Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
In my house, we have multiple reasons to celebrate. As the Roman playwright Plautus said, “Let us celebrate the occasion with wine and sweet words.” I’m sure he would accept beer, if that’s your preferred beverage.
Anyway, on to the celebrations! We have been attending multiple showings of the successful run (so far) of my son Truman’s production of 12 Angry Jurors. He plays the Henry Fonda role with the sort of bravery and eloquence that any of us would hope we could display were we transported into the 1957 Sidney Lumet production of 12 Angry Men. You can still see the play this coming Thursday evening at 7, or Saturday or Sunday afternoon at 2. So worth it!
My wife Kate’s parents arrived by train into the Davis train station this morning, coming from Chicago via Portland, Oregon. They didn’t originally plan to travel through Portland, but evidently one of their intended trains was stuck in a snowdrift. I love that these impressive octogenarians who spent most of their lives in the 20th century have been bravely traveling the way we did in the 19th century. I’m glad they did not come via horseback, or we would worry.
Finally, Halloween is almost upon us, and I have written a spooky poem to celebrate. It’s called “Exhuming the Sphinx.”
Exhuming the Sphinx
Breathing dust, we followed incongruous paw prints
Across the baked earth to the forsaken tomb
And saw how the entangled amaryllis blooms darkly,
Its thorny spine thick with hemorrhaged
Snakeroot, a thousand fists shaken,
But now unclinched, skeletons in the sand.
Cosmic castaways beneath a penumbra
Of palm trees, each revealing where, parasitic,
They succumbed to the windy mane’s incessant ache,
A mind’s splinter, a map without bearings.
An immaculate apparatus, once a glowing engine
Attuned to the earth’s supersonic percussion,
Like the forgotten oracle, lies wrapped in ragged tapestry;
The desiccated tumbledown remnants of its spells
Now tatter in this sickbed, scorched by an infertile sun.
Once the hectares of stone pyramidions suggested
Solar alignment, nebular umbilical; the sidereal display case
Is now torchstruck, devoured by hourglass pathogens,
The aspiring human blood-knot cut, the specimens splayed,
Impossible to record, too fearful for any bible.
We imagined answers heliotropic, a starved cosmos,
A bitter army of lesions, jigsaw salted amputations,
Artful carvings behind the shadow of the sand’s only rock,
Seared zombic blood the antipode of water,
Makeshift altar where snapping Anubis anointed a jackal.
Ever unrecovered, the sacrificial knife still scalds
Across the centuries, one imagines, errant incantations
Where someone once sacrificed an entire nocturnal flock.
Dig deep enough beneath Thebes, disassembled nuclei
In the lamentation of desert heat, and you’ll encounter Eden.
I don’t know if that will spook you more than a Poe tale, but I will enjoy reading it at Poetry Night tomorrow evening (at the open mic after a D.R. Wagner and Dave Boles performance on October 19th at 7 atop the John Natsoulas Gallery). One joy of poetry is that we get to read and write the sort of unusual words, such as “torchstruck” and “pyramidions,” that don’t come up in everyday conversation, or even in one’s reading.
You might find something from the above in a past or future pub quiz. For instance, careful readers will recognize last week’s supersonic percussion anagram nestled into line 12.
If you are in town tonight, please join us for the Pub Quiz at Sudwerk. Members of my family may be joining us, perhaps even my actor son and my sleeper railway car enthusiast in-laws. Although an earthquake struck our region soon after they de-trained, they are still getting used to stable ground beneath their feet. I guess that could be said for many of us.
In addition to topics raised above, tonight expect questions on the following: feeling like a shape-shifter, social media alternatives, beaks, eyeball obsessions, summer cities, financial recourses when “No pill’s gonna cure my ill,” nearby interstates, title characters, famous founders, better angels, long adjectives that I used in graduate school, chart-toppers, gender-indeterminate television stars, muscles, deserters, forgotten first names, tiny machines, galvanizing bands, early friends, misguided kings, circus examples, football teams, Gay books, taxonomies, Mongols, international airports that you have unlikely visited, people with accents in their first names, hospice work, final compositions, Nabokov inspirations, people named Stella, Dr. Spock, evolutionary biology, current events, books and authors, and Shakespeare.
Thanks to all of you who have signed up for the Pub Quiz mailing list at yourquizmaster.com. Thanks also to The Original Vincibles, who joined us with a new name last week, as well as to Quizimodo, Summer Brains, The Outside Agitators, Gena Harper and others who support the Pub Quiz on Patreon, where you can find a picture of Leonard Nimoy surprising Carol Burnett and a baby. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of Patreon supporters. I appreciate your backing this endeavor!
Speaking of favorite Pub Quiz attendees, two of the regulars will be reading at a Killer Authors at Folsom Library event on October 28 at 1 PM. Find the details for such (Catriona McPherson) events at http://catrionamcpherson.com/news
Best,
Dr. Andy
P.S. Here are three questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:
- Mottos and Slogans. Starting with the letter E, what magazine uses the slogan “Where Black Women Come First”?
- Internet Culture. What three-word phrase does Alexa use to tell that she is changing the subject to a suggestion of something you should buy from Amazon?
- Newspaper Headlines. What actress in her new memoir, titled Worthy, reveals that she has been separated from her even more famous husband since 2016?
P.P.S. If you are looking for free events to attend, I would love to see you tomorrow night at Poetry Night! And Friday at noon I am hosting a Zoom forum on designing online classes. Be well.