Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
I’m listening to jazz and thinking about Paris.
Right now my Davis home is filled with the famous Sonny Rollins tune “St. Thomas.” Perhaps if you asked your smart speaker to play it for you know, you would recognize the tune.
I think of jazz musicians in Paris because of the warm reception Jim Crow era African-American maestros would receive in Paris, where French audiences were thought to appreciate this American art form more than American audiences did. Also, with segregation the law in the southern birthplaces of jazz, musicians found that their artistry was noticed and remarked upon more so than their racial heritage. All of us like to be appreciated for the artistry that we can share with our communities.
Right now I am reading Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin in which the prose stylist reveals, the collection’s first essay, “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American.” A longtime resident of Paris (he moved there to escape segregation and discrimination in 1948), Baldwin explored questions of belonging and race, and the ways he felt simultaneously alienated and comforted in both Paris and New York (but for different reasons). People interested in identity politics and social justice, as well as masterful and philosophical prose, can still learn lessons from James Baldwin.
I had read some Baldwin during my first year in college, but his importance was driven home to me by a certain kind of curatorial artistry practiced by my librarian mom. In December of 1987, soon after I returned from my first trip to Europe, the trip when I met my wife Kate in London, I stopped by D.C.’s Martin Luther King Memorial Library where my mom worked in the Washingtoniana Division. Because my mom was in charge of the voluminous photo morgue donated to the library by the defunct Washington Star, she was asked to create a pictorial remembrance of James Baldwin, who had died earlier that month. As I reviewed the many photographs and read the captions, my appreciation of Baldwin deepened, and I resolved to read more of his work.
In 2001, my UC Davis colleague Anne Fleischmann and I created a series of online literature resources for those taking the AP exam in English. That included a unit on Jazz and Literature and on the amazing short story “Sonny’s Blues.” My favorite of Baldwin’s paragraphs comes penultimately:
“Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, and what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now, I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth. He had made it his: that long line, of which we knew only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live forever. I saw my mother’s face again, and felt, for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet. I saw the moonlit road where my father’s brother died. And it brought something else back to me, and carried me past it, I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel’s tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise. And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.”
This paragraph and Baldwin’s other creations continue to affect and inspire me. I have read four of James Baldwin’s novels and essay collections since discovering “Sonny’s Blues,” and I have a few more in my Audible library, queued up for my enjoyment.
I have enjoyed Paris vicariously through the prose of Dickens, Hemingway, and James Baldwin, and this week I am enjoying it vicariously through the texts and pictures shared with me by my wife Kate, who has returned to Europe, 36 years after we lived there together. She is accompanied by our son Truman, taking his first international trip.
According to Kate’s photographs, The Eiffel Tower is as majestic as it was when Hemingway first beheld it as a teenage World War I veteran, when it was the tallest manmade structure in the world. She and Truman got to visit the top today and discover why, even more than 150 years after the first gas street lamps were lit there in the 1860s, Paris is still called the City of Lights.
I look forward to revisiting those lights and sights with Kate next summer. Meanwhile, I hope your Thanksgiving is also filled with family and with light and that, like Sonny at the piano in “Sonny’s Blues,” you are able to give something back.
Join us for Pub Quiz tonight. Even though Thanksgiving is tomorrow, we will gather for the Pub Quiz tonight! Come early to grab a spot near one of the outdoor gas heaters!
If you are in Davis tonight, please join us for the Pub Quiz at Sudwerk. Recruit a team, dress for sunset, and join us at the beautiful outdoor patio where we have room for almost everyone. Latecomers will find a table to play inside. Even though it is more work for me, we always have more fun with the bigger crowds and more voices. As Walt Whitman says, “the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”
In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on cosmetics companies, numerical titles, famous birds, ponds, memoirs, gold tunes, Pixar films, Presidential Medals of Freedom, gratitude, water journeys, things that have sold over a billion copies, fun in the mountains, privileged ladies, stakeholders, people who are no longer irrelevant, twins, rocket men, universities in the news, prime ministers, assets, award winners, lights you can hear, relocation votes, insects, federal men, countrysides, Patreon supporters of Dr. Andy, art history, backpacks (hello Keith!), backing vocals, joyful tango rituals, hormones, Interstate 80, flowers, final books, current events, books and authors, and Shakespeare.
Thanks to The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, The Outside Agitators, Gena Harper, a new guy named Spencer (welcome!) and others who support the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of supporters. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine!
See you tonight!
Dr. Andy
P.S. Here are questions from a recent quiz:
- Books and Authors Named Audubon. Ornithologist John James Audubon and William Beaumont, the father of gastric physiology, were born the same year that Jean-Pierre Blanchard demonstrated the parachute as a means of safely disembarking from a hot air balloon. Name the century.
- Film Questions with Numeric Answers. Directed by Peter Weir and starring Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany, a 2003 Napoleonic War-era British naval drama was nominated for ten Oscars, winning two. What is the odd number of words in the long title of this film?
- Wrestling Culture. Born on November 15 in 1952, the Wrestler Macho Man Randy Savage used to enter the arena to the music of “Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1,” a tune familiar to anyone who has participated in a graduation ceremony. Name the composer.
Photo credit: Kate Duren