me to jot notes to myself, ideas for stanzas, and favorite lines of the roasted poet in different margins of different pages, and then bring them all together for the performance. Phone-composing wouldn’t have worked: nobody wants to see Dr. Andy rudely speed-thumbing on his iPhone during a poetry performance. A paper notebook encourages one to be present in the moment, or deep in thought, while a smartphone encourages one to be preoccupied with faraway distractions of texting or, for some, TikTok, rather than enjoying a performance. 

Fast-forward to this past Thursday, and I got to deploy this inessential skill again. As part of The (Sacramento) Crocker Art Museum’s celebration of Festivus, regional poets were being recruited to turn the museum’s members and other attendees’ grievances into poems, written onto paper thought-bubbles about the size of a small plate. Sign me up, I told the Crocker.

As an undergraduate at Boston University, I switched from Psychology to English not only because of the world-class English Department (where I took classes with a future U.S. Poet Laureate, a Future Oxford Professor of Poetry, and a future Nobel Laureate), but because I didn’t want to spend my professional life listening to people air their grumbles and protests. Ironically, fielding complaints was exactly my job description Thursday night, and I can’t imagine enjoying such a job more.

Of course, I loved this experience in part because I got to attend a boisterous party with live music in an art museum. I haven’t attended an event that fun for years, at least not one that I wasn’t also hosting. I felt like I was traveling back to the carefree days of 2019.

I wore a mask because these days are not, in fact, carefree.

And I wrote a bunch of really short poems. Sometimes they started off as tweets, but then I would add some wordplay or affix an image. My talented poet coworkers, Traci Gourdine and Rhony Bhopla, fit more words onto their paper-plate thought bubbles, but I think I powered through more individual poems. Although Gandhi said, “It is the quality of our work which will please God and not the quantity,” my attitude better matched that of the actor Steve Schirripa: “There’s no such thing as quality time; there’s only quantity time.”

The quality of my work is debatable – some of my poetry students might call some of these poems “rushed.” Some examples would prove them right. When one party guest directed me to write a flash-poem about menopause, I came up with this:

The heinous hated heat is on.

At night I stare into the dark unblinking, 

Like the red glare of my clock.

Sometimes I feel the years are waning,

But my friends and I are all gaining.

Where is the pause button?

At least that one included a simile – the perimeter of my circular writing space mercifully “paused” the poem. 

Someone else took a while to explain to me her dislike of soap scum. I asked her the inevitable response question: “Really?” And then I wrote this:

“Soap Scum”

How much soap is too much?

My body is clean,

the marketers tell me,

but now my mind is busy,

much like my tub’s drain,

brimming with soap scum,

vegetable oil and alabaster colorants.

Ask not what soap can clean for you,

but what your whistling Irish Spring I

must shower stall sacrifice

to clean it.

Another lady complained that her FOMO friends check their smartphones too often when out to dinner with her. In my poem, I imagined that her friends were irreligious ketosis fanatics:

First Date

A religious couple on a first date.

Bowed heads over keto grain bowls?

Nope! My naiveté rather than their crudités!

Soon I saw their Bluetooth earbuds, 

Their vulture necks crooked downward,

Immersed in media, rather than prayer,

Sidetracked by TikTok under the table!

Speaking of tweets, I edited that down a bit to fit into a tweet. Although Rhony and Traci and I had posted almost 100 poems on the wall for museum-goers to review, will any of our lines be remembered? A tweet will make even more impressions. With so many of us snappish, social media doom-scrollers expect some complaining.

Happy Festivus!

Every week I write up a 31-question Pub Quiz for subscribers, and I would love to count you among their number. Also, this coming Thursday, December 15^th, the birthday of Muriel Rukeyser (1913) and others, I’m hosting a poetry reading with Beth Suter and Bethanie Humphreys.

Thanks, and be well.

Dr. Andy

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

1. Pop Culture – Music. Composed in 1852, what English language nursery rhyme and a popular children’s song whose five-word title includes one word appearing three times in a medley on the 1961 Bing Crosby album 101 Gang Songs?  

2. Sports. Babe Ruth’s first and final games as a Major League Baseball player was for teams in what city?  

3. Science. Which of the following scientists invented the rubber balloon in 1824: Michael Faraday, Alfred Nobel, Joseph Priestley, Nikola Tesla?  

“Although I know it’s unfair, I reveal myself one mask at a time.” Stephen Dunn

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

I recently taught my last class of the fall quarter, so now that I am spending time with a final stack of submitted essays, I’ve also been thinking about my students and how much I’ve enjoyed their company.

Many of my students believe they are already strong writers when they enroll in my class, so I have them submit their first essay assignment early in the quarter. In most cases, they are startled by the discoveries that I share about their prose and the grade their essays have earned. Then they buckle down and get to work.

The students who visit my Zoom office hours learn the most. Not only do their receive personalized attention – visiting office hours is like taking an essay in to the doctor for a check-up rather than merely watching some educational videos on exercise and nutrition – but in Zoom office hours, we also get to see each other’s faces. The “face-to-face” conversations in a Zoom room remind us that authentic communication entails facial expressions, the sort that at least I took for granted before I started teaching my classes from behind a mask.

Using the sort of theatrical gesticulations that I learned from my actor father, when teaching as a masked man I gesture a lot more and draw bigger diagrams on the whiteboards. The performer in me enjoys telegraphing my lessons. For instance, sometimes in class I make a point to tell students what I’m thinking, using phrases such as “I’m curious about what you just said,” or “You’ve made some smart choices in this paragraph, showing me evidence that you are thoroughly revising your prose.” Sometimes I point out what might once have been obvious: “You are really attending to the needs of your reader.” Before the pandemic, my facial expressions would communicate some of these messages. 

I suppose that, as is the case in our interpersonal relationships, people in a writing class like to hear expressions of praise and admiration, rather than just sense such affirmations through eye contact and smiles. For wisdom on such matters, I turn to a book that I have also given to former students as a wedding present: The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, by Dr. John Gottman. Notice how what Gottman says here could apply to teaching writing, as well as love relationships:

“People can change only if they feel that they are basically liked and accepted the way they are. When people feel criticized, disliked, and unappreciated they are unable to change. Instead, they feel under siege and dig in to protect themselves.”

I really admire and appreciate my students, appraisals that I communicate by praising the insights they offer and assertions that they make about topics that matter to them. In my Writing in Fine Arts class, for instance, my students’ first assignment – a multimedia autobiography – gives them a chance to introduce themselves with a few paragraphs of prose, with a photograph that includes their (unmasked) faces, and with a representation of one of their creations so I can unabashedly laud their creative output. I note their imaginative strengths and artistic flair while pointing out that I could not hope to accomplish what they have done in their creative field.

Then I turn to the organization, emphasis, style, and clarity of their prose and gently show them where and how they are missing the mark. I promise to help them eventually match the clarity of their prose to the clarity of their thinking. No matter one’s previous experiences as an academic writer, writing about the arts or about any topic can feel like a struggle to translate one’s inherent wisdom into a language that can be received by a reader.

As one our assigned composition theorists, William Zinsser, says, “Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other.” With examples, many of them taken by authors enrolled in the class, I show them how clear thinking functions as the foundation of their essays. If they are majoring in design (and I have more design majors in my Writing in Fine Arts classes than those from any other disciplines), I remind them what data visualization guru Edward Tufte says: “Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual.” If they are artists, I remind them what the poet W.H. Auden said: “Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.” If they are wrestling with loss or confronting social injustices, I present them with a favorite Ernest Holmes quotation: “Healing is the result of clear thinking.” Before the quarter is over, students are workshopping and submitting prose that contains what expository prose expert Maxine Hairston lists as the qualities of successful writing: Substance, clarity, unity, economy, and grammatical correctness. 

Lao Tzu said that “When the student is ready the teacher will appear,” and likely each of us can think of a teacher or professor who appeared at just the right time for us (and allow me to share a shout-out to Will Layman, Carolyn Williams, and Sir Christopher Ricks). Anticipating the sudden and mysterious exit of elderly Obi-Wan Kenobi, Lao Tzu also said that “When the student is truly ready… The teacher will Disappear.” 

I don’t know if my students were ready for me, but it’s with a mix of satisfaction and regret that I will disappear from these students’ lives. I hope they feel prepared to think and write clearly about what excites them to be artists. I will keep an eye open for their publications, art openings, and performances, as well as the day when we can all congregate again without our masks. 

Eighty people came to the most recent poetry reading that I attended. I remember when 80 people could fill the indoor seats at de Vere’s Irish Pub on a Monday night for a Pub Quiz. If you were among that crowd, thanks for participating. Katie Peterson, Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at UC Davis, called it “the biggest crowd for a poetry reading, ever.” I appreciated the exaggeration!

Every week I write and publish a Pub Quiz of 30 trivia questions for subscribers on Patreon. Would  you like to join us there, and receive the trivia fruits of all that labor? This week’s quiz includes question on topics raised above, as well as dog breeds, breakfast cereals, U.S. senators, genetics, MCU actors, trotting possums, and other topics you might know something about. If you plan to gather with friends or family this holiday season, I hope you will ask me for a sample so you can host or participate in a form of entertainment that doesn’t involve a screen (unless you are quizzing via Zoom). Or, you could just visit the Patreon page to show your support there. Thanks to all the patrons who make these weekly missives possible.

Be well. Enjoy the rain!

Dr. Andy 

P.S. The aforementioned W. H. Auden described the aforementioned Sir Christopher Ricks as “exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding.” I’m glad I found him!

P.P.S. Here are some questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:

1. California Culture. The 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood was filmed in Bidwell Park. A municipal park, it’s the third largest in California and one of the 25 largest in the US. Name the city.  

2. Countries of the World. What is the name of the German-speaking microstate located in the Alps between Austria and Switzerland?  

3. Science. The second largest order of mammals after rodents comprises about 20% of all classified mammal species worldwide, with over 1,400 species. Name this mammal recognizable by most schoolchildren.  

4. Books and Authors. Published in 1937, what short novel set in California tells the story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers? 

5. Sports. Born with the first name Ferdinand in 1947, what American former professional basketball player played 20 seasons in the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers?  

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

I rarely watched the TV show MacGyver when I was a kid, but I understood the concept. 

My dad taught us more concepts than skills. His father was entirely conversant in auto repair and maintenance, but grandpa was surprised by how little Oliver and I knew about these topics. I had friends who were Boy Scouts, but for my Quaker dad, the uniforms seemed too military in their appearance. For the same reason, we were not allowed to play with toy guns or Army Men.

But this admirable pacifism came with an opportunity cost. When I wanted to learn about all the blades on a Swiss Army Knife or the many uses of an Erector Set, I turned to friends in the neighborhood. I went camping only on school trips. We cooked food in our kitchen rather than over coals. I watched other people bait hooks rather than doing so myself. Although in the early 1990s I changed a number of flat tires on my 1978 orange four-door Datsun B210, I’ve never rebuilt a carburetor.

I did have other strengths. Growing up, I knew more about Boris Karloff, Gene Kelly, The Magna Carta, and Norse gods than most of my parents’ adult friends. I could recite entire poems by Lewis Carroll and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I could tell you the titles of all four of Nat King Cole’s #1 singles from the 1940s, and by the time John Lennon was assassinated, I had read more than a dozen books about The Beatles. In conversation or with a drawing pad, I could also helpfully illustrate the salient differences between orcs, goblins, and kobolds. These important bits of information rarely served any purpose in the field.

As we fast-forward to the present, the MacGyver of our household is my wife Kate. Because of our first-floor remodel, she has come up with ingenious ways to make do as we continue to live without access to a functioning kitchen or laundry facilities at home. When friends heard that she was planning a full-course Thanksgiving meal without a kitchen, stovetop, or oven, they offered her their sympathies, as well as their kitchens and slow cookers. Kate, however, felt determined to challenge herself to create her traditional feast all on her own, a Thanksgiving we’d always remember. 

Regular readers know that I am working my way through the 684-page biography titled Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson Jr., and that self-reliance was one of Ralph Waldo’s favorite topics. In his 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” Emerson says, “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” A practicing introvert, Kate relished her own company and that of her own ingenuity as she worked with a microwave, a toaster oven, and a hot plate. Because our garage electrical system would not allow any two of these three appliances to be working simultaneously, she used the microwave in the garage, set up the toaster oven in our entryway, and the hot plate on a card table in the empty laundry room.

The challenge – and the joy – of our celebration was heightened when we heard that a friend’s family Thanksgiving was cancelled because of the cook’s Thanksgiving eve broken collarbone, so we invited him and a bottle of his favorite wine (a Cabernet Sauvignon) to join us for the vegetarian feast. Part of the fun of this holiday is the pleasure one takes in the company and the stories of beloveds who don’t already live under the same roof. With my daughter Geneva returning home to enjoy a glass of that wine and the delicious feast, we all got to catch up with each other’s lives in ways that transcend what one can find in a post on a social medium.

And what a feast it was! Sitting outside on an afternoon when it was warmer outside than in, we enjoyed what Kate created in a variety of disassembled and partially-remodeled first floor rooms in our nearly unheatable home. We dined on spinach quiche, steamed veggies, stuffing, cranberries, scalloped potatoes, an arugula salad with lemon basil vinaigrette and chopped almonds, fluffy dinner rolls, and pumpkin pie!

After dinner, some of us watched a movie that my dad the film critic had introduced to Kate during the first Thanksgiving that she and I spent as a married couple. On Thanksgiving Day in 1992 and 2022, Kate and my son Truman, respectively, got to watch for the first time a favorite film about extended families: The Godfather.

All credit for the success of our Thanksgiving goes to our resident culinary MacGyver. I bet that Thursday night Kate felt all the more triumphant because of the challenges she overcame to make us such an ambitious, tasty, and seasonal meal. As George S. Patton said, “Accept the challenges so that you can feel the exhilaration of victory.”

I bet when Patton was a child, he knew the purpose of every blade on a Swiss Army knife.

This year I am deeply thankful to all the friends who support this writing project via Patreon. Most subscribers get a weekly Pub Quiz with questions on a variety of topics, including current events, history, popular culture, technology, books and authors, sports, retirement options, and science.

Of all the supporters on Patreon who make this happen, I’d like especially to thank the Outside Agitators, the Original Vincibles, Potent Potables, and Quizimodo. I’m always grateful to the team captains who pledge for their entire team, and thus sustain this enterprise. 

Enjoy the rest of this holiday weekend.

Best,

Dr. Andy

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

1. The U.S. Government. The U.S. Department of Education was founded in what odd-numbered 20th-century decade?   

2. Science. Starting with the letter M, what branch of biology deals with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features?  

3. Books and Authors. What American wrote the books Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood?  

P.P.S. 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, such as this coming Thursday night at 7 with Katie Peterson, 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).

“Poems for me work like flashlights in a cave; they’re a way to explore the dark without dying. Also, because other poets over the years have given me such beauty, to the point of changing my life, I’d like to give something back, if I can.” – Lola Haskins

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

I saw a play (The Lost Claus) Friday evening in which an elf had the worst time understanding his comrades when they used figurative language. He kept a little notebook in which he would jot down aphorisms and euphemisms that his Elfin friends had used over the centuries, trying to keep up, treating figurative language as a second language. Sometimes Santa and the other elves would use more gruesome phrases, such as being “so nervous that they might jump out of their skin,” just to watch him flinch and blanch. Congratulations to Jason Kuykendall for being the heart of this new holiday classic.

As a poet, as a collector of images, juxtapositions, and little fragments of dialogue, Jason’s character of Henry McCallow appealed to me. Like him, I keep a little notebook in the form of an iPhone Google doc in which I collect intrigues and images for future poems, and topics for future newsletters.

Watching the play (which was better written than most original Christmas plays that Kate and I have watched over the last 20 winters of our subscription at the B Street Theatre), I noted that I was enjoying myself immensely. I had just enjoyed dinner with our boys, I had the company of my lovely wife, and we were spending date night watching our favorite merry band of actors attempting a new take on Christmas in 2022.

How does a thoughtful person approach theatre? Insofar as theatre spreads delusion, both Plato and The Buddha were against it. We can read these words by The Buddha in The Talaputa Sutta: “When sentient beings are still not free of delusion, and are still bound by delusion, a dancer in a stage or festival presents them with even more delusory things. And so, being heedless and negligent themselves, they’ve encouraged others to be heedless and negligent. When their body breaks up, after death, they’re reborn in the hell called ‘Laughter.’”

Perhaps a play is a distraction from the mindful and the spiritual, but it might also be called a welcome respite from all the atomizing distractions of modern life. The artist helps us with inconvenient truths and realizations. James Baldwin said, “A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” Life disappoints us, but with the people left who love us, we persevere. As Gwendolyn Brooks says, “You are the beautiful half of a golden hurt.”

Less golden hurts also await us. Take social media, for instance. Elon Musk‘s announcement that he’s welcoming Donald Trump back to Twitter just as Twitter itself is shedding all of its employees, along with its responsibilities and self-regulations, indicates that Musk is welcoming back the well-poisoner in chief, our nation’s most famous and most effective purveyor of misinformation and lies. Peter Ternes, my favorite Detroit communications manager, likened the return of Trump to Twitter as “Pouring crude oil into a stream.” 

Twitter is a former boom town that has gone bust. The World Cup next week, typically one of the busiest times for the social medium, will tax the last remaining overstretched employees, as well as the Twitter’s three main US data centers, one of which, in Sacramento, is scheduled to be shut down as part of Musk’s cost-cutting.

I need to learn to put my phone down more often, and instead to take the hand of a family member and see what they are doing. Marcus Aurelius asks, “Stop whatever you’re doing for a moment and ask yourself: Am I afraid of death because I won’t be able to do this anymore?” We probably never think about that about our Instagram feed.  

For me, attending a play or a poetry reading, or taking a long nature walk that is free of agendas or action items, reminds me the pleasures afforded to our precious human lives. When it comes to social media, we should remember that for every hour that we lose to doom scrolling, we also miss an opportunity to see a play, write a poem, embrace a beloved, or reconnect with our own thoughts through journaling, meditating, or sitting by a favorite nearby body of water.

I wish for you to enjoy all of these during this Thanksgiving week, and that you begin December refreshed and inspired.

Thanks for your continued readership. Would people miss the hints if I were to leave them out this week? I am always seeking to simplify. 

Please subscribe so I can send you the full quiz every week! Here are three questions from last week’s Pub Quiz

1. Global Warming. In 1979, the Art Deco Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the city in the United States that is most immediately threatened by climate-driven sea-level rise and flooding. Name this famous beach city of 83,000 people.   

2. Pop Culture – Music. The biographer Nicholas Jennings said this about what musician born in 1938: “His name is synonymous with timeless songs about trains and shipwrecks, rivers and highways, lovers and loneliness. He is unquestionably Canada’s greatest songwriter”?  

3. Sports. What former Chicago Bears football player remains the heaviest player to score a touchdown in the Super Bowl and has the largest Super Bowl ring at size 25?  

Be well,

Dr. Andy

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

We all lose things. We lose friends, family members, and beloved pets to death. Some friends fade from our lives due to neglect or a falling out. Others just disappear. Some people I know are slowly losing their minds, while others might lose a decade because they weren’t paying attention.

Some people, such as myself, lose our looks, while some of us seem particularly well preserved. For example, the waiter who carded my lovely wife Kate at a Sacramento restaurant recently guessed wrong on her age (that is, too young) by 17 years. This was one of many birthday presents for her that night. Meanwhile, by contrast, someone recently asked me if I had plans to play Santa Claus this year.

I believe the Santa remark concerned my whitening beard, not my girth. If  you are curious, and I feel compelled to share even if you are not, my belt size is holding steady at 32 inches. If I were a mixed martial arts fighter, I would compete in the lightweight division, reserved for scrappers who enter the octagon weighing 70.3 kilograms. Perhaps our not having access to a kitchen this month has caused me to lose some weight.

The daily walking routine helps with this, though I have been losing steam now that the afternoons have grown dark and the air has turned frigid. I’m only averaging about seven miles a day this month of November. What have I got to lose by easing off from my daily quota now that I’ve almost made it to the finish line? Of course, the answer is so much.

Rather than measuring out his life with coffee spoons, or with miles logged, my son Truman has a monthly quota of classic movies viewed. Today my son Truman and I watched the 1948 classic Oscar-winner The Treasure of Sierra Madre, which features characters who gain and lose a great deal, though some of them remain sanguine about the losses. The Spanish spoken in the film by banditos, Federales, and Indios was not accompanied by subtitles, so I tried to keep up as best I could, translating poorly in my head. Surely something was lost in the translation.

My parents knew Frances “Scottie” Fitzgerald in Washington DC in the 1960s. I wonder if she felt lost after both her parents died in their 40s. Scottie was a locally famous hostess and a big proponent of the arts. My parents lost touch with her after she moved down to her mom’s home town of Montgomery, Alabama in 1973.

A scene near the end of The Treasure of Sierra Madre reminds me of something Scottie’s dad, F. Scott Fitzgerald, a member of what Gertrude Stein called “The Lost Generation,” wrote in in his 1922 novel The Beautiful and the Damned: “Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know–because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot. And when I got it, it turned to dust in my hands.”

Sometimes we make new friends to make up for all the losses. For instance, yesterday I had lunch with a new friend who speaks five languages. When I asked her three children what the fifth language was – I remembered only Italian, Spanish, French, and English – one of them asserted that it was Chinese. I checked with their dad whom I have known for 45 years, but who I haven’t seen in almost 40, and he corrected them: It’s German. The kids, who moved seamlessly from English to Italian themselves, had lost track of what their impressive mom knew. I bet German is spoken in the house less than the other four languages.

If I wanted to say “I was groping on the floor for a lost contact lens” in German, I would get to use the most delightful 18-letter term for “lost.” Check this out: “Ich tastete auf dem Fußboden nach einer heruntergefallenen Kontaktlinse.” Alphabetically, the first 18-letter word in English is “ABSENTMINDEDNESSES.” Both this word and heruntergefallenen indicate a loss, but I bet only one frequently accompanies a professor. The German translation of “professor” is “der Professor.” I thought I had lost all my German, but evidently I still speak it from time to time.

Whether in the dojo, the octagon, or the chess board, men sometimes prefer to speak the language of competition rather than the language of understanding and negotiation. I used to win online games of chess with my friends Joe and Brad, but now I lose more often than I win. C.S. Lewis once said that, “Like a good chess player, Satan is always trying to maneuver you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop.” I prefer the virtual company of Joe and Brad to that of Satan, whom I know best from long poems by Dante and Milton. 

Speaking of Bishops, Elizabeth Bishop is one of my favorite American poets. And just as I never got to meet F. Scott Fitzgerald (he died decades before I was born), I can relive his genius through his novels and through the stories I remember my parents telling me when I was a young English major. Likewise, I never got to see Bishop read, but I have learned important lessons about poetry from two of her students, Robert Pinsky and Dana Gioia, two living poets who continue to write and publish important poems.

Bishop’s most-anthologized poem is a villanelle about losing titled “One Art.” It begins this way:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

You can read the rest of this short Bishop masterpiece online. I myself am aware of losing places – four different apartments in three different cities where I have lived with Kate – and of losing names. For instance, I keep mistaking Owen Wilson, the writer and voice actor who loses races but gains friends as Lightning McQueen, and Wilfred Owen, the solider poet who lost his life in the closing days of World War I.

I assume I am losing faces, too, for people in Davis still “recognize” me or greet me by name even though I don’t always know who they are. My famous but blind father taught me how to deal with this situation: Greet everyone as if they were an old friend. Let kindness compensate for the awkwardness. People forgive quirkiness.

As a film buff, like the grandson he would never meet, and as a film critic, my father likely watched over 10,000 films in his life, many of them in the movie theatre where I worked as a teenager. Almost all of the 30 or so Washington DC theatres where he and I watched films together have been lost – the palaces have been closed. I was with him for the last film he ever saw, watched from his room during my last visit with him not long before he died. That film was Lost in Translation. 

We might rebrand loss to become more comfortable with it. As an article published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association tells us, a mindfulness course can be just as effective as medication at helping us deal with anxiety. This is how Dr. Elizabeth Hoge and her co-authors summarized their findings: “In this randomized clinical trial of 276 adults with anxiety disorders, 8-week treatment with mindfulness-based stress reduction was noninferior to escitalopram.” 

From this study, and from this blog entry, I hope you will take my suggestion that we should practice treating people, experiences, and even losses as “noninferior.” I will leave you, but I hope not lose you, with these wise and antidotal words by the Brazilian lyricist who authored The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho:

“Let things go. Release them. Detach yourself from them. Stop turning on your emotional television to watch the same program over and over again, the one that shows how much you suffered from a certain loss: that is only poisoning you, nothing else.”

Thanks for reading that longer-than-usual essay on loss.

Every week I share a Pub Quiz with subscribers who make all of this possible. I would love to include you among their number. Visit and join us at Patreon at whatever level you please. Some people say that joining in person or virtually with other quiz-loving friends keeps them from losing their marbles. Perhaps the same will be true of you.

I hope you get to see this week’s Pub Quiz. Expect questions on topics raised above, and on the following: Japanese companies, independence, hurricanes, lions, people named Zoe, Kings named Henry, discs, election results, the effects of quakes, The Beatles, Asian cultures, favorite journalists, big films from yesteryear, angels, numbers and letters, identified millennia, large rings, ruinous gates, peanuts, people who are lost, astronomy, first cousins, temperatures in Fahrenheit, spheres with sides, great American pairings, Canadians, large appliances, climate changes, shipwrecks, co-ed institutions, things that come from Boston, current events, mottos and slogans, and Shakespeare. 

Aren’t you intrigued? Subscribe!

Yours in letting go,

Dr. Andy

P.S. Find here three questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:

1. Food and Drink – Blueberries. Blueberry jam is made from blueberries, sugar, water, and fruit WHAT?  

2. Pop Culture – Television. The Sopranos aired for what even number of seasons?  

3. Another Music Question. What color is the “note” in the name of the most prolific, influential and respected jazz labels of the mid-20th century?  

P.P.S. Poetry Night happens indoors on Thursday with international flavor. Expect to be entertained by André Naffis-Sahely and Natachi Mez!

P.P.P.S. Also, In my most recent podcast, I interview poet Suzanne Frischkorn and two students from my first-year seminar titled Bravery Studies: Three Poems A Week. 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/. As you know, 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).

“Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” Carl Sandburg

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

I attended a Waldorf elementary school, so my classmates and I were introduced to the natural world before language. As first graders, we held hands on the grounds of the National Cathedral in Washington D.C., sharing rhymes while rotating together in slow circles. We developed wonder in the stories we were told about wild animals who talked to children, and in the mazes and shrubberies of the Bishop’s Garden.

Eventually we were taught equivalencies between nouns and letters. From one of the fairy tales, we drew a green dragon, and then from the “D” of his shape, learned how to draw an upper-case D. We eventually learned to do the same with a snake, with mountains, with the horizontally stretched branches of a tree.

Years later, I was introduced to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s great 1836 book-length essay titled Nature. The chapter on language echoes principles that informed how we were taught at The Washington Waldorf School:

“Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Note: Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most of the process by which this transformation is made, is hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed; but the same tendency may be daily observed in children.” 

When it came to my early schooling, I lived in two worlds. At home, I learned to read from The Washington Post, and sometimes I would accompany my journalist dad to the local TV station where the news of the day was presented by anchors who during commercial breaks would ask me how things were going at school. Because my dad reviewed movies soon after the sports stars who would offer learned commentary, in the early 1970s I got to know quarterback Sonny Jurgensen (whose NFL number will be retired this year — he’s now 88!), and Martina Navratilova. 

At school, we trafficked in wonder and magic, rather than the worldly concerns that appeared on Eyewitness News on (then) WTOP or in The Washington Post. Taught to dance, to draw, and to listen patiently to stories and poems, my classmates and I were immersed in a world of play and imagination. Rather than being hurried into a world of symbols, grades, or assessments of any kind, we enjoyed art classes, field trips with naturalists, and a morning and an afternoon recess. When it came to words, we were taught, as Emerson would write, that “All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language.”

Although he is 21, my son Jukie still lives in such a world. He understands most of what we say to him, but he lives a life unencumbered by language, preferring instead to grasp the world by beholding a rising moon, or examining in his hand the leaves pruned from a tree he has just visited. Last night, Jukie and I dined at Dos Coyotes, the neighborhood Tex-Mex restaurant named after the two Coyote brothers who founded it. Jukie has stared up at the restaurant’s coyote art since he was a toddler, though these days he will excuse himself from the table to sit in the nearby courtyard until I finish my oversized salad (with extra Brussel’s sprouts that Jukie likes to steal).

Despite our meandering pace along one of the quiet greenbelts of south Davis, our long walk home kept us warm on this chilly evening. I was holding Jukie’s hand as I have done for more than 20 years of such walks, and Jukie was yodeling as he does, amusing himself with sounds that a kindly woman on a restaurant patio recently said sounded like an opera singer warming up. 

As I was reflecting on Emerson’s assertion that “Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts,” I began to hear multiple distant replies to Jukie’s plaintive song. From across the fields far to the south of Putah Creek, reminding me that the story-time magic of my childhood lessons can still be available if we make room for it, we could hear that Jukie’s yodels were being answered by the howls of actual coyotes.

Every week I create a trivia contest for subscribers, and I would love to share it with you. If you would like to consider subscribing, drop me a line so I can send you this week’s quiz! In it you will find questions about the following: I hope you get to see this week’s Pub Quiz. Expect questions on topics raised above, and on the following: promises of a better life, incessant emails, attempts to save daylight, MSNBC hosts, leeches, fools and wise men, mavericks, branches of biology, cabinet secretaries, Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, empires, rhythm, gay icons, places that start with a particular letter, the Persian Gulf, people not known for their poor mercy, synesthesia and music, gangsters, blueberry jams, trail time with horses, field goals, living musicians, highways, people who are liked, current events, mottos and slogans, and Shakespeare.

Thanks to all the supporters on Patreon who make all this happen, especially the Outside Agitators, the Original Vincibles, Potent Potables, and Quizimodo. I’m always grateful to the team captains who pledge for their entire team, and thus sustain this enterprise. Please subscribe so you can share the fun of the Pub Quiz with your friends and neighbors!

Poetry Night returns on November 17. I think we will have to move it inside. Mask up and join us! Also, please consider subscribing to my podcast.

Be well.

Dr. Andy

P.S. Here are six questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:

1. Newspaper Headlines. About how many billions did Elon Musk pay for Twitter?  
2. California Cities. What California city was recently listed among most “breathtaking” vacation spots in the world by National Geographic?  
3. Halloween Movies. The most famous scenes of the film Hocus Pocus were filmed in what city?  
4. Pop Culture – Music. In 1948, Music Digest estimated that one man’s recordings filled more than half of the 80,000 weekly hours allocated to recorded radio music in America. Name the singer.  
5. Sports. On October 31^st in what year ending in a zero did the Big Cat, Earl Lloyd, becomes the first African-American to play a game in the NBA, scoring 6 points on debut for the Washington Capitols?  
6. Science. In biology, what T word do we use for the cellular organizational level between cells and a complete organ?  

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

It’s Halloween, and our house seems to be haunted.

In Davis, a seller is not required to reveal if the home in question has been subject to any paranormal activity, and our home, bought the year my father died in 2004, has been free of spooks, as far as I know.

But this week, as these stories sometimes go, workmen were doing some work in the house, some digging. We didn’t expect them to turn up anything unusual, but we did expect them to scare up a bunch of dust, so we asked them to cover our living room and dining room furniture with plastic sheets.

The translucent material is so light that every time we open the front door, which itself is at best a semi-permeable membrane protecting our home, the resulting breeze causes all the sheets to flutter like ghosts whose haunted home is being disturbed by unwelcome visitors.

With all the color in our living room muted by these seemingly-animated plastic covers, I was reminded of a favorite Wallace Stevens poem:

Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock

The houses are haunted  

By white night-gowns.  

None are green,

Or purple with green rings,  

Or green with yellow rings,  

Or yellow with blue rings.  

None of them are strange,  

With socks of lace

And beaded ceintures.

People are not going

To dream of baboons and periwinkles.  

This town of monochromatic houses is interrupted at the end of the poem by “an old sailor, / Drunk and asleep in his boots” who “Catches tigers / In red weather.” One hopes that the sailor’s colorful dream could exorcise (or dis-illusion) the town of its unimaginative listlessness, and its ghostly people who seem like nothing more than “white night-gowns.” 

Meanwhile, back at our house, as the kitchen remodel has only just begun, so much has been moved into the garage. This chilly new home to our refrigerator and microwave, our makeshift kitchen, is also home to my boxes of books and old letters from friends, some of whom haunt my dreams with unfulfillable promises of reunions. 

In the garage we have letters from my dad, who sometimes also sent postcards of Dali paintings and Buster Keaton portraits; letters from my best friend Tito, who filled me in on his time working as a pilot in Alaska; letters from my Boston University dorm-mate Kevin, arranging one of his many visits to our homes in Sacramento and Davis; letters from our DC neighbor Beverly Price, who encouraged me to get started early on my dissertation; and letters from John Davenport, who used to tell me stories of his work as a DC cab driver to afford himself time to work on his novel. 

You can imagine how much I appreciate that all these beloved people flew to Chicago to attend our wedding 30 years ago this month, Tito in his own plane. All of them died before our 20^th anniversary. Some of the deaths might have been expected, but some continue to shock us in their suddenness. Beverly was 40 years older than me. Tito, eight days. 

Meanwhile, the temporary cellophane ghosts keep waving to us as we come and go in our haunted house, making us remember all the people they stand in for on this Halloween.

This week’s Pub Quiz asks some questions about Halloween. I hope you get to see this week’s ghastly Pub Quiz. Expect questions on topics raised above, and on the following: French phrases, buyer’s remorse, the European Union, Jamie Lee Curtis, mortal murders, Major League Baseball, fundraising Jokers, biological color palates, people who seem to be named after elves, Christmas composers, Box Office Mojo, pumpkins and other seasonal vegetables, states that start with the letter I, literary expanded diet possibilities, countries I have never visited, Andrew Marvel, sicknesses and health, first ladies, scary movies, cellular organizations, Washington Capitols, Music Digest, California cities, current events, mottos and slogans, and Shakespeare.

Thanks to all the supporters on Patreon who make all this happen, especially the Outside Agitators, the Original Vincibles, Potent Potables, and Quizimodo, the members of which I got to visit with last week as Quizmaster. I’m always grateful to the team captains who pledge for their entire team, and thus sustain this enterprise. Please subscribe so you can share the fun of the Pub Quiz with your friends and neighbors!

Be well.

Dr. Andy 

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

1. Books and Authors. What mononymic French author is best known in the English-speaking world for her 1944 novella Gigi?  

2. Sports. What is the only California MLB team not to have won a World Series?  

3. Shakespeare. The Shakespeare co-written play The Two Noble Kinsmen is based on a knight’s tale by what “Father of British Literature”? 

P.P.S. Did you know that you can register your interest in attending this coming Thursday’s Poetry Night via Facebook?

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

The question at the after party Thursday night was this: “What drew 100 people to Poetry Night tonight?”

Many theories were batted about. One was that Margaret Ronda, a much-loved English Department faculty member with family ties to the community, gives only occasional poetry readings, and her friends wanted to support her.

Another is that one of my colleagues brought an entire class of students to the reading, and even a small graduate class can make a poetry reading look crowded.

Another is the well-designed fliers that I posted in the English Department. Another is the graduate student instructors who have been telling their creative writing classes that the Poetry Night open mic is a place they can try out their new poems.

Another is that the event was advertised in the Facebook group Events in Davis, which I created about five years ago to publicize Poetry Night and the pub quiz. While the Poetry in Davis group (which is about 15 years old) has now topped a thousand members, the Events group now has more than five thousand, or about 15% of the population of Davis.

Ernest Hemingway wrote a famous line in The Sun Also Rises that has informed how we understand economic downturns: “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.” 

I think that’s how our Poetry Night audience grew. Gradually, over the last 15 years, and then, Thursday night, all at once.

The Poetry Night reading series now meets on the actual rooftop of the John Natsoulas Gallery, in a sculpture garden that offers some of the best views of the city. We enjoy the last wisps of sunset while starting to set up at 6:30, with the local director, actor, and musician Timothy Nutter providing top-rate sound equipment and enough theatrical lighting to impress upon people that they would get to see a “show.”

We had chairs set up for about 50, and it looked at 6:55 that that would be sufficient, but then more and more people emerged from the five-floor staircase or the lugubrious elevator. Some of them agreed to help my event producer Kat fetch more chairs, with more people and more chairs emerging as I began my introductions.

Our opener, Augusta Funk, and our headliner, Margaret Ronda, delighted the polite crowd. Atypically, people sat silently after each poem – so many people were attending for the first time that they didn’t know that crowds typically make noises in between the performances, even if only light applause.

I had fun introducing our opening poet, who I had talked to the day before on my radio show, now also a podcast (to which you should subscribe!). Recalling my time listening to funk songs on Washington DC radio stations when I was a youth, I quoted a favorite Parliament song: “We want the Funk. Give us the Funk,” and then brought on Augusta Funk.

I have known our second poet, Margaret Ronda, for years, so I was looking forward to her performance. Ronda wrote a bunch of epistolary poems during the pandemic, poems addressed to people she knows, people she knew, and admired poets from generations before, such as the Romantic poet John Clare. Each poem was titled “Dear Friend,” and each one compelled me to buy the book where they will eventually be published.

Perhaps people familiar with Ronda’s new project knew that Poetry Night would be their opportunity to hear her new work, and that is why 100 of them recently packed the roof of the John Natsoulas Gallery, to enjoy an evening of poetry under the stars.

I hope you get to see this week’s Pub Quiz. Expect questions on topics raised above, and on the following: medications, celebrity holders of Guinness records, The Marx Brothers, knights, baseball teams, people who overdo it, French people, cows, pigments, obscure airlines, new countries, board games, world-builders, people with alliterative names, directors, Marvel movies, entities named Karen, goliaths, impossible missions, different sized workouts, British bands, long American rivers, periods in history, unexpected memoirists, soul musicians, populous cities, ghosts, Republicans, consoles, solutions, current events, mottos and slogans, and Shakespeare.

Thanks to all the supporters on Patreon who make all this happen, especially the Outside Agitators, the Original Vincibles, Potent Potables, and Quizimodo. I’m always grateful to the team captains who pledge for their entire team, and thus sustain this enterprise. Please subscribe so you can share the fun of the Pub Quiz with your friends and neighbors!

Be well.

Dr. Andy

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

1. Halloween Preparations. In the films Hocus Pocus and Hocus Pocus 2, the three main witches were played by Bette Midler and two other actresses. Name one of those two.  

2. Sports. The jazz standard “Sweet Georgia Brown” eventually became the theme song of what sports team?  

3. Science. In the world of medicine, what S-word do we use for a tubular support placed temporarily inside a blood vessel, canal, or duct to aid healing or relieve an obstruction?  

P.P.S. Our next Poetry Night, featuring Joshua McKinney and Matthew Chronister, takes place on November 3^rd, the day before my wife Kate’s birthday!

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

I think my favorite line from Virgil’s Aeneid appealed to me originally because of the misinterpreted image of a succulent disco:

Non ignara mali miseris succurrere disco.

Robert Fitzgerald translates that as “Through pain I’ve learned to comfort suffering men.”

As we are celebrating the famously agrarian poet Virgil this weekend (his birthday is October 15), I’ve been thinking about the ethos of care that underscores this line of poetry. Many of us who are not Classics scholars remember Virgil as being the helper and guide who meets and supports Dante in the first canto of Dante’s Inferno.

Speaking of needed support, our weekend started with my wife Kate supporting a family in Romania (a country that the Romans first “visited” during Virgil’s lifetime) who needed her particular knowledge and experience. Kate is the Director of Communications and Family Support for the Smith-Lemli-Opitz (SLO) Foundation, so parents turn to her when they need SLO questions answered. Often they reach out to her upon first learning of the rare syndrome and about the varied challenges that will likely await their families.

One particular mom wrote to Kate with heartfelt and heartbreaking questions about her daughter: “What could I do for my girl being still at a young age? To help her in time?” These are the questions all parents of newborns with Smith-Lemli-Opitz Syndrome ask. Later in the conversation she channeled all such parents when she said, “I want her not be very affected. I want to help her as much as I can.”

I got to attend TASTE Saturday night, a celebration of local food and drink that raised funds for the Student Farm, a place set aside at UC Davis “where students can learn, practice, and model an ecologically, socially, and economically sustainable agriculture and food system.” At TASTE I encountered university colleagues, friends from the community, and friends that I first got to know at the live Pub Quiz that I used to host in town.

I visited tables offering samples from some favorite food groups (vegan salads, rich chocolate bars, and Davis Food Co-op cheeses), as well as some popular liquids, including wine, beer, cider, almond milk (?), and tea. Pushing the tea and tea culture was my multidecade friend Katharine Burnett, also the chair of the Art History Program at UC Davis. I had previously interviewed Katharine at the Summer Institute on Teaching and Technology that I host, as well as on my radio show (now also a podcast) to discuss her Global Tea Initiative. Tea is a multi-billion dollar industry, I remember us discussing. She hopes that UC Davis can do for tea in California what our Viticulture and Enology Department has done to support the wine industry.

Seeing that Katharine and her cozy tea friends had just started to pack up their two tables’ worth of porcelain displays, tea samples, and Madeleine cookies as the TASTE event had ended, I offered to help them move their stuff to their vehicle(s). Perhaps daunted by the many jugs of undrunk water that had been set aside to make tea that evening, Katharine took me up on my offer, and I got to catch up with an old friend while we walked back and forth to her car with all her bins and boxes.

After each of the passenger seats and the entire trunk of her undersized car was filled, Katharine repeated my name in thanks, almost the way that Dante does when thanking Virgil in Canto 30 of Purgatorio, just before Beatrice takes over as Dante’s guide.

Speaking of Italian culture, after TASTE I told an Italian-born French friend of mine that I was ready to Zoom with her to discuss her application for a faculty position, due at midnight that evening. I work with second-language writers every week in my writing classes, but rarely do I get to wrestle with sophisticated literary analysis concepts that have been translated from my second language, French, into my native language.

Pouring over a shared Google doc that would be soon reviewed by a hiring committee at one of California’s most prestigious universities, my Francophone literature expert and I discussed the wording of key phrases and the relative merits of different theoretical approaches to multilingual literary study. At the end, we both agreed that the word “exotic” should be spelled the French way: “exotique.” I felt bad “correcting” that term on her final draft.

Like Virgil, and like Kate, I was reminded on Saturday of the many rewards of “comforting suffering men,” or, in this case, women who were suffering through some task or another. Kate and I probably benefitted the most from our good deeds, from our lessening of others’ burdens. As the Dalai Lama says, “The more we take the welfare of others to heart and work for their benefit, the more benefit we derive for ourselves. This is a fact that we can see.”

I hope you get to support a friend or stranger this week!

Dr. Andy

I also I hope you get to see this week’s Pub Quiz. Expect questions on topics raised above, and on the following: chickens, baby names, bears, soccer, layoffs, wizards, canines, inventors, capital cities that  you may never have heard of, art history, men who wear black, elegies, fast cars, zombies, mournful tunes, busses, chromosomes, Jupiter and other planets, flowers, lush generosities, psychologists, energy bills, small-time villains, hoaxes, jazz standards, games of chess, hotels, sequels, fictional high schools, headphones, social media trails, witches, current events, mottos and slogans, and Shakespeare.

I send significant thanks to all the supporters on Patreon who make all this happen, especially the Outside Agitators, the Original Vincibles, and Quizimodo. I’m always grateful to players who pledge for their entire team. Please subscribe so you can share the fun of the Pub Quiz with your friends and neighbors!

P.S. October 20^th means another poetry reading is coming to the Natsoulas Gallery, this time featuring UC Davis English Department professor Margaret Ronda. See you then at 7!

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

1. Films Directed by David Lynch. Four David Lynch films have place names in their titles. Name one of them. 

2. Sports. How many baseball teams are there in Major League Baseball?  

3. Science: Italian Physicists. What Chevy was named after an electrical unit that was named after an Italian physicist?