Last night I attended a poetry reading at Twin Lotus, a Thai restaurant that doubles as a jazz club. I joined regulars dining on pad see ew, pad krapow tofu, and, in my case, som tam—a refreshing salad of shredded green papaya, tomatoes, and long beans dressed with lime and chili.

Men and women alike were drinking colorful mango Chiang Mai shakes that were dressed like extravagant desserts, or passion fruit green tea, a surprising blend of sweet and stern.

I was delighted to encounter Bob Blake, the retired distinguished professor of Spanish linguistics, who, like me, is a big fan of innovative instructional technologies and live jazz. Bob is also an accomplished jazz guitarist, and has played many gigs in downtown Davis as part of Calvin Handy & The Jazz Patrol and other duos and trios.

As diners submitted their orders, poets circulated and caught up with old friends. Several came to my table for a hug or rested a hand on my shoulder. I stood so often that I was glad to have trained for the evening with my daily goblet squats.

So many of my poet friends apologized for not coming to Poetry Night at the Natsoulas Gallery more often, but the Causeway and night driving are such impediments. I’m just as guilty as they are, for Sacramento offers a poetry reading most evenings of the week, time when I find myself walking the greenbelts of Davis, catching up with audiobooks, photographing sunsets, or sitting down in my living room to watch a movie with Kate or Truman.

We are so lucky to live where we do, likely not far from cities that offer us cultural capital and in-person entertainments of all sorts, and yet we succumb to the sort of social or psychological inertia that keeps us at home. As Nora Ephron said, “Let’s face it: Part of being a grownup is that every day you have to choose between going out at night or staying home, and it is one of life’s unhappy truths that there is not enough time to do both.”

I felt the cost of that inertia while videos of earlier jazz performances played on the large-screen television above me (much preferable, to my mind, to sports or political coverage). Twin Lotus Thai and other venues in the Sacramento Valley, and some in my college town of Davis, offer us jazz or poetry or theatre or dance just about every evening.

Several poets who read before me—both featured and open-mic poets—spoke appreciatively of “Bob Stanley’s summer camp,” their name for a series of workshops, readings, writing prompts, and other activities led by the former Sacramento poet laureate, who was hosting the evening.

I had grabbed a witty poem about computer pass phrases that I planned to read. Here’s a sample:

My pass phrase is a giraffe ladder of vertebrae

made of commas and other special characters,

a basilica of syllables stacked in the dark,

the attendant dogs of my childhood,

a choir of consonants wearing snowshoes.

It stretches across the screen like a nervous centipede

dragging briefcases labeled uppercase, symbol, regret.

Like my children, each word signifies, 

insists on its own name and on being 

remembered in the precise order it was born.

Everyone wants to hear a poem about computer passphrases, but the repeated praise for Bob’s summer camp prompted me to begin writing during the reading. When Bob called on me, I left my iPhone—the keeper of my finished poems—beside my salad bowl and read what I had written during the previous five minutes.

I have not yet fully revised the improvisation, but enjoy this breathless run-on version of what I shared:

I attended Bob’s summer camp, people say, 

making me feel like I had missed out on sampling 

the second-youth that is so evident in this room, 

but it seems to me as I hear your urgent and ardent poems 

that an emanation of summer camp surrounds Bob, 

and that it then swells in ever-expanding circles, 

admixtures of charisma, character, and wordplay, 

of toolbox tools and banjo strings, 

of meditations not only on the bookish love we celebrate this evening, 

but also meditations on summer afternoon Thai cuisine, 

when, despite the late hour, sunshine continues to envelop and surround us 

(reminding me that everything was darker when I featured 

at this same venue in January, especially my poems), 

meditation on a heart that yearns, as we all do, 

for our misremembered youth, 

for minds that thicken rather than thin, 

for ethereal children and garden parties, 

for idylls from our musical and poetic idols, 

meditations on backyard pool diving boards 

that never stop vibrating for the entire summer, 

meditations on wooded walks 

in public parks and on random lanes.

This is what I tried to capture in that hastily written poem. Making something can return us to summer camp: an experimental jazz phrase, an arts-and-crafts project made with paint and feathers, or a poem written in a Dollar Store notebook. Creativity can keep some part of a psychological summer alive throughout the year. 

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Please plan to partake in the Pub Quiz festivities on this pleasant evening at Sudwerk in Davis. Bring your team to the beautiful outdoor patio where we have room for everyone amongst the refreshing misters. Surely the jollity will be unfiltered after sunset tonight. As Albert Schweitzer said, “Happiness is the only thing that multiplies when you share it.” I encourage you to come early to snag a table. Also, take heed that the performance of the quiz may along quickly — the entire quiz is a mere 874 words long! 

Tonight’s guest host will be James, The Actor. James has substituted for me in the past, so I am deeply grateful. I will be taking care of my son Jukie tonight.

In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on advertising agencies, airmen, Alaskan bears, ancient cities, archipelagos, associates, balloons, barbecue grills, beards, blue tents, casinos, census counts, comedians, crashes, delays, farm animals, films, Finnish cities, first frames, gladiators, great Scots, idlers, jurors, kingdoms, lifeguards, lions, lotteries, maidens, maritime chokepoints, mobile phones, mosques, oil tankers, Olympic medals, paddles, personalities, ponds, pyramids, quarterbacks, rebels, secretaries, sheepdogs, shepherds, shorts, sick days, singers, small states, supercenters, superheroes, symphonies, Texas bluesmen, umbrellas, voices, current events, books and authors, and Shakespeare. 

Thanks to all the new players joining us at the live quizzes and to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Thanks especially to new subscribers Janet, Jasmine, Joey, Carly, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions The Mavens who keep attending, despite their ambitious travel schedules and the cost of avocado. Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine! 

Best,

Dr. Andy

Sample questions:

Four for Four. Which two of the following are actual species of bush quail: jungle bush quail, lava bush quail, rock bush quail, velvet bush quail?

• Generational Friction. According to an article in this week’s Fortune magazine titled “Millennials are not punk kids anymore,” which member of the U.S. Congress sees a “generational tidal wave” driven by anger over economic futures sidelined by boomers?  

Moose in National Parks. The moose population in Wyoming’s Jackson Hole valley has declined from an estimated 400–500 animals to fewer than 300, but it still has more moose than any other park. Much of the valley lies within which national park?  

Having seen the movie and now rereading the poem, I have been thinking about Odysseus.

Like many of you, I recently returned to The Odyssey, prompted by the 2026 film and by that pleasant compulsion, familiar to readers of this newsletter, to go back to the source after watching the film. Adaptations send us to their sources, where we discover what was omitted or softened for consumers of Hollywood narratives. 

One of the great male heroes, Odysseus is brave, cunning, eloquent, resilient, and longs for home with an intensity that has survived nearly three thousand years. He wants to return home to Ithaca and his household. He yearns for Penelope.

He also sleeps with other women, well, goddesses and witches in Calypso and Circe

In Homer’s poem, Odysseus becomes the lover of Circe and spends years in the bed of Calypso. The two episodes differ. The daughter of a god, Calypso holds the power to detain Odysseus for years; Circe first encounters him as a supernatural adversary. Those complications deserve acknowledgment, as do the radically unequal standards governing the behavior of husbands and wives in ancient Greek marriage. 

Penelope, meanwhile, remains at home, surrounded by men who eat her food, occupy her house, pressure her to remarry, insult her son, and presume that her husband is dead. She holds them off through intelligence, patience, and her habit of unraveling her handiwork. Odysseus is permitted adventures while Penelope embodies constancy. His infidelities are treated almost as weather encountered on the voyage. Her fidelity is the moral architecture, almost the definition, of the home to which he hopes to return.

As a devoted husband, I find this asymmetry dispiriting. Marriage has taught me that fidelity is an active habit of the heart: the daily, repeated choice to recognize one particular person as home.  

Odysseus spends the whole poem trying to get home, but he is remarkably casual about violating what home means.

That thought sent me looking for a certain kind of man in the movies: not merely a loving husband, and not merely a man who performs some grand gesture after having behaved badly, but a man whose loyalty survives opportunity, distance, fear, vanity, grief, or temptation. Popular stories give us no shortage of faithless husbands. Adultery is an efficient plot device; fidelity is more difficult to dramatize. A man who simply keeps his vows may be admirable in life, but his constant love for his wife seems not to interest screenwriters.

And yet devoted husbands do appear on film. 

Consider Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II. No one would mistake Vito for a universal moral model. His ascent is inseparable from violence, intimidation, and the construction of a criminal dynasty. Yet the film gives him a strangely illuminating moment when Genco Abbandando takes Vito to see the beautiful young actress he admires. He asks his friend what he thinks of her. Vito calls her beautiful—for Genco. “For me,” he says, “there is only my wife.” With those words, we find evidence of a violent man who nevertheless observes a moral code.

Then there is John McClane in Die Hard 2. While waiting for Holly at the airport, he receives unmistakable attention from another woman, an airport employee who facilitates a fax that provides the investigating McClane some information about the film’s villains. She propositions him, but he deflects with “Just the fax, ma’am.” The joke depends upon his unfashionably solid devotion to his wife Holly.

Aragorn, in The Lord of the Rings, offers the nobler and more courtly version. For much of the story, he is not yet Arwen’s husband, but his commitment to her has already taken on the character of a vow. The royal heroine Éowyn is brave, beautiful, admirable, and nearby, while Arwen is far away, separated from him by distance, destiny, and the unnerving complications that arise when one’s future father-in-law is an Elf who is thousands of years old.

Aragorn’s treatment of Éowyn shows us his character. He does not exploit her affection or enjoy it as proof of his own desirability. He is tender to her without being false. He can recognize the worth of another woman without behaving as if admiration must become possession.

George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life plays a version of Odysseus who never gets to leave Ithaca. He spends much of the film in Bedford Falls believing that life has passed him by. His marriage to Mary must bear the weight of financial anxiety, disappointed ambition, domestic chaos (including painful piano practice sessions), and despair.

The Bailey marriage is moving because it is made from the ordinary materials of most successful marriages: a drafty house, children underfoot, bills, interruptions, old frustrations, and affection tested by exhaustion. George’s crisis reveals how densely his life has been woven into Mary’s.

If George and Mary show devotion under pressure, Gomez and Morticia Addams show devotion as delight. Gomez is not resigned to marriage. He is thrilled by it. Years into the relationship, he behaves as though he has only just discovered Morticia and cannot believe his luck. I know just how he feels.

The Pixar film The Incredibles borrows the visual grammar of an affair. Bob Parr sneaks out. He lies about where he has been. He changes his body and becomes energized by a secret life. There is even a glamorous woman associated with that life. Helen has ample reason to fear the familiar betrayal, even though Bob’s devotion for his wife and his children never falters. Plus, the four of them get to work together.

Like George Bailey, Carl Fredricksen in Up postpones his grand adventures. Ellie blesses his next chapter even if she doesn’t get to join him, and his actions reflect his enduring appreciation of her early encouragement and fearlessness. His security in their love proposels him back into life and into our hearts. 

Perhaps only Chuck Noland’s separation from his beloved is as definitive as Carl Frederickson’s.   Stripped of society, routine, and any assurance that he will ever return, the hero of Castaway holds onto Kelly as part of his connection to the human world. Like Odysseus, Noland is stuck on an island, and I would like to believe that they both imagined their beloveds when they closed their eyes. 

The film also teaches us that loyalty may endure in one person while circumstances force another life to change. Chuck’s devotion is therefore not rewarded in the neat way we might desire – he kills no suitors — but it is nevertheless admirable. Also, it helps keep him alive. The promise of home remains powerful even when home cannot be restored exactly as it was.

These men are not interchangeable, and some are imperfect fits. Aragorn and Noland spend much or all of their stories unmarried. Carl is a widower. And Vito is a faithful husband engaged in underhanded dealings with nearly every civic virtue.

I do wish male fidelity were treated not as dullness, weakness, or the absence of plot, but as a form of courage. The husband who keeps faith recognizes that not every appetite deserves a story.

Men who battle neither monsters nor talking Doberman Pinschers nor shipwrecks can still be heroes. As someone known for making my way faithfully home to my wife Kate, I know which story I would rather inhabit.

---

I hope you can join us for the pub quiz tonight. Here are the hints: Ancient structures, anatomical terms, anagrams, archaeological surveys, bands, bird names, botanical terms, counties, chemical structures, entertainers, controversial singles, data centers, economic anxieties, educational programs, European governments, fertilizer labels, floral structures, franchise sales, gender terms, generational labels, genres, geometric curves, geometric terms, governors, historical dramas, inflation rankings, invented species, judicial careers, literary allusions, abbreviations, military raids, musical terms, national parks, nautical terms, organ layers, ownership groups, personal identities, pigments, plant nutrients, prolific writers, bands, record performances, sales rankings, sailors, sequel titles, slogans, solo careers, speculative novels, spirals, surgical preparations, team names, throws, wartime leaders, weekend rankings, wildlife populations, current events, and, purportedly, Shakespeare.

1. Find below three questions from last week:
   
   Books and Authors. Ann Patchett’s newest novel is her best reviewed. Its title is also the name of the horse on the cover and the last name of an American painter whose first name was James and whose middle name was McNeill. Name the novel. Whistler

2. Sports. Both Luis García Jr., who was recently acquired ahead of the trade deadline, and George Lombard, the fifth-youngest player to make his Major League debut, hit home runs in their debuts with the same AL baseball team this week. Name the team. The New York Yankees 

3. Shakespeare. The 1999 high-school comedy film 10 Things I Hate About You and the 2003 romantic comedy Deliver Us from Eva are loosely based on which problematic Shakespeare play? The Taming of the Shrew

We recently returned from a family trip along the Northern California coast. We started in Fort Bragg, visited Mendocino, continued down to Sea Ranch, and had dinner in Point Reyes Station. In such places, the ocean keeps arriving in sound and air. We saw it from the road, heard it from our rooms, and felt it in the wind after we had turned inland.

This morning, our trip led me back to the beach vacations of my childhood. I grew up in Washington, D.C., where a trip to the ocean meant driving to Delaware or Maryland. We visited Lewes, Rehoboth Beach, and Ocean City. Decades later, I remember moments from those trips more vividly than I remember whole months at home.

One summer in the mid-1970s, my parents rented a cottage in Lewes, Delaware. I think we stayed for a month, though I remember only a handful of scenes from that long vacation. Across the street stood Jack’s Market, a small general store that supplied nearly everything we needed.

Jack’s Market was also where I landed my first job.

I was seven or eight years old. Somehow, I persuaded the proprietors to let me sweep the store. I remember being paid in candy, though they may have paid me in coins that I quickly exchanged for candy.

Why a child needed a job during his beach vacation remains unclear. My father believed deeply in work. Did he also believe that elementary school was a suitable time for me to enter the labor force, or was this solely my idea? I don’t remember that conversation.

At Rehoboth Beach, our friends Liz and Peter Carley opened their large beach house to a crowd of families. Of the five Carley children, I especially came to know Jeff, Jill, and Oliver. Sporty and hilarious, Jeff became a fast friend. 

The MacKayes joined us, too. We walked or rode bicycles from the house to downtown Rehoboth and the beach, where the boardwalk held skee-ball machines and salt-water taffy stands, and where the waves were far more forceful than the gentler water I remembered at Lewes.

I also remember watching myself on television at the Carley house. In my brief career as a child actor, I appeared in commercials for Billy the Kid Action Wear and Kid Power Shoes. One of them aired on the Howdy Doody Show while we were at Rehoboth. Seeing my younger self on television was a major event, even if the Social Security Administration reports that my entire acting career earned me only about $300.

Later, we visited Ocean City, Maryland, where my step-uncle Harry owned a condominium. I was there with my father and stepmother in June 1989 as news arrived of the violent suppression of the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. I listened to National Public Radio throughout the protests and their violent aftermath. I discussed the news with my father and stepmother. I remember the sand in the condo’s tile entryway, the floor-to-ceiling glass doors, and the cordless Levolor blinds.

Candy, bicycles, television commercials, rough surf, and Tiananmen Square belong to different orders of experience. In my memory, the beach holds them together.

Psychologists Jefferson Singer and Peter Salovey use the term “self-defining memories” for the recollections that help shape our sense of self. Pixar’s Inside Out later popularized the phrase “core memories.” Some of my beach memories occupy that territory.

A beach vacation removes a family from its usual surroundings. Memory held onto distinctive objects: the unfamiliar cottage, the walk into town, the boardwalk, the smell of saltwater taffy and ocean air, and the daily freedom to decide what to do next.

Those memories have gained importance as the world that produced them has receded. My parents took me eastward to the Atlantic. Decades later, I stood beside the Pacific with my own sons. I could not know what part of the morning they would remember.

Both my mother and father once owned homes in Washington, D.C. Neither parent is alive now, and both homes have been sold. My connection to the East Coast survives chiefly through people and memory. When I picture my family there, I often find us near the Atlantic.

I have lived in California since 1989 and have visited the Pacific many times. By the calendar, the Pacific has been my ocean for most of my adult life. Yet I feel that I have spent more time beside the Atlantic, for a single summer can occupy more space in memory than several adult years.

On our recent trip, I walked at dawn along Pudding Creek Beach in Fort Bragg with my son Jukie. A woman approached with a whippet and responsibly attached its leash. The dog looked eager to meet us, so I asked whether she wanted to say hello. The woman’s face opened with gratitude as she smiled and said, “Oh, thank you. She would love that.” She released the dog, who raced over to greet us.

Then Jukie and I continued to the bridge and watched the surf come in. While remembering the Atlantic beaches of my childhood, I was also videorecording the kind of morning I hope Jukie might remember years from now.

I found the words for that call in John Masefield. In the mid-1980s, I recorded myself reading John Masefield’s “Sea-Fever” into a cassette recorder. That private performance now seems like early practice for the radio work, poetry readings, teaching, and video recording that came later. The poem has been stuck in my head like a favorite song ever since.

Sea-Fever

John Masefield

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

Masefield heard the sea calling him toward adventure. I hear another invitation in it now. The ocean calls me back toward the people with whom I first encountered it and toward the child who swept Jack’s Market for candy.

The tide removes our footprints almost as soon as we make them. Memory keeps the cottage, the bicycle ride, Howdy Doody on television, the conversation with my father, and the morning walk with my son. We leave the beach, but like the sand in our shoes, some part of it comes home with us.

---

Even though we will enjoy temperatures in the 90s today, it will still be the coolest day of the week, so I hope you will come join us at Sudwerk, home of the Pub Quiz with Dr. Andy. Join us on the patio if you can get a reservation or arrive early enough. As for the quiz, expect 31 questions on a variety of topics you should know something about, this week with questions on Greek mythology, a topic that many of us are returning to this summer.  

In addition to topics raised above and below, expect questions tonight on the following: adaptations, anagrams, ankles, aquifers, ballads, boardwalks, boots, boyfriends, cameras, cartoons, chloroplasts, cinephiles, classrooms, databases, dealerships, diaries, documentaries, dolls, elections, enticements, existentialists, expeditions, farmlands, festivals, garrisons, geysers, glaciers, goddesses, harmonies, honors, horses, islands, laureates, lineups, missions, modernists, mountains, musicals, negotiations, novels, oceans, pinstripes, portraits, repetitions, rivalries, rivers, rookies, sedans, sermons, sitcoms, spellings, streaks, suitors, Swedes, taxonomies, temptations, tendons, thrillers, trades, wanderers, workouts, wrappers. current events, and Shakespeare.

For more Pub Quiz fun, please subscribe via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/yourquizmaster.

Thanks to all the new players joining us at the live quizzes and to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Certain friends have upgraded their memberships recently, which I really appreciate.

We are now past 140 Patreon members, including people who have upgraded their paid memberships! You know who you are, and I salute you! I also incidentally salute Heghnar, Cathy, Kevin, Christine, Caroline, Bobby, Prescott, James, Damian, Meebles, and Bill and Diane! Thanks also to The X-Ennial Falcons, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. Maybe next week it will be you! I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, Still Here for the Shakesbeer, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions and bakers of marvelous and healthy treats, The Mavens. Thanks also to my paid subscribers on Substack. 

Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. Also, I sometimes remember to add an extra hint on Patreon. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine! 

I also want to recognize those who visit my Substack the most often, including Elaine, Michael, Luna, Jean, Ron, Myrna, Maria, to whom I send sustained compassion, especially this week

Best,

Dr. Andy

Three questions from last week:

1. Fred Astaire. Which Marvel cinematic universe actor has been cast as the lead in a new Fred Astaire biopic and plans to do all the dancing himself?  

• Town Plazas. The largest town plaza in California is found about 54 miles from Davis. Name the town.  

• Pop Culture – Music. What American pop and R&B group had hits with “There Goes My Baby” (1959), “Save the Last Dance for Me” (1960), and “Under the Boardwalk” (1964)?  

When the temperatures reach into the 90s or triple digits, a number of us get our steps in the morning, even before dawn. The other early risers and I smile at each other in the still blue air, but do not stop to chat. We have a word for such morning larks: matutinal. 

Only scientists, crossword solvers, and metaphysical poets use it. “Auroral” and “dilucular” are two more unused words that mean “pertaining to dawn.” We can recognize dawn in a glance, but not in the words themselves.

A friend who visited Ireland in July brought rain jackets she never needed. What astonished her was the sky: one photograph shows her squinting through sunshine at a distant castle, overwhelmed by the irrepressible green.

Sometimes I forget that the social medium Bluesky, but every summer dawn reminds me that blue sky exists. The bed in my daughter’s room faces the dawn first, overlooking the sun-touched tops of the tallest pines above the park next to our house.

A red-tailed hawk in that park announces dawn about thirty minutes early with a fierce, falling shriek. Hollywood often dubs red-tailed hawk calls over eagles, whose dawn voices are comparatively thin and chattering.

I learned recently that birds sing before sunrise because cool, dense air carries sound well, and because dawn offers less wind and less human noise. Dawn is an efficient time for attracting mates and defending territory.

Birdsong and Homer’s surviving poems are both territorial announcements, each asking who belongs here.”  Paris attracted Helen, and the thousand ships followed. Priam and Hector could not defend Troy, a truth Priam nearly admits in his dawn visit to Achilles.

Homer describes dawn as ῥοδοδάκτυλος (rhododaktylos), historically translated by Alexander Pope and others as “rosy-fingered.” Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey tells us that “Soon Dawn appeared and touched the sky with roses.” In mountainous parts of Greece and Turkey, including many Greek islands, dawn can gather small clouds. 

For Homer, roses belong not in a garden but in the sky.  

One of the first plays my wife Kate and I ever saw together was Tennessee Williams’ A Glass Menagerie. Its nickname for Laura Wingfield, “Blue Roses,” became part of our own vocabulary.

Later I sent her actual glass blue roses, a keepsake from our semester of playgoing together in London. Set on the ledge of a window in her Yellow Springs dorm room, it seemed to catch the dawn briefly before scattering it into prisms of rainbow.

From our London apartment on England’s Lane, NW3, I can’t remember seeing much blue sky, much less dawn. A favorite London picture of Kate depicts her sitting on the windowsill of our third-floor walkup, looking down on the market below. I can still see the insistent curls of her auburn hair.

Taking the dog to the back yard yesterday, I called up to Kate to see if she’d like to converse from our bedroom. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare writes that “The gray-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night.” 

When I was younger, only an alarm clock could wake me before dawn, such as was necessary with one of my first jobs, delivering the Sunday morning edition of The Washington Star to subscribers in my Glover Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C.. Now, I wake up before the sun on most mornings. Both my son Jukie’s room and our front door face east, so after sneaking into his room to close his curtains (he likes to review his books by streetlamps in the middle of the night), I stand outside our front door and welcome the day.

Sometimes I think of those famous lines from Book X of Wordsworth’s “The Prelude”: 

Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood

Upon our side, we who were strong in love!

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!–Oh! times,

In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways

Of custom, law, and statute, took at once

The attraction of a country in romance!

If there is bliss in waking at dawn, it lives in the welcome chill of this moment before the day speaks or requires anything of us. Watching the sunrise, steeped in birdsong, we delight in having answered the call.

---

I will be sitting at a VIP table for the pub quiz dinner tonight, one that will include two or more of my children and their supporters. I look forward to seeing you and your VIPs at the pub quiz. Join us on the patio if you can get a reservation or arrive early enough. As for the quiz, expect 31 questions on a variety of topics you should know something about, this week with questions on liminal spaces. 

In addition to topics raised above and below, expect questions tonight on the following: adjectives, animation, antennae, appearances, artificial intelligence, astronauts, astronomers, awns, baby boomers, ballots, ballots, bestsellers, biopics, blockbusters, boardwalks, borders, botanists, breathing, budgets, cardinals, casting, catalysts, championships, chemists, chirping, coalitions, collaborations, collisions, comic books, congressmembers, consoles, constellations, contracts, county seats, dancers, darkness, demons, devils, directors, ecosystems, emperors, endurance, farmhouses, fastballs, ferries, franchises, free agents, futurists, garments, Grammys, grasses, grasses, Greeks, harmonies, harbors, insults, islands, journalists, libraries, meadows, metabolism, missions, molecules, mountains, musicals, paws, percentages, philosophers, pitchforks, plants, portraits, porch lights, predictions, promotions, prospectors, rackets, rainforests, road trips, runways, runners, salaries, seizures, smugglers, sociology, songwriters, spending, stagecoaches, storefronts, souvenirs, superheroes, technologists, telescopes, tourists, trends, veterinarians, warriors, wineries, current events, and Shakespeare.

For more Pub Quiz fun, please subscribe via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/yourquizmaster.

Thanks to all the new players joining us at the live quizzes and to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Certain friends have upgraded their memberships recently, which I really appreciate.

We are now past 140 Patreon members, including people who have upgraded their paid memberships! You know who you are, and I salute you! I also incidentally salute Heghnar, Cathy, Kevin, Christine, Caroline, Bobby, Prescott, James, Damian, Meebles, and Bill and Diane! Thanks also to The X-Ennial Falcons, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. Maybe next week it will be you! I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, Still Here for the Shakesbeer, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions and bakers of marvelous and healthy treats, The Mavens. Thanks also to my paid subscribers on Substack. 

Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. Also, I sometimes remember to add an extra hint on Patreon. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine! 

I also want to recognize those who visit my Substack the most often, including Elaine, Michael, Luna, Jean, Ron, Myrna, Maria, to whom I send sustained compassion, especially this week

Best,

Dr. Andy

Three questions from last week:

1. Current Events – Names in the News. Josh Kerr (born October 8, 1997) is a runner from Scotland who recently broke the world record for the fastest mile ever run by a human. Within ten seconds, how fast was his mile?  

2. Sports. The Calgary Wranglers play in the American Hockey League (AHL), sharing the Scotiabank Saddledome with what other hockey team?  

3. Shakespeare. Having succeeded Queen Elizabeth I to the English throne in 1603, who was the King of England when William Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616? 

P.S. Please join us at Poetry Night on August 6 at the John Natsoulas Gallery in Davis. We are featuring a reading by Sam Jensen and Tamer Mostafa.

The autobiographical author of fiction and non-fiction Primo Levi said, “Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.”

For most of my life, I believed my memory for movies was an exception.

When I was young, my father had seen more movies, and more good movies, than anyone else I knew. He had been a film buff since the late 1930s, when he and his friends spent their weekends watching double and triple features. Decades later, he became the film critic for the CBS television affiliate in Washington, D.C.

His responsibilities included reviewing the bad films along with the good ones. When a universally panned sequel arrived in the 1980s, he developed a strategy for avoiding it. He would first see every new foreign film, independent film, and promising studio release playing at the city’s many theaters. With luck, the sequel would leave town before he got around to it.

Movies also shaped my childhood. I saw older films at the Georgetown Theatre, the Biograph, and the Circle. Later, I worked as an usher and cashier at the Tenley Circle Theatre, a position that came with free admission to movie houses across Washington. In 1983, I made a list of every movie I had seen. I could have called it simply “All the Movies.” Somehow, despite my dedication, I missed Terms of Endearment.

For many years, I had seen more films than my younger brother Oliver. Eventually, after he became a film critic himself, he passed me. My twenty-year-old son Truman may soon do the same. Truman approaches film history as a completionist. When he encounters a list of the greatest films ever made, he fills in the gaps. He has worked his way through lists compiled by critics, scholars, and the American Film Institute.

At a Poetry Night afterparty earlier this year, one of our regulars asked Truman what he thought of the films of Jacques Tati. Truman had plenty to say.

I still have the advantage in total films seen, although Truman’s knowledge of canonical films already rivals mine. This unsettles me slightly. I have studied film as an undergraduate and graduate student and taught film and film theory classes at UC Davis. For much of my life, I also possessed a peculiar form of movie memory. I could recall the Washington theater where I had seen almost every film between about 1978 and my departure for California in 1989. I could often remember who had accompanied me. I had confidence in my own mental archive. I believed I could reach into it and retrieve the circumstances surrounding almost any significant film from my youth.

Recently, I have been reflecting on how confidently memory invents.

My wife, Kate, asked why my then recently-divorced father had taken Oliver and me to see Kramer vs. Kramer when it was released. Oliver was about the same age as the little boy in the film, so she could imagine that the story of divorce might have unsettled him.

I corrected her immediately. My mother had taken us, I said. We had seen it at the Embassy Circle Theatre near Dupont Circle.

Even now, that recollection feels precise. It has a person, a place, and a family context. Yet my recent experiences have made me wonder what precision proves. A memory can arrive with architectural detail and still contain mistakes.

The clearest example came this past Monday, when Truman, my niece Clementine, and I went to the Tower Theatre to see John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Truman always finds us the greatest cinematic opportunities. He agrees with Truffaut’s comment: “The most beautiful sight in a movie theater is to walk down to the front, turn around, and look at the light from the screen reflected on the upturned faces of the members of the audience.”

I entered The Tower Theater confident that I had seen the movie before. I remembered one scene with unusual clarity. In it, James Stewart’s character wears an apron while bringing food to a group of cowboys and other demanding customers. I could picture the clothing, the public dining hall, and the tension created by the sight of a man serving food in a setting governed by masculine codes.

As the movie began, however, I recognized almost nothing.

At first, I assumed the familiar parts would soon appear. Then I began to wonder whether I had once fallen asleep during the opening half hour. More unfamiliar scenes followed. Perhaps, I thought, I had slept through the final hour as well?

Eventually, a more credible explanation emerged. I had never seen the entire film.

What I remembered was a single scene shown to me around 1991 by the film theorist Laura Mulvey, who visited UC Davis in 1991 to give a lecture attended by about twenty graduate students and me. She was a friend with my professor Sandra Gilbert, herself also a feminist critic.

Mulvey was already famous for her work on visual pleasure and the male gaze. She used the scene from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to examine gender roles and the way movies teach audiences to look at men and women. Liberty Valance, played by Oscar-winner Lee Marvin, humiliates Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) by calling him “the new waitress,” turning the apron into an object of ridicule and questioning Stoddard’s masculinity. Yet only Stoddard could de-escalate the violent confrontation between Valance and Tom Doniphon, played by John Wayne.

For thirty-five years, Mulvey’s discussion of that single scene remained vivid enough to expand inside my mind. At some point, my memory converted a classroom excerpt into an entire viewing experience. I had retained the scene, the interpretation, and the intellectual excitement of the lecture. My mind had supplied the rest.

The episode revealed something more encouraging than simple forgetfulness. I had confused the film with the experience of being taught the film. Laura Mulvey’s interpretation had adhered to the scene so completely that I could no longer separate the work from the teacher who had shown me how to see it.

This happens often.

We think we remember a poem, a novel, a film, or an ancient story. Often, we are also remembering the person who first made the work vivid to us. The teacher enters the memory along with the material. Years later, the voice explaining the story may endure as strongly as the story itself.

This realization carries particular significance for me because I am now assembling a memoir about my teaching experiences. Much of that memoir begins with scenes I have remembered for decades. A student enters a classroom. Someone asks an unexpected question. A discussion takes a surprising turn. A remark made in passing becomes the part of the class that survives.

I discovered that I have as many memories of encountering students outside the classroom, sometimes unexpectedly, as I do of teaching them familiar lessons. 

With regard to my memoir project, I see my early teaching experiences through the eyes of someone who has now taught for more than thirty-five years. Experience helps me interpret those moments, but it can also revise them. The teacher I am today looks back at the graduate student instructor I was in the early 1990s and imposes patterns and insights that may have become visible only later.

My former students also carry their own versions of those encounters. They may remember a class discussion that vanished from my memory. They may interpret an exchange in a way that would surprise me. A moment I regarded as incidental may have shaped a decision they made years later. A lesson I considered central may have disappeared before the end of the week.

In about 1992, my student Chris wrote me a note that my scratchy voice made it difficult for him to follow the lecture, and had I considered bringing water or lozenges to class? As someone who has worked in radio for more than 25 years, I think often of that remark while preparing my voice for broadcast. Many of the faculty I have met with while giving mid-quarter evaluations of their teaching have told me that they remember the encouraging assessments for minutes and the negative comments for decades. As the African proverb says, “The tree remembers what the axe forgets.”

One chapter of my recorded memoir tells the story of a student who would hurry into the classroom, duffel bag over one shoulder, the hard plastic of her rugby gear clacking softly with every step. She always had a practice or a scrimmage shortly before our class met. The image has stayed with me for three decades.

I remember that her name was Dianna. I also remember roughly when I taught her. The difficulty is that I taught more than one Dianna during that period, and the class rosters from the 1990s contain no photographs.

Was I remembering the right Dianna when I recorded the story?

The uncertainty does not erase the student entering the classroom in rugby equipment. I can still see her entering my writing classroom as many others had before and since. They arrive from laboratories, rehearsals, jobs, athletic fields, family responsibilities, and private struggles that we faculty will never fully understand.

Yet memoir asks for greater care than a good image alone can provide. The scene may be accurate while the name attached to it is wrong. The emotional meaning may have endured while the surrounding details shifted.

Writers of narrative nonfiction have long faced this problem. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, one of the foundational works of literary journalism, includes scenes and details that raise serious questions about how Capote could have known them. How could Capote have known details about the Clutter family conversations on that tragic day in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959?

Capote also believed he could reconstruct scenes with a certainty that later critics questioned. New Yorker essayist and author David Sedaris has described being questioned closely about the factual basis of essays he submitted there. For example, Sedaris once wrote that he bought “a gross of condoms” at Costco. The checker objected because Costco did not sell condoms in quantities of 144, so Sedaris changed “a gross” to “a mess.”

No fact-checker at The New Yorker is waiting to determine which Dianna played rugby before attending my writing and science class in the 1990s. Still, I owe my students and readers an honest account of what I know, what I can verify, and what memory alone supplies.

Brackets, qualifications, and corrections may become part of the memoir’s method. I can say that I remember a student named Dianna while acknowledging uncertainty about her full identity. I can distinguish the vividness of the scene from the unreliability of every detail surrounding it.

The most responsible memoir may allow readers to see this process. Memory offers evidence, emotion, and meaning. Records supply dates, names, and sequence. Other people contribute versions that may reinforce or challenge our own. The memoirist seeks to place these sources in conversation.

Teachers face a related mystery. We rarely know which parts of our teaching will remain with students.

This past Sunday, I attended a talk about The Odyssey. During the discussion, I found myself remembering two episodes from the Greek myths and history that had first been made vivid to me by Jack Petrash, my Waldorf teacher. After my parents, Jack played the largest role in guiding my education from first through eighth grade. One episode involved Odysseus feigning insanity by plowing a field and sowing it with salt. Whenever I encounter that story, I think of Jack.

The other involved Argos, the old dog who recognizes Odysseus after twenty years of absence. As an undergraduate, I studied that episode with Carolyn Williams, an award-winning distinguished professor who now teaches at Rutgers. Yet it was Jack’s telling of the story that first fixed it in my imagination.

Jack knew the names of our dogs.

That fact may explain why his version stayed with me. He understood that the death of Argos would reach children through their own experience of loving animals. He connected an ancient epic to the dogs waiting for us at home.

Laura Mulvey and Jack Petrash taught in different settings. Mulvey addressed graduate students through the language of film theory. Jack told ancient stories to children. Both knew how to choose the best scene and give it lasting force.

Mulvey left me with an apron, a serving tray, and a new way to examine masculinity in a Western. Jack left me with a salted field and an old dog recognizing his master one last time.

I did not retain every word of either lesson. I retained the scenes they taught me to notice.

As I record stories about my former students, I am also recording traces of my own teachers. Their methods appear in the questions I ask, the stories I emphasize, and the details I hope my students will remember. My teaching life contains Laura Mulvey’s close attention to images, Jack Petrash’s ability to connect epic stories to a child’s daily life, Carolyn Williams’s scholarly guidance, and my father’s lifelong devotion to film.

The people who taught us become part of the way we encounter the world. We look through lenses they helped to shape. We hear their voices when an old story returns. Sometimes we even remember seeing a film because a teacher once showed us a few unforgettable minutes of it.

This week Truman and I will see The Odyssey in IMAX. I will arrive with memories formed by Homer, Jack Petrash, Carolyn Williams, and the many later interpreters who have returned me to the story.

Even if I pay close attention, years from now, I may forget portions of the film. I may confuse one viewing with another conversation, lecture, or book. Yet a few scenes will remain. 

Perhaps our most durable memories of art are shared creations. The artist gives us the work. A teacher shows us where to look. 

---

I look forward to seeing you tonight with our more pleasant weather. Join us on the patio if you can get a reservation or arrive early enough. As for the quiz, expect 31 questions on a variety of topics you should know something about, this week with questions on leaders. 

In addition to topics raised above and below, expect questions tonight on the following: Academy Awards, acting careers, adventures, affordability, albums, anagrams, animation, Apple, Arizona, athletics, bicycles, birds, birthplaces, books, Britain, Britain, California, campuses, chart hits, children’s entertainment, Civil War, classics, clothing, comedy, conservation, countries, counting, crime, directors, education, emotions, England, entrepreneurs, epics, Europe, film, flight, geography, geography, Grammy winners, Greek mythology, habits, health, history, history, Hollywood, India, independence, islands, lakes, Latin music, leadership, liquids, logos, literature, long-term trends, loyalty, marriages, manufacturing, memorable characters, movies, movies, mythology, networks, Nobel Prizes, novelists, Olympians, peripherals, playwrights, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, pop music, presidents, psychology, quotations, recent history, records, recurring themes, research, Rome, saloons, scavengers, Scotland, seventeenth century, singers, soccer, South Asia, sports, statistics, television, television, track, transformations, universities, vegetables, verbs, vocabulary, westerns, women, youth current events, and Shakespeare.

For more Pub Quiz fun, please subscribe via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/yourquizmaster.

Thanks to all the new players joining us at the live quizzes and to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Certain friends have upgraded their memberships recently, which I really appreciate.

We are now past 100 Patreon members, including people who have upgraded their paid memberships! You know who you are, and I salute you! I also incidentally salute Cathy, Christine, Bobby, Esther, James, Damian, Jim, and Meebles! Thanks also to new subscribers Prescott, Bill and Diane, Tamara, Megan, Michael, Janet, Jasmine, Joey, Carly, The X-Ennial Falcons, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. Maybe next week it will be you! I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, Still Here for the Shakesbeer, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions and bakers of marvelous and healthy treats, The Mavens. Hello to Bill and to Jude’s dad. Thanks in particular to my paid subscribers on Substack. Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. Also, I sometimes remember to add an extra hint on Patreon. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine! 

I also want to recognize those who visit my Substack the most often, including Elaine, Michael, Luna, Jean, Ron, Myrna, Maria, to whom I send sustained compassion, especially this week

Best,

Dr. Andy

Three questions from last week:

1. Books and Authors. The author of The Goldfinch and The Secret History shares a last name with what kind of delicacy? 

• Film. What title character of a 1986 film teaches us that “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it”? 

• Countries of the World. China and Russia lead the world in combat tanks, with the United States coming in 4^th. What country has the third largest number of combat tanks?

When two former students asked me to officiate their wedding in 2012, I accepted immediately, even though I had not yet registered as a wedding officiant. Since then, I have presided over several weddings. Only at that first one, though, did I find an official-looking nameplate at dinner identifying me by my new title: “The Reverend Dr. Andy Jones.”

My wife Kate, whose father and stepfather were both Reverend Doctors, laughed when she saw that. “I’m not sure our family needs another reverend,” she said. “Especially one whose doctorate is in English.”

Kate spent much of her childhood attending church functions, weddings, and funerals. She suggested that my wedding website carry a simple motto: I marry. I don’t bury.

These days, however, I seem to attend more memorials than weddings.

Last Saturday, I journeyed to Grass Valley for the celebration of life honoring the poet and publisher Bill Gainer. My son Jukie came with me. We arrived early and chose seats near the back of the room so that we could slip out quietly if he became restless.

Bill had been making the drive from Grass Valley to Davis for years because he loved the Jack Kerouac Poetry Prize ceremony. Every October he attended, hoping to win someday, though he never did. Each year, he congratulated the winners with genuine enthusiasm and spoke about the poems he admired, wanting good poems to find readers whether or not his own poem received the prize.

At the Kerouac event, where every submitted poem is read aloud regardless of the outcome, Bill got his moment at the mic every year, and he delighted listeners as much with his introductions as with his poems. “True story,” he would add, after recounting something unlikely or fantastical.

After one of his readings at the Natsoulas Gallery, he told me about an idea that excited him. He wanted to establish a poetry prize devoted to short poems, works shorter than a sonnet, and he wanted me to judge it. We never did get to launch that prize, but his expression as he pitched it captured his dedication to lifting up other voices.

While we waited for lunch, I checked out the many books gifted to attendees at the tables. People began flipping through them as they sat for the program to begin, and soon laughter spread from table to table as readers discovered examples of his mischievous and bawdy wit. He trusted ordinary experience as the best topic for poems, pointing out and embodying the pleasures and absurdities of daily life.

One example from his book A Note in the Window is “At the Shelter.”

Stooped,
he carries
a pillow —
as if it has
weight

defends it
as if it has
a porch
a doorbell
a lawn
to mow.

Attendees got to watch a slideshow of photographs from Bill’s life while sharing a meal. I sat waiting for the room to quiet down, expecting a microphone to squeal with feedback, a master of ceremonies to step up, or even for someone to call on me to tell a story. But the formal program never started. 

Instead, the room stayed loud with the sounds of chairs scraping as old friends crossed the room to hug, the clink of forks, and the spontaneous bursts of laughter as someone at a nearby table read a poem about a shower stall that was too small for two people. Jukie concentrated on the vegetarian pizza and the three kinds of salads, which pleased him every bit as much as the poetry pleased the rest of us.

As I watched his family and friends reading his poems together over lunch, I realized that this gathering expressed his legacy more fully than any speech could have done. His books had brought everyone together one more time. They sparked conversations, laughter, memories, and introductions.

Many writers devote themselves to building a reputation, but Bill devoted himself to building a community. At his final reading in Davis, he had asked me to help give away the books he had brought with him. He wanted every copy to find a home.

As we prepared to leave and said goodbye to some old and new poet friends, I looked around the room one last time. White tablecloths covered the long tables. Bill’s books rested beside coffee cups, dessert plates, and reading glasses. Everywhere I looked, people were smiling over something he had written.

Every writer hopes to leave behind a few good books. Bill left behind something more: a community of writers who remember his encouragement.

That may prove to be his finest work. True story.

---

I am trying to figure out how to adapt this joke from Steven Wright: “It was so hot today, I saw a dog chasing a cat, and they were both walking.”

I look forward to seeing you and your teams this evening. Join us on the patio under the necessary misters if you can get a reservation or arrive early enough. As for the quiz, expect 31 questions on a variety of topics you should know something about, this week with questions on a particular letter of the alphabet. Also, a mandatory mention of heat and deserts.  

In addition to topics raised above and below, expect questions tonight on the following: 1980s comedy films, Academy Award winners, ages, astronomy, baseball, birthdays, birth certificates, Broadway musicals, Canada, commencement speeches, controversial novels, convenience foods, current NFL players, data centers that are not bookstores or libraries, DNA, economics, familiar phrases, hardware, kings, leading roles, Nobel Prize winners, personal finance, pop music, self-portraits, settlements, tragedies, trusts, varied choices, visuals, walkable cities, current events, and Shakespeare.

For more Pub Quiz fun, please subscribe via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/yourquizmaster.

Thanks to all the new players joining us at the live quizzes and to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Certain friends have upgraded their memberships recently, which I really appreciate.

We are now past 100 Patreon members, including people who have upgraded their paid memberships! You know who you are, and I salute you! I also incidentally salute Cathy, Christine, Bobby, Esther, James, Damian, Jim, and Meebles! Thanks also to new subscribers Prescott, Bill and Diane, Tamara, Megan, Michael, Janet, Jasmine, Joey, Carly, The X-Ennial Falcons, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. Maybe next week it will be you! I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, Still Here for the Shakesbeer, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions and bakers of marvelous and healthy treats, The Mavens. Hello to Bill and to Jude’s dad. Thanks in particular to my paid subscribers on Substack. Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. Also, I sometimes remember to add an extra hint on Patreon. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine! 

Best,

Dr. Andy

Three questions from last week:

1. Internet Culture. What athlete never had time for Mario Kart because she was always putting on an offensive clinic? Her name is an anagram of the phrase CLINICAL KART.  

2. Newspaper Headlines. Born in Virginia in 1957, what veteran journalist and former morning and evening anchor revealed this week that she had recently been diagnosed with a case of transient global amnesia?  

3. Four for Four. Which two of the following are actual terms for a 250-year anniversary: Quasquicentennial, semiquincentennial, sesquicentennial, sestercentennial?  

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been surprised by how many people have asked me about America’s Bicentennial in 1976. I was a child growing up in Washington, D.C., and many people assume I must have vivid memories of the celebration. I do. I remember the crowds, the flags, the fireworks, and the excitement as the entire country turned its attention to a single anniversary.

Yet thinking back on those conversations, I realize what people really wanted to know: What did it feel like?

That question reflects uncertainty about the present. Public life feels increasingly fragmented. Many people approach national celebrations with suspicion and unease. People asking me about the Bicentennial are likely wondering what it felt like to participate in a moment when millions of Americans gathered around a common civic occasion, an experience we rarely share now.

Such questions stayed with me this week as my son Truman and I went to see Citizen Kane on the big screen for its eighty-fifth anniversary. Film buffs regard this 1941 film with a respect bordering on awe, perhaps wishing that contemporary films were as artful and substantive. Thousands of movies have been released since the Orson Welles masterpiece, but most have faded from memory. 

Yet Citizen Kane still attracts viewers, including me. My father was a film critic, actor, and director, and I grew up hearing him lecture about Orson Welles’s masterpiece. I’ve now seen the film eight times, and every viewing reminds me of those conversations, just as Citizen Kane itself reminds us of the importance of simple and abiding memories.

As I summon up my memories of my dad introducing that film (as he did with a rented film projector at my third-grade birthday party), I realize that I miss my father’s optimism. People often remarked on my dad’s boundless cheery energy, his focus, and his readiness to engage on almost any topic. Trained as a magician, actor, and director, he approached every conversation as though he had just stepped onto a stage. If you have seen video of Orson Welles telling a story, you will see something they had in common.

In 1976, we hoped that we were putting our national darkness of Watergate and presidential corruption behind us. The celebrations were bipartisan, joyous, and widespread. I remember our parking near the Martin Luther King Memorial Library and then walking the mile or so to see the enormous crowds on the National Mall. I remember the patriotic bunting on the streetlights, the parade, the Smithsonian’s Bicentennial exhibits, the excitement surrounding the newly opened Air and Space Museum, and finally the fireworks exploding above the Washington Monument.

My mother worked as a librarian, and my father reviewed theater and film for WTOP (today’s WUSA) television. Books filled our house, the Post always lay open on the table, and the evening news presented my dad and his on-air colleagues. I wore Bicentennial buttons, completed Bicentennial school projects, and posted commemorative posters in my room. By the summer of 1976, I had thoroughly caught Bicentennial fever.

The Bicentennial and Citizen Kane have endured for the same reason: each offers a fixed point in a culture that feels constantly in motion. 

This week I sat beside Truman watching the same film that my father taught me to love, realizing that enduring memories can be gifts that one generation passes to the next.

Time filters our memories. We forget most movies, perhaps thankfully, and remember the masterpieces. We forget most public celebrations and remember the ones that endure. The past often appears richer than the present because time has already performed the work of selection.

We should devote as much attention to creating memorable experiences as we devote to admiring the memorable achievements of others. We might ask what we are creating today that people will still celebrate fifty years from now. What films from our era (such as Sinners, Oppenheimer, or The Odyssey) will we care about in 2076? Which of today’s most-discussed books will still be read or taught? What stories about acts of public generosity, civic imagination, or artistic courage will still be remembered when today’s obsessions with malfeasance and buffoonery have been forgotten? 

Perhaps if we can identify and celebrate what gave the Bicentennial its spirit or Citizen Kane its staying power, we can then cultivate those same qualities in our own communities, classrooms, neighborhoods, and creative work. 

Few of us will create works that people admire eighty-five years from now or organize celebrations remembered half a century later; we need not construct our own Xanadus. Instead, we can all enrich another person’s memories. A teacher may inspire a student, a mother’s encouragement may stay with her son for decades, or a neighbor may establish a local tradition that others carry forward. We seldom recognize those moments while we are living them, but we can recognize them with hindsight. 

As we reflect on the people and country we love, we should strive to fill our days with words and actions worthy of being remembered.

---

I look forward to seeing you and being seen tonight. I have yet another outrageous black shirt that should keep me cool as I pace and perplex. I look forward to seeing you and your teams this evening. Join us on the patio if you can get a reservation or arrive early enough. As for the quiz, expect 31 questions on a variety of topics you should know something about, this week with questions on spices.  

In addition to topics raised above and below, expect questions tonight on the following: Actresses, animation, anniversaries, apartments, apostles, authors, awards, basketball, bears, billionaires, board games, box office, broadcasters, buoyancy, businesses, carriers, chart-topping songs, chemistry, classic Hollywood, compounds, cooking, crystals, documentaries, epics, flowers, forests, forests, geography, islands, losing streaks, lyrics, mammals, marsupials, memories, minerals, musicals, obligations, oceans, olives, rankings, satires, seasonings, skyscrapers, streaming services, studios, suspects, television history, vocabulary, westerns, wildlife., current events, and Shakespeare.

For more Pub Quiz fun, please subscribe via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/yourquizmaster.

Thanks to all the new players joining us at the live quizzes and to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Certain friends have upgraded their memberships recently, which I really appreciate.

We are now past 100 Patreon members, including people who have upgraded their paid memberships! You know who you are, and I salute you! I also incidentally salute Cathy, Christine, Bobby, Esther, James, Damian, Jim, and Meebles! Thanks also to new subscribers Prescott, Bill and Diane, Tamara, Megan, Michael, Janet, Jasmine, Joey, Carly, The X-Ennial Falcons, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. Maybe next week it will be you! I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, Still Here for the Shakesbeer, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions and bakers of marvelous and healthy treats, The Mavens. Hello to Bill and to Jude’s dad. Thanks in particular to my paid subscribers on Substack. Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. Also, I sometimes remember to add an extra hint on Patreon. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine! 

Best,

Dr. Andy

Three questions from last week:

• Unusual Words. What four-letter P verb means to trim or reduce something?  
• Cars. According to J.D. Power and Associates, what is the most reliable car brand of 2026? It has five letters in its name and is not Honda.  
• Pop Culture – Television. Who had the title role in the Emmy-winning dramedy Nurse Jackie (2009–2015)?  

On July 1, 2027, after 37 years as a faculty member and academic administrator at UC Davis, I will retire from the university. As I thought about how I wanted to spend my final year on campus, one word kept returning to me: gratitude.

Thirty-six years ago, in the spring of 1990, UC Davis admitted me to its Ph.D. program in English, awarded me a fellowship that covered my tuition throughout graduate school, and offered me a teaching position. Those three gifts turned into 37 years of work I loved.

During those early years, generous mentors helped me helped me grow into the teacher I hoped to be. Ellen Lange (who co-taught my first class), Marlene Clark, Eric Schroder (who taught me how to lecture confidently), Alan Williamson (who directed my dissertation), Sandra Gilbert, and many others modeled intellectual rigor, kindness, and deep respect for students. They challenged me, encouraged me, and trusted me with important responsibilities. Every class I have taught since then carries traces of their influence.

I spent many years exploring how writing, instructional technology, and research-guided pedagogy could enrich teaching and learning. Those interests gradually expanded beyond my own classroom into administrative positions that allowed me to collaborate with colleagues across the University Writing Program, the English Department, and eventually every school and college at UC Davis. I have enjoyed helping faculty experiment with new teaching tools and pedagogical approaches while maintaining a focus on students.

I also appreciated having the opportunity to create and lead initiatives that encouraged faculty to share ideas about teaching and instructional technology, like with the faculty forums on topics such as generative AI and accessibility that I host twice a month during the school year. Yet, when I look back across nearly four decades of academic work, I find myself thinking less about programs, committees, publications, or administrative titles than about people.

Over the years, more than 5,000 students have passed through my classrooms. Some arrived bursting with confidence. Others discovered their voices and obsessions along the way. My students have become writers, teachers, physicians, therapists, nonprofit leaders, deans, parents, and thoughtful citizens. 

Every quarter they showed me new ways of seeing the world. They introduced me to books I had not read, bands I had not encountered, technologies that reshaped education, and questions that lingered long after grades had been submitted. They reminded me that every classroom is a community of learners, and that the professor gets to learn alongside everyone else. Looking back, I realize that one of the greatest gifts my students gave me was the permission to remain intellectually young, whether as a 23-year-old graduate student or, now, a seasoned (I almost wrote “wizened”) academic administrator.

That realization has inspired a project I want to pursue throughout my final year at UC Davis.

Over the next 365 days, I will write about 365 former students whose lives intersected with mine in memorable ways. Some stories will celebrate inspiring accomplishments. Others will capture a single classroom conversation, a surprising paper, an office-hour discussion, or a moment that changed how I think about teaching. Many of these stories extend well beyond a single quarter; some students became colleagues, collaborators, and friends. Together, I hope the essays and videos I create will become a portrait of the extraordinary people who have enriched my life through the ordinary rhythm of university classrooms.

Memory has its limits. I recently cleaned out my office and recycled boxes of papers that an earlier version of myself would have guarded forever. The most valuable artifacts of a teaching career do not fit into filing cabinets. Rather, the real record of my career lives in conversations, relationships, and moments that resurface every time a former student writes to me. As much as my memory lets me, those are the stories I want to preserve.

This year will be my Year of Gratitude. And although my time at UC Davis will be drawing to a close, my work as a writer, teacher, radio talk show host, interviewer, and poet will continue.

Fittingly, as I sat down this morning to write these words, I opened my email and found a message from a former student whom I recently contacted about the part he played in a pre-professional writing class for English majors that I created in 1998.  

Dear Dr. Andy,

Thank you for reaching out, and congratulations on your upcoming retirement. I certainly remember you and your class.

I consider my time in your course, along with a mentorship program at UC Berkeley, as pivotal moments in my career. Focusing on writing, revising, and crafting my statement of purpose and grad school application materials gave me immense confidence. I have frequently shared that positive experience with colleagues over the years.

Thank you for everything you did in that class.

Best,

Jeremy

Earlier this year, Jeremy became Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the university where he has taught for many years.

Jeremy’s note arrived at exactly the right moment. It reminded me why teaching has been such a privilege and why gratitude feels like the right theme for my final year at UC Davis. I look forward to sharing many more stories like his over the coming months.

---

July is here. Welcome to the start of a new fiscal year! 

Let’s see how you do with no hints this week. 

I look forward to seeing you tonight and every Wednesday at 7 for the Sudwerk Pub Quiz.

When I moved to London in 1987, everything I owned had to fit into a single rucksack. Somehow a Billy Joel cassette made the cut.

In London, I met and shared a room with a beautiful woman named Kate, who has now been my wife for almost 34 years. But before all that happened, before marriage and children and all the rest, I remember worrying that my Billy Joel cassette would not help my case

I actually remember thinking, “Should I have brought music by The Velvet Underground, or The Cure, or Hüsker Dü, even though I don’t listen to any of those bands, as if taste were something you could just swap out at customs?”

As a poet, I recognize the music of Billy Joel’s lines, the exactness of the characters, the humor and heartbreak. I recognize the craft hiding inside his popular ballads. 

The year before I moved to London, I saw Billy Joel in concert at the Worcester Centrum in Massachusetts. A friend and I loved the music so much that at some point we stood up to dance. 

Isn’t that what one does at a concert? Apparently not in our section; the man behind us told us that if we wanted to dance, we should go to a different part of the auditorium. We sat down.

Then Billy Joel started playing “Only the Good Die Young,” and everyone left their seats to dance. I remember looking over my shoulder and smiling at the man behind us, as if to say, “What are you going to do now, bub?”

One of the compensations of getting older is that we no longer have to pretend to like the music we think will impress other people.   

I listened to my LP of The Stranger over and over. I still listen to “Vienna,” “Only the Good Die Young,” and “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” even though these days I drink neither a bottle of red nor a bottle of white.

And the older I get, the sadder “Piano Man” sounds to me.

When I was younger, I heard the singalong. I heard the harmonica. I heard the crowd in Worcester roaring at the line, “Man, what are you doing here?” All of us were asking the same question: What was a songwriter that talented doing in a piano bar?

Now I hear the thwarted lives.

The regular crowd shuffles in. The old man makes love to his tonic and gin. John at the bar dreams of being a movie star. Davey is still in the Navy and probably will be for life. Paul never had time for a wife.

The song sounds cheerful because people are singing along, but almost everyone in it has become stuck in a past they can’t escape. This brings me to a certain hotel in Monterey.

Over Juneteenth weekend, Kate and I made our plans late, and so we were unable to stay at one of our favorite Monterey hotels, so we stayed at a sad little inn that had seen its glory days decades before.

I will not name it and thus perhaps hurt the feelings of the owners, who already know what the place needs. 

It needs paint, updated bathrooms, repaired mirrors, and a showerhead that struck me squarely at the breastbone. I am reasonably tall, but no grown adult should have to crouch to wash their hair.

I began thinking about the sadness of “Piano Man,” about people and places past their prime. Nostalgia can become a kind of deferred maintenance. The inn had its own chorus of regulars: the faucet, the wallpaper, the barricaded balconies, and the scarred mirror.

The New York Times may not consider Billy Joel one of the hundred greatest American songwriters, but I recognize that nearly forty years after I worried about bringing his cassette to London, I’m still learning from him.

Ridiculous premises sometimes make room for real affection. I still like the song. I still like Monterey. I even felt a little tenderness for the inn, just not enough to stay there again.

Here, then, with apologies to Billy Joel, is The Monterey Neglected Inn Blues.

The Monterey Neglected Inn Blues

It’s check-in time on a Saturday,
And the fog’s rolling in from the bay,
There’s a smile at the desk and a whiff of old must,
And a carpet that’s faded to gray.

Well, the brochure still talks about luxury,
And the photos are as bright as can be,
But the paint’s peeling off and the shutters all cough,
Like they’re begging for early release.

Sing us a sad song, you Neglected Inn,
Sing us a tune from your prime.
You were charming once, 
Maybe back when you launched,
But you’ve fallen behind with the times.

Now the bathroom’s a study in sadness,
With a faucet that drips through the night,
And the mirror’s so scarred that it’s hard to regard
If it’s me or a trick of the light.

There’s a shower that groans like a sea lion,
And a toilet that leans to one side,
And the grout in the tile had been crumbling a while
until it simply got tired and died.

Sing us a sad song, you Neglected Inn,
Sing us a tune from your prime.
Your towels are thin and your wallpaper’s grim,
And your glory has faded with time.

There’s a painting that hangs in the hallway,
Showing schooners and sunsets and cheer,
But the frame’s coming loose and the ice machine’s truce
With the cold ended sometime last year.

And the walls have the charm of old history,
Though the windows don’t open at all,
And the lamp by the bed sheds a flickering dread
On a crack running down through the wall.

Sing us a sad song, Neglected Inn,
You’ve been coasting on memories,
So a fresh coat of paint and some mirrors that ain’t
From the Hoover administration, please.

---

Every Pub Quiz is like a mid-week vacation for me — I look forward to seeing you and your teams this evening. Join us on the patio if you can get a reservation or arrive early enough. As for the quiz, expect 31 questions on a variety of topics you should know something about, this week with questions on individual locations. My walking friend Bill suggested a number of topics that will come up tonight or on future Wednesdays. 

In addition to topics raised above and below, expect questions tonight on the following: Action films, advertising slogans, American history, soccer, apples, beverages, blockbuster actors, box office stars, British politics, California history, calendar patterns, Captain America, children, comedians, conventions, East Coast education, exaltations, exits, fancy outfits, fans, farms, fish, French geography, girls, golf history, insurance, lights, major music releases, mothers, novelists, opening numbers, outer space, playwrights, pop singers, prestige television, rays, Shakespearean holidays, snivel, sob stories, South America, superheroes, Washington, D.C., wines, wordplay, work, current events, and Shakespeare.

For more Pub Quiz fun, please subscribe via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/yourquizmaster.

Thanks to all the new players joining us at the live quizzes and to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Certain friends have upgraded their memberships recently, which I really appreciate.

We are now past 100 Patreon members, including people who have upgraded their paid memberships! You know who you are, and I salute you! I also incidentally salute Cathy, Christine, Bobby, Esther, James, Damian, Jim, and Meebles! Thanks also to new subscribers Prescott, Bill and Diane, Tamara, Megan, Michael, Janet, Jasmine, Joey, Carly, The X-Ennial Falcons, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. Maybe next week it will be you! I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, Still Here for the Shakesbeer, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions and bakers of marvelous and healthy treats, The Mavens. Hello to Bill and to Jude’s dad. Thanks in particular to my paid subscribers on Substack. Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. Also, I sometimes remember to add an extra hint on Patreon. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine! 

Best,

Dr. Andy

Three questions from last week’s pub quiz:

1. Mottos and Slogans. Known as “The Voice of the West,” the San Francisco Chronicle’s weekday newsstand price is the same as that of The Sacramento Bee. Rounded off to the nearest dollar, what is that price? 

• Internet Culture. Starting with an R, what maker of streaming devices has Fox Corp. recently agreed to buy for $22 billion?  

• Newspaper Headlines. The new Obama Presidential Center is found in which south side of Chicago park: Garfield Park, Jackson Park, or Lincoln Park?