Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Sometimes I don my Ph.D. in poetry hat, grab an anthology, and stand ready to profess about topics cultural and poetical. That said, on the weekend I’m not typically spending social time with people who are demanding my literary insights and interpretations. So I will try a few out on you.

In honor of the 100^th anniversary of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, one of the subjects of my doctoral dissertation, I’ve been rereading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the best of Eliot’s early poems, and reliving its sublimity and explorations of anxiety.

To look at this favorite work after all these years, I had to engage in what the Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky called “Defamiliarization,” an attempt to see something one knows well outside the familiar context, which for me includes teaching the poem in a dozen or more classes over the last 32 years. Like many teenagers, I was introduced to Eliot’s first major poem in high school, and I remember sympathizing with the title character immediately. Few other writers I had encountered could so fittingly represent the awkwardness and discomfort teenagers such as myself felt when interacting with opposite sex peers.  

For example, when J. Alfred Prufrock imagines a young woman surveying him and saying “That is not it at all,” he echoes the fears of rejection and general apprehensions of many adolescents, this despite the seemingly sophisticated veil of urbanity that the speaker of this poem employs to protect himself from what Prufrock interprets as the poem’s frightening aggressors, women who use social customs to manipulate others. Prufrock seemed urbane for me when I first read his work, though I doubt I even knew what “urbane” meant back then. I just knew that I enjoyed the music of his poetry:

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

               “That is not it at all,

               That is not what I meant, at all.”

While the poetry itself is magical to me, rereading Prufrock’s thoughts in the context of one’s original discovery of the poem is much like reading the diary from years one would sooner forget. Speaking from a place of barely-concealed insecurity, Prufrock speaks to a common need to mistrust the already provided answers and expectations–about religion, about human relations, about the universe–while being forced to cope with more immediate and less grand crises, social gatherings, meaningless chitchat, and tea-time menu choices.  

Many of Prufrock’s social anxieties, when looked at individually, seem typical of a man who is rooted in the customs of interacting with and thinking about women that we associate with the Victorian age. Yet, when looked at as a whole, the patterns of anxiety in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” do not merely reveal the study of a historically dated persona; rather they portray a man who, as I was when I studied this poem as a high school student, seems flustered and confounded by the women about him. Prufrock’s frustration and confusion regarding the poem’s women is so complete that I believed his anxiety transcends merely Victorian-era shyness. 

My youthful reflections on unstable poetic narrators such as Prufrock not only informed my eventual dissertation, but they also helped me make sense of my own literary, creative, and even social obstacles and goals. Rereading the poem today is like opening an emotional time capsule, a historic cache of goods that reflects my own early attempts at intellectual interpretation and artistic awakening.

I’m curious to know what works of literature, music, or art spark similar aesthetic nostalgia for you.

Thanks to everyone who subscribes to the Pub Quiz. I hope you get to see it this week – it’s challenging in a crafty way. Expect questions on topics raised above, and on the following:  places to get equipment, Davis schools, elephants outside the room, flip-flops, challenging approaches to hockey, an uncle’s court, Asian countries, people named Max, animated TV shows for children, sunlight, fast-growing economies, inside and outside of walls, film projectors, magic words, days of the week, Christian traditions, woeful names, penitent jellies, music festivals, sandwiches, straps, modesty, bowling, 19th-century creations, leaves, warships, shoes, Greek and Roman gods, mottos and slogans, news of the world, and Shakespeare. 

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 competitors!

I’m hosting three Thursday-night poetry readings this month. I invite you to join us for one or more of them. Find details at PoetryinDavis.com.

Best,

Dr. Andy

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

1. Know Your American Rivers. Starting with the letter S, and at 444 miles long, what is the longest river on the East Coast of the United States? 

2. Etymological Confluences. What language was named after a beverage that was named after an island? 

3. Science. Lipase and amylase are both examples of what E word? 

P.S. I received the sweetest note from a new reader named Judy in response to last week’s Star Wars-focused newsletter, a version of which also appeared this weekend in The Davis Enterprise:

Andy,

Your article in the Davis Enterprise brought back some fond memories. When Star Wars came out, we were visiting my sister-in-law took us to the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to see it because she knew we were all sci-fi nerds. What we saw was a line from the box office to around the corner. We went home and saw it in our hometown theater in Michigan. When the giant spaceship rumbled across the screen, I fell in love with the movie. So did my husband, my daughter age 9, and son age 7. 

The kids’ favorite story involves the second movie. When the Empire Strikes Back  came to town in 1980, the first showing was at 3 p.m. on Friday. The only problem was the kids didn’t get out of school until 3:30. So I wrote a note that said I would be picking up both my kids at 2:30 because they had appointments. We were some of the first people in line and enjoyed watching the show while munching on popcorn and candy bars. It was a worthwhile “appointment.”

May the Force be with you,

Judy

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

My friend Bob says that Star Wars has replaced the western in cinematic culture, and I suppose he’s right.

Bob and I have been using the video walkie-talkie (as we call it) iPhone application Marco Polo to stay in touch, conversing about deep and quotidian subjects just as we did when we first met as freshman-year roommates, and then again as we drove across the country during the summer before our junior year, each of us eager to visit California for the first time after reading Kerouac and giving into our automobile wanderlust.

As a communication tool, Marco Polo offers certain advantages, such as the understanding that you won’t catch your friend at a bad time – he will decide when to watch your video – and the understanding that you won’t be interrupted. One downside that I am used to from 22 years on the radio is that you won’t hear your audience laughing at your jokes. I guess I sometimes also experience that sort of silence in the classroom.

Recently I made a Star Wars allusion to Bob in a Marco Polo video, and Bob responded with a series of exclamations and anecdotes about his own love of everything Star Wars. For example, Bob saw the first Star Wars movie when he was about ten years old in 1977, and then when George Lucas re-released A New Hope20 years later in 1997, Bob got to take his younger brother, who was then also ten years old, to see Star Warsin the theater and experience through the young man’s eyes the magic that so informed Bob’s childhood. Bob’s brother complained that they had to wait two weeks before the sequel would be released. Bob explained that the rest of us had to wait three years for The Empire Strikes Back.

In response, I told Bob that I had three Star Wars stories (one for each of the first three films) to offer him in a subsequent Polo. Even though Bob and his lovely wife Susi are two of my most devoted newsletter readers in New Hampshire, I will represent the stories here even before I get to them in Polo form. I present them in reverse chronological order and reversed order of importance (at least to me).

In 1983, when Return of the Jedi came out, I had two summer jobs: I was working as an usher at the Tenley Circle movie theatre, and I was still babysitting a young man named Micah (now Mical). Micah’s mom Miraa, a Rolfer, was highly protective of the sort of content her seven-year-old son saw at the movies, but she approved of the latest Star Wars film, so the young man and I saw that film together at least a half-dozen times. And because of my movie theatre connections, the tickets were always free. We had to pay for our own popcorn.

As an aside, I haven’t spoken to Mical since the mid-1980s, and, prompted by this reminiscing, I just looked him up and now have a phone number. Mical may even live in California! Perhaps I will update you in a future newsletter on the resulting phone call if anything comes of it.

So that covers Jedi. My Empire Strikes Back story (which I have previously shared in this forum) was more momentous and more memorable. Because my father, Davey Marlin-Jones, was the film and theatre critic for the local CBS affiliate in Washington DC, he was invited to openings, screenings, and gala events of all sorts. He was still seen on TV several nights a week at the time that that The Empire Strikes Back had its U.S. premiere (May 17^th, 1980) at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Of course my dad was invited, and he brought his two sons along. Now that I think of it, he probably attended primarily for his sons, and to catch up with a friend from his days as the Artistic Director at the Washington Theatre Club.

As soon as we arrived, Oliver and I saw an opportunity. Each of us grabbed a Star Wars paper plate from the buffet and proceeded to pester all the celebrities attending that event for autographs. Minus Sir Alec Guinness and Anthony Daniels, who was sick, the entire cast was there, and we got to meet them all, including Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Billy Dee Williams (my dad’s theatre friends), and Kenny Baker. I especially enjoyed chatting with Mark Hamill and Frank Oz, both of whom I have corresponded with subsequently.

You would think I couldn’t top that, but actually my first Star Wars story is my favorite. Jack Valenti, then President of the Motion Picture Association of America, took my dad aside at some function and told him that he thought his son Andrew would really enjoy this new space opera which would be released soon, so my dad took me to the critics’ screening room at the American Film Institute to see it. Just as the room was darkening and the curtains were parting, I asked my dad this question: “Dad, what’s the name of this movie again?” He responded, “Son, I don’t remember.” Then I looked up at the screen and saw these words:

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . . .

My youthful imagination could not easily process everything I experienced in that film, but I do know that I had never felt more enthusiastically about a film. That said, because I was likely the first child in America to see the film Star Wars, I had no one but dad to talk to about it. None of the kids at school had any patience for my talk of Wookiees, “Luke Skywalker,” or “Darth Vader,” whatever that was, but they would.

Star Wars, Marvel, and to a lesser extent, The Muppets, came to dominate cinematic culture for the coming four decades. Disney bought up all these foundational intellectual properties of my youth (they thankfully haven’t yet acquired Dungeons and Dragons), and because the folks at The Walt Disney Company are experts at creating sequels and other forms of narrative repackaging, Bob and I, our siblings, and youthful enthusiasts of subsequent generations will likely continue to turn to Star Wars stories for the rest of our lives.

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I hope you get to see this week’s Pub Quiz. It’s a bit easier than usual. Expect questions on topics raised above, and on the following:  kumquats, sinners, airplanes, words that start with Q, literary genres of politicians, eggplants, countries on different continents, bayonets, peaks and changelings, films from the 1970s, subway stations, Saturday Night Live, towns that may be in California, state capitals, iris elements, actresses that appear in songs, subtitles, world capitals, car insurance, stolen cars, Connecticut stories, cello standouts, lovely rivers, famous islands, candles, catalysts, deadpan comedians, infatuations, mottos and slogans, news of the world, and Shakespeare. 

Thanks to all the supporters on Patreon who make these newsletters and pub quizzes 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!

Be well!

Dr. Andy

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

1. Maritime Boundaries. What P country shares maritime boundaries with Denmark and Sweden?  

2. Pop Culture – Television. What part did the late Efrem Zimbalist Jr., the son of renowned Russian-born concert violinist Efrem Zimbalist Sr., play in 54 of the 85 episodes of the TV show Batman: The Animated Series?  

3. Another Music Question. What Frank Sinatra 1964 recording became closely associated with NASA’s Apollo space program?  

P.P.S. “The point of a knighthood for British actors is to enable them to play butlers.” Sir Alec Guinness

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

My wife Kate and our oldest and youngest children are in Wisconsin this weekend for my daughter Geneva’s graduation from Beloit College. Close readers of past newsletters will remember that Geneva finished school in 2020, but she never had a proper graduation. On March 17^th of that year, Kate and Truman flew to Chicago to rent the largest possible van to move Geneva home. Here’s how Kate put it in the blog entry that she published yesterday:

“Many of you remember our National Disaster Massive Road Trip (NDMRT), as Truman named it. We rented a huge van, which we immediately named The Beast, and which still barely fit all of Geneva’s belongings, and we drove four days back to California. On the NDMRT, we encountered many fellow unhinged cross-country travelers, everyone trying to get somewhere fast, all of us eyeing each other with trepidation as we sought to keep our distance from one another, both on the road and at every rest stop. 

The trip felt both surreal and perilous, as if we were living out a real-life disaster film. On the third day, we white-knuckled The Beast through a blizzard atop a Wyoming mountain pass, a heart-pumping, frightening experience of unplowed roads and icy white-outs. At the hotel that evening, I was filled both with relief that we had survived the day’s drive, and with the sense of trauma we were all just beginning to experience; we were never going to forget this NDMRT or the earliest days of our new pandemic mindset.”

By contrast, today for the big ceremony the weather was sunny, the Beloit President cheerful in his commencement speech, and the grass lush and green. Evidently in other parts of the country, it rains during more than one season. After all the names were read, the new graduates drank a champaign toast, received a standing ovation from their families, and then greeted well-wishers while Motown music played. 

Now preparations are underway for a gala, and Geneva is not expected to be seeing her family again until tomorrow. When I graduated from Boston University and UC Davis (twice), the organizers of those events totally forgot to throw me and my fellow graduates a gala. Also, the word “alumni” came up often during the ceremony at Beloit College today. I’m sure Geneva and her parents will remain on the Beloit alumni mailing list. The good news is that, with the help of Joe Biden and Biden-Harris Administration’s Student Debt Relief Plan, this may be the year that we make our last payment for Geneva’s education. 

Now we are saving money for the higher education of Truman, my Facetime cameraman for today’s ceremony. He is also treating today’s visit to Wisconsin in temperate September as a college scouting trip. Who knows what will happen? Perhaps in two years, our payments to Beloit will start anew!

Meanwhile, Jukie the dog and I are enjoying perpetual jazz, and no TV. Jukie is rediscovering his library. I am reminded of a poem I wrote during one of Kate’s previous trips to Chicago. I will excerpt the relevant stanzas from “Seven Steps to Heaven” right here:

Ours is an unhurried August Saturday morning.

My wife is visiting Chicago for a fortnight,

while Miles Davis fills the kitchen.

The trumpet croons. How can something so cool, born in 1957, be so old?

The title of our chosen British underground internet radio station, 

“Giants of Jazz Radio,” seems more oxmoronic with every passing moment,

but here we are, dancing like oxymorons.

The bulldog dances too, yelping, and nipping at our legs,

wondering what strange game we are playing.

When I told Truman that for the next three weeks

we would dance to jazz anytime we felt compelled to reach for the remote,

he gave me a high five.

No one will stop us from acting rashly.

I suppose like all of us, Jukie and I are acting less rashly in 2022 than we did in 2014, but the soundtrack is the same, jazz rather than Motown. I miss my family in Wisconsin, and wish that I could have joined the celebrations, but the music filling the jazz is helping. As Bob Marley said, “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”

Congratulations to the new graduates at Beloit, and good luck to the new students at UC Davis, or wherever you find yourself. Be well!

Andy

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For existential and logistical reasons, my parents could not attend Geneva’s ceremony in Wisconsin today, but Kate’s parents did. Both of them are Beloit graduates who met there in the early 1960s. I think they would get at least five of the questions right on this week’s Pub Quiz. In addition to topics raised above, expect questions on the following: car companies, search engines, majestic animals, spoons, maternal health in Connecticut, famous marriages, southern exports, volleyball scandals, unresolved issues, German theatre directors, third countries, treachery, intelligence quotients, cocktails, ninth and tenth spots, entertainers, literary communities, variety shows, spinning horses, best pictures, dancing mice, trains, blessings, nerds on the radio, telephoned requests, other worlds, fairies, red flags, billionaires, faraway counties, musical instruments, fire powers, people named after birds, top contenders, starting gods, long drives to corporate cities, mottos and slogans, news of the world, and Shakespeare. 

Thanks to all the supporters on Patreon who make these newsletters and this trivial output possible, especially the Outside Agitators, the Original Vincibles, and Quizimodo. I’m always appreciative to those stalwart players who pledge for their entire teams. Please subscribe so you can share the fun of the Pub Quiz!

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

1. Film. What parodic four-film franchise was developed by Keenen Ivory Wayans, Shawn Wayans, and Marlon Wayans, and grossed over $900 million at the worldwide box office?  

2. Countries of the World. What country whose name starts with the letter N has coastlines on both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans?  

3. Science and Engineering. Starting with the letter M, and created by a Scottish engineer, what sort of road construction involves crushed stone placed in shallow, convex layers and compacted thoroughly?  

P.P.S. “We will explore the mysteries of science and harness the power of technology and innovation. We will realise the opportunities of the digital world. Our youth will learn more from – and with – each other.” Narendra Modi

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

What a busy time this has been for me! Recently I gathered all the documentation needed to apply for a merit pay raise at the university where I work, I hosted our annual Summer Institute on Teaching and Technology (more on that below), and I celebrated my 30^thwedding anniversary with my wife Kate.

Wednesday, September 7, 1992 was particularly warm, so we decided not to eat outside at one of Sacramento’s fancier restaurants. Instead, Kate and two of our kids got vaccinated with the new bivalent vaccine that day, as they are traveling to Wisconsin next week. We are going out for dinner on September 10^th, instead. Next week I will tell you about the presents we got each other.

This week, I will share with you the poem I wrote for The Summer Institute on Teaching and Technology, a gathering of scores of UC Davis faculty who wish to share and learn on innovative teaching. I am so impressed with my faculty colleagues, especially those who presented either live or asynchronously.

Blooming in the Unquenchable September Sun:

A Poem for the Summer Institute on Teaching and Technology at UC Davis

The powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

–Walt Whitman

Once it felt hopeful when we would hold SITT in September.

Davis schoolchildren, some of them our children,

Had been filling their Trapper Keepers for almost a month,

But we had gathered in our air-conditioned rooms

Pretending at our personal growth camp that it was still summer,

Pretending that we had plenty of time yet to prepare for fall.

But now, as if she were hosting a barbecue required of all Californians,

The molten earth herself has warmed to our idea of an extended summer.

The U-Hauls that moved so many of our undergraduates 

Between leased Davis apartments in late August

Now bake in Bunsen burner parking lots, 

Itching, like all of us, to be useful for the students once again.

I seek to comment wittily on our scorched earth,

But my poet’s brain has been enduring rolling brownouts.

We can see why. I mean, the Queen is dead, 

and here in Davis, it’s almost too hot for metaphors.

Around here, SITT happens only in the morning

With the understanding that by mid-afternoon

All of us will have bunkered down like Saharan sand beetles.

And just as those beetles need a hint of fog for their outstretched wings

To collect sufficient moisture to survive another day,

So do all of us need these Zoom-tiled moments

Of community, of discovery, of innovation, and support.

Our speakers, asynchronous and those present,

Outstretch their wings for us, show us where the droplets can be found.

The overstuffed maw of every double-parked August U-Haul 

Reveals students who have packed too much for college.

This starts early. Driving for the first time into Davis this September,

And wondering if they are enrolling in UC Death Valley,

The new student brings not only too much luggage to the dorm room

But also excess baggage to the classroom.

Memorizing and strict attention to instructions have gotten them this far,

But what happens when our students find the syllabus to be incomplete,

The professor herself demanding that they contribute a verse?

Surely they thrived in small classes in high school, waiting for the bell,

But what happens when even in their large UC Davis classes,

Our students find themselves put on the spot,

Expectations raised as much by peers in their groups

As by the professor asking just the right iClicker question?

Like their U-Hauls, our new students have much to unpack.

The most confident of our high school overachievers, 

Audacious but not yet what every fall we would call “oriented,” 

Must often be eased away from their preconceptions and unhelpful habits.

We must guide them, as Yoda says, to unlearn what they have learned,

To remain receptive as they climb the scaffolds we build for them.

If indeed we sit on the top of the pyramid, teeming with creativity,

Let us strive to connect our classroom ethics to our students’ work ethics.

If “A man is worked upon by what he works on,” as Frederick Douglass says,

Let us present them with transparent classroom models, inspirations in overalls,

Showing them with every interaction why we work to teach what we love.

Piece by piece, let us give away the contents of our own overheated U-Hauls, 

Mobile receptacles of our libraries, our anecdotes, our formative assessments.

The nourishment we bring can be sunshine, food, or fertilizer.

Like watering-can gardeners seeking to irrigate a parched planet,

Let us use our tools, our unmute buttons, our renamed drop-in office hours, 

our taxonomic Blooms, to help our eager students bloom!

I’m still recovering from SITT and our anniversary celebrations, as well as my own shot in the arm. We will return to regular weekly programming next time!

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Thanks to all my ongoing Pub Quiz subscribers. They drive me to keep writing trivia for all of you. Lately I have been posting occasional trivia questions from my Twitter account for my 6K followers to enjoy. The first friend or stranger who answers a tricky question without Googling gets a copy of that week’s quiz. To keep things regular and dependable, I recommend that you just subscribe via Patreon. Thanks to especially to the following teams: 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!

This week’s quiz will ask questions about topics raised in my poem, as well as the following: contraptions, food with personality, pests, big fans, two people with the same job title, shortstops, the southern border, maritime borders, French titles, changed names, convex layers, words from history that begin with the letter M, breaks from everyday duties, fear factors at the movies, wasps, clouds, February mishaps, unusual fears, famous Americans, musical knots, walks in the forest, beaks and bills, patriotic songs, breadbaskets, animals in books, NASA, what violinists produce, European countries, mottos and slogans, news of the world, and Shakespeare.

Thanks for your support. Poetry Night on Thursday will take place on the roof because normal weather is BACK! The poets will be Mischa Kuczynski and Jordan Karnes.

Dr. Andy

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

1. Last names of fictional characters. What is Thor’s last name? 
2. Pop Music. What is the stage name of is the drummer for the hip hop band The Roots? 
3. Anagram. What famous socialist’s speech denouncing American participation in World War I led to his second arrest in 1918? Hint: His name is an anagram of the phrase BUNGEE SEED.

P.S. “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.” Albert Einstein

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

When the power went out in south Davis as I sat down to write my newsletter, I resolved that the universe was directing me to continue the vacation I had started the week before in Los Angeles and San Diego, so that’s exactly what I did. Thanks for your patience with the delay.

Most of us live with the constant thrum of empowered sound all the time. In our house, for example, we try not to use the air conditioner much, so a fan is always going, approximating a breeze, but so is its accompanying whir. 

When the power went out, Kate texted me to not let our son Jukie open up the refrigerator, and I was reminded of the time when we moved into our first Sacramento apartment together (1801 H Street). Our only piece of furniture was a solid and not terribly comfortable futon which we had assembled in our small living room. As we were falling asleep that first night, I commented that the noise from the refrigerator was a distraction, and Kate said she hadn’t noticed it until I said something.

Alone last week in our home during the power outage, I noticed that I couldn’t hear a fan or a refrigerator or even the noise from nearby I-80. The only sounds were my typing fingers and the slight snore of the French bulldog on the couch. The lack of power in our house yielded a welcome silence.

Los Angeles, by contrast, is noisy with car traffic, and it requires immense power to keep it going. A friend texted to ask if we had begun our vacation yet, so I stepped out the door of our hotel to take a picture of the power lines above us, the ones that crackled with sound if you were to stop to notice, approximating the sound of a drizzling rain that we knew would not visit LA this August. The photograph of those powerful electrical conduits (see the accompanying image) told him all he needed to know: we weren’t in Davis anymore.

We visited LA to see my brother Oliver and his family, and my mom, who had moved to be closer to Oliver so that first he, and later the staff of a retirement and care center, could keep an eye on her. Mom still had flashes of her old humor and obstinacy, but I could tell that, as will happen to most of us, her batteries were slowly draining. Like my home, she was negotiating periodic outages.

Conversations with a beloved selective amnesiac in her late 80s remind one always to remain in the present. Mom has largely been released from the responsibilities of continuity, but she clearly loves and takes delight in our children and our dog Margot. In many ways, my conversations with mom these days are much like what I imagine our first conversations were like: identification of small discovered treasures, and wondrous commentary on the observable phenomena of the natural world.

In my 9^th grade geometry class 41 years ago, our teacher Mrs. Ketcham explained to us an example of when we might want to identify the intersection of two graphs. She explained that her beloved mother’s mental faculties were deteriorating perhaps at about the same rate that her toddler daughter’s faculties were growing. If these opposite-direction phenomenon could be graphed, one could find the point when the two lines intersected, the moment when her daughter’s cognition overtook that of her mother.

Then stoic Mrs. Ketcham turned to us, still holding a piece of chalk in her hand, and stared at us, blinking slowly as if to ward off tears. It seemed odd to me that she suddenly stopped speaking to us, though as I write this today, I can imagine the conversation in her head. The noise of high school seeming to have stilled, and we, unknowing and naïve, we stared back up at her, none of us making a sound, all of us recognizing the power present in an extended moment of silence.

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I hope you get to see this week’s Pub Quiz, for I love sharing them with friends old and new. Expect questions on topics raised above, and on the following:  mythical characters that come in groups, American jobs, dragons, constables, uses of energy, football matches, singer/actors, Oceans of the world, lyrics about sleep, births outside marriage, socks, pins, Spider-Man, blade runners, Latin phrases, state anagrams, European artists, platinum hits, quarter-centuries, the population of California, snakes, languages you likely don’t know, mottos and slogans, news of the world, and Shakespeare. 

Thanks to my 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. We all need to keep our memories working. The rest is silence.

Best,

Dr. Andy

P.S. Here are three questions from last week’s pub quiz:

1. Four for Four. Which two of the following are the most-consumed tree nuts in the world: Almonds, hazelnuts, peanuts, walnuts?  

2. Billboards. Only four U.S. states have banned billboard: two far flung states, and two in New England. Name one of the four.  

3. Signees of the Declaration of Independence. In what month in 1776 did most signees actually sign the Declaration of Independence? Hint: It wasn’t July.  

P.P.S. I get to introduce the poets Bill Gainer and Laura Martin at the Natsoulas Gallery on Thursday night at 7. It would be a treat to see you there. According to the Facebook event, already 25 people are going or interested. Add your name!

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

We have just returned from a ten-day vacation in the humid south of San Diego and other southern hotspots. Looking for a synonym for the word “swamp,” for we missed the Delta breezes that chill our summer evenings in Davis, I somehow brought up a poem titled “Swampbed Confession” that is so odd that I don’t even remember writing it.

For this week’s newsletter, I will offer this in the stead of my regular newsletter, transformed here from poetry into prose.

Swampbed Confession

I have returned to the swamp.

I am drawn by the frogs, fattening and unfattening like slippery bellows of mud, gargling sonorously a deep chorus of gongs, soundposts of something primordial, resonant unending lamentation of bug-eyed mucous-melting minions, warty opaque dirge of the hornèd burp; a thousand shades of green scampering in thick slobber, as if kissed but then rejected by God’s bulldog.

The frogs’ loose-necked pillowcase bodies sink boundlessly into the layers of muck, a million years of mulch and wet decay. From creek bed to alluvium to swamp, the thick humidity hangs, sousing my unsteady march to the fetid, enveloping marsh of strangling banyan trees, while the stuff below us, bilious intermingle of water and earth, the creeping unfenced mulch, opens underfoot like the pull of one’s last days.

I march as if in custody to where even the dragonflies will not follow. Imagining here the onetime river, I must step over or into the waterlogged trunk of this onetime tree, now a fly-farm and worm-busy semipermeable muddy outline of dark and rot-rich pulp. You could almost dip your hand in, the bark now too wet, too indistinguishable, to clutch, to hamper reemergence with a fistful of that organic rot.

Something inside me has festered. Call it my amphibian center, my wet and cankerous soul gripped by pneumatic infection, something the last light part of me hopes could be abandoned here In the brackish, clotted water, something heretofore inexpressible, a dark thread affixed for an age to my internal demon’s degenerate anchor.

Oh that I could be unmoored here by this equally dark and sympathetic symphony. The sound of the frogs is moving. Something in the swamp is unclasping. Could it be the void? Release me. Release me. Let the gloaming ache be wooed out by the frogs’ heavy and seductive song. 

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None of this week’s Pub Quiz questions are about swamps. Instead, expect questions on the following: your grandfather’s choices, separated podcasts, American civilians, countries that start with S, best actresses, Whitney Houston, golf balls, ancient love stories, cereal boxes, faraway countries, American poets, two-digit numbers, trade associations, African cities, music collections, bayonets, exchanged letters, changed names, hometown alligators, broken souls, famous cargos, odd medications, nine-letter worries, U.S. presidents, chemical reactions, yearly events, news of the world, and Shakespeare. 

Thanks to all the supporters on Patreon who make all this happen, especially the Outside Agitators, the Original Vincibles, and Quizimodo. I’m grateful to players who support this effort, and who pledge for their entire team. 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. Playful Categories. All of the following are examples of what larger category: Benoni, Budapest, Dutch, French, Grünfeld, Italian, Nimzo-Indian, Sicilian, Vienna?  

2. Mountain Ranges. In addition to Tajikistan, the Hindu Kush mountain range is found in two countries. Name one of them.  

3. Pop Culture – Music. Born in 1944, what highly-influential living British guitarist is noted for occasionally playing his guitar with a cello bow to create a droning sound texture to his rock music?  

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz

As a poet, I remain receptive to all possible voices, no matter how faint. For example, recently my shoes have been complaining to me.

Pleas of empathy usually refer to someone’s shoes (or moccassins) as a metaphor, but in this case, the shoe message struck home because I heard it at home while I was lacing up the trusty sneakers that I’ve used throughout 2022. I couldn’t tell if it was the left or the right shoe speaking, but I can tell you the gist of the message:

“Look, I’m just worn out! My manufacturer wisely indicated that shoes such as we should be replaced every 400-600 miles, but look what’ I’ve withstood, over 1500 miles of walking with these two sadist engines, your feet.” That’s pretty sharp language for something that was created to keep me comfortable.

Histrionically, the shoe continued:

“Mercy, please. You should really let me die. Let me recycle as a picnic bench, an immobile playground’s apparatus slide, or the crosswise weft of AstroTurf that on certain days my mate and I, we transverse.”

I never expected my shoes to send me to the dictionary to look up words such as “weft.” Soon it was enumerating its complaints:

“Perhaps if you didn’t walk every single day, I could better suffer the torturous treads, the trudge, of these incessant footfalls? The feat of 20 thousand steps should be an occasional objective, fleet tormentor, not a daily quota.”

For the record, this year I am averaging only about 17,000 steps a day, so obviously the shoe exaggerates like a politician. By the way, you know what an aglet is, don’t you? Let the shoes continue:

“My aglets long since worn away, you burn my shoelace wick on both ends, ruthlessly, unnaturally distending me, such that my fibers now overstretch like the muscles of a should-be overstaying retired athlete, a suited-up relic whose muscled have long since attenuated. As I hear you tell uninterested strangers, you may be in your prime, but I am past mine. You soullessly forsake my insoles. Disassemble me. Let my padding go.”

Did my shoe suggest that it’s time I retire my walking habit, retire my shoes, or just retire? Even my lap dog doesn’t get as exhausted as these two.

“Also, would it kill you to stay on the path? Never aspiring to be a boot, I was built 

for gentle strolls on pavement, not brambly outback adventures! I suppose that even Aaron Burr never generated so many burrs as our obsessive jaunts do, little buds of prickle that attach themselves to me like so many viruses. No tongue has ever been so parched.”

The tongue of these shoes evidently make puns about Vice-Presidents who shoot notable citizens (and I don’t mean Dick Cheney, who is back in the news this week).

“Furthermore, note that because of you I am now tailed by foxtails, chlorophyl fish hooks that make their bed embedded in me, somehow piercing my polyurethane polymer fabric meshed cover, my pincushioned safeguards, all the way down to the rubber.”

Shamed by my own shoes, I’m now just feeling guilty, but at least I’ve found a new way to hit my newsletter word quota. Like Plato when he channels Socrates, and Davis Enterprise daily columnist Bob Dunning when responding to letters from readers, I’m using conversations with others to expand on my own thinking.

Speaking of which, Truman Capote once said, “A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.” Of course, despite its vocabulary, I don’t think we can accuse my shoes of being “intelligent talkers.” OK, let’s turn to my shoes once again to finish this up.

“If I were a clam, the irritable grit you bid join us on our often thrice-daily sashays would yield enough needle-pierced pearls for a fey flapper’s necklace.”

What do shoes know of fey flappers? Thankfully, these pearls of wisdom are about to come to an end.

“Please, sir, you must surcease, desist. Stand still a while, and stand down. You ask too much from both of us.”

Thanks, shoes. As the aforementioned politicians say, I will take all of this under advisement. Now let’s go for a walk.

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This week’s Pub Quiz will feature no shoe questions. Instead, expect questions on non-shoe topics raised above, and on the following: reasons for relaxation, entry-level gadgets, condemned provocations, California cities, playful openings, unknown (to me) Canadians, campaign stops, dress colors, spaceflights, Yiddish surprises for censors, seedless grapes, detective novels, white stripes, World War I, five-pointed stars, chicken in church, hilarious mesomorphs, British rock bands, Olympic games, the purposes of thermoses, baseball teams, notable universities, law enforcement agencies, mountain ranges, Freud’s thoughts on the Irish, people named Henry, art museums, current events, and Shakespeare. 

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!

Be well, and support your local independent shoe store, as I do!

Sadly, this week’s newsletter was not sponsored by Fleet Feet of Davis, but it should have been! Thanks for reading.

Dr. Andy

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

1. Polynesian Countries whose names sound like the first names of famous San Francisco poets. Starting with the letter T, what Polynesian country is also an archipelago consisting of 169 islands, of which 36 are inhabited? 

• Pop Culture – Music. Born in 1995, what British singer/songwriter had huge hits with songs titled “Don’t Start Now” and “Levitating”? 

• Sports. What NFL football team won Superbowl LVI in its home stadium? 

P.P.S. Rest in Peace, Marilyn Monroe, this week sixty years gone. She said, “Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world.”

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Having walked to campus to teach my classes during this past year, I felt confident that I knew how much time to leave when I set out to walk downtown for a dental surgical procedure. I misjudged.

Afternoon classes at UC Davis start at 10 minutes after the hour, and really the classes I teach don’t start until I arrive, but I make it a practice always to arrive five minutes early. As I headed out the door Friday morning to visit my oral surgeon (I will call him Dr. John because that’s his name), I had that 10-minute buffer in mind.

Checking my phone, I remembered that Dr. John’s staff requested that I show up 15 minutes early for my procedure. We patients like to comply with such requests so that any procedures we are undergoing are not rushed. Figuratively running late, I actually started to run.

Now when you walk more than seven miles a day as I do, running two and a half miles is not daunting, but the effort does have a physiological effect. The casual clothes I was wearing did not wick moisture effectively, so I kept standing after checking in, closely reading the doctor’s many diplomas on the wall, trying to expose as much of me as possible to the waiting room’s frigid air.

When they brought me back to the surgery room, the pulse oximeter attached to my finger unnerved me. No patient wants a fast heart rate either to remind them how out of shape they are or to give anyone else the impression that they are frightened of the coming scalpel. It was time to breathe deeply.

Rather than general sedation, I opted for local anesthesia so Dr. John and his team could pull the damaged tooth from the back of my jaw. I figured that with all the meditation training that I’ve done after the last four years, I might as well apply some of the courage that I’ve been studying and, one would hope, fostering.

In his book Conquering Fear: The Heart of Shambhala, Chögyam Trungpa wrote the following: “If victory is the notion of no enemy, then the whole world is a friend. That seems to be the warrior’s philosophy. The true warrior is not like somebody carrying a sword and looking behind his own shadow, in case somebody is lurking there. That is the setting-sun warrior’s point of view, which is an expression of cowardice. The true warrior always has a weapon, in any case … The definition of warriorship is fearlessness and gentleness. Those are your weapons. The genuine warrior becomes truly gentle because there is no enemy at all.”

I thought that I was ready to demonstrate fearlessness and gentleness while staying awake under the knife.

Settling into the most solid and comfortable dental chair that I’ve ever experienced, I first met with the hygienist / doctor’s assistant whom my wife has affectionately nicknamed Charo. She placed two super long Q-tips slathered with the first layer of anesthesia on the location of the coming incision. She then left me alone for at least five minutes, which was helpful because I had an appointment in the sunken place.

Using the strategies that I have learned from the live and Zoom-based meditation classes that I have taken with multiple teachers over the last four years, I retreated into a hypnotic stupor, a sort of willed deep relaxation that I’ve learned to deploy at times like these. I could hear that my pulse was slowing, and then I was visited by what I imagine were especially long needles.

On cue, in my mind I noticed myself retreating first to the Davis Shambhala Center where I first learned to meditate, then to Chestnut Park where I meditate with a group every Sunday morning, and then to my grandmother’s bench swing outside the family cabin in Beavertown, Pennsylvania.

I didn’t really hear what soft-spoken Dr. John was saying over the relaxing sea wave sounds and meditation music they play for anxious patients, but I did register a few of Charo’s directions. When working with an awake patient, the medical professionals have to narrate what’s going on, such as when the patient is told that he is about to feel some “pressure.” “Pressure” is a favorite euphemism of surgery centers.

Turning my head towards the doctor as instructed, I felt a single tear slide down my face. “So much for fearlessness,” I said to myself, prompting a smile. Only my face was not responding to its instructions to smile, or at least I couldn’t tell if I was smiling. Before long, I was almost dreaming.

20 minutes after the suturing, I was smiling to myself again, texting ,my wife Kate that I was heading east on 2^nd Street, walking home from my own surgery, which I thought was especially badass.

More interested in my comfort than in my jumbled narratives of badassery, Kate arranged to intercept me on my walk and drive me home in an air conditioned car where I could return to that sunken place in the form of a nap on our living room couch. A day later, as I told my daughter Geneva this afternoon, my natural Wolverine healing factor was already at work, preparing me for a weekend with family and friends. 

As is true with everyone, I suppose, today my mask will be hiding my internal scars.

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Thanks to everyone who subscribes to the Pub Quiz. This week those lucky people will find a pub quiz with questions on the following topics: restaurant chains, The Simpsons, jazz musicians, three-syllable sports teams, actors in superhero movies, stadia, Kansas highlights, peas, populations of numbers, deserts, family donations, compact cars, ballet dancers, words that come from phrases, famous Italian brothers, Theresas and Esthers, villains, drivers of outrageous automobiles, glands, Arabic words, late harvest names,  prime ministers, current events, and Shakespeare. This week the questions will be sent out Saturday night, so a few more topics may present themselves to me before then!

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. Let’s look forward to a time when we can all gather again to play with our friends!

Be well, and remember to floss.

Dr. Andy

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

1. Great Americans. In the 2002 book Gay and Lesbian Americans and Political Participation, who was called “the most famous and most significant openly LGBT official ever elected in the United States”? 

2. Unusual Words. What larva of a wood-boring beetle is also an avid reader? 

3. Steven King Books. The king of horror subtitled his memoir “A Memoir of the Craft.” What was its title? 

P.P.S. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” Steve Jobs

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

I am writing to you about writing from a writers conference. How meta!

I’ve been attending the San Francisco Writers Conference for the last 15 years. I’ve made a ton of good friends here, met some best-selling authors (such as the iconic authors R.L. Stine and John Lescroart – hi John!), and learned much about writing and the publishing industry that I’ve shared with subsequent clients and students.

But I really keep coming back for the poetry. My friend Brad Henderson and I used to run most of the poetry panels for the conference, but in recent years the conference has established a poetry track that reflects the deep poetry roots of this beautiful city.

Running the track this year is the current San Francisco poet laureate, Tongo Eisen-Martin. Tongo appeared on my radio show earlier this year, as well as reading in my reading series when I was on Zoom. Wielding a rich and allusive imagination that leads him to fresh and surreal juxtapositions of phrases and imagery, Tongo has one of the most original voices that I’ve heard in a live poet.

And because attending a writers conference or working on a writing project leads me inevitably to my favorite Margaret Drabble quotation (“Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations”), I thought I would devote much of the rest of this week’s newsletter to a few of the comments that Tongo Eisen-Martin made in his long introduction to poetry and to the poetry panel this morning at the San Francisco Writers Conference:

Poetry can be a strange sort of hegemonic autopilot.

The internal journey is crucial, too. I hate to be a hippie about it, but you have to blow your own mind first.

Duke Ellington said that “Every musician gets a shot.”

The bourgeois-derived poetry world remains behind closed doors.

Remember that in every room you visit as a poet, there is someone who can help you. A blues guitarist once told me, “Don’t turn down any gig. You never know who is in any room, and every gig gives you a chance to practice.”

I write two to three hours a day, regardless of whether or not I have something to say. I just put a timer on, and I keep at it. When I do this, I don’t sit down to write an individual poem – I sit down just to write. Then I have miles and miles of material to shape poems from.

Your poems should move cooperatively with your own interests in becoming a better human.

Reciting a poem from memory connects the mind, body, and soul, especially if you can imagine waking up to a line of your own poetry. When you let go of your own personal vendettas, your own personal territory, then everything becomes acute.

To find a poetry community, go to where all the underdogs are.

The true journey is the journey to your own voice.

Tongo shared so much other wisdom that I happened not to jot down. Like my UC Davis students taking their favorite lecture-captured courses, I look forward to watching the video even though I was there to hear Tongo Eisen-Martin speak.

I invite you to share with me the names (and occasions) of speakers who you’ve seen who really impressed you with their wisdom and authenticity. Meanwhile, please do watch some video of Tongo Eisen-Martin performing while I rush back to the conference.

Also, enjoy the photo collage that my wife Kate made of her adventures with our boys and Margot while I was masked in a hotel conference room.

Be well!

Dr. Andy

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I had to finish this week’s Pub Quiz early, because I performed 15 questions from it at the Friday breakfast of the San Francisco Writers Conference. As a result of that target audience, the questions are more bookish than usual. Expect questions on topics raised above, and on the following: San Francisco, short names, notable patients, Agatha Christie, greenery, Davis elementary schools, South America, old names, top-grossing films, dystopias, fountain pens, Las Vegas, Versailles, Puerto Rico, neon fleabags, The Grateful Dead, memoirs, titles with colors, boring beetles, American heroes, fancy terms for rocks, super bowls, proponents of levitation,  islands, notable parks, airports, shipments of phones, current events, and Shakespeare.

An increasing number of authors are turning to Patreon as a way of circumventing traditional publishing. 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. I so enjoyed performing in person this week, and hope to do so for you again sometime! 

Dr. Andy

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

1. Mottos and Slogans. Although a pub is not forever, what company uses the slogan “A Diamond is Forever”? 

2. Internet Culture. What Hollywood actress is known to some as the mother of Wi-Fi? 

3. Religiosity. According to polling done from 2014-2018, for only one state in the United States do more than 75% of those polled answer “Yes” to the question asking if “religion is very important in their lives.” This state’s name is found in the first 25% of the alphabet. Name the state. 

P.P.S. “An apt quotation is like a lamp which flings its light over the whole sentence.” Letitia Landon