Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Welcome to November, the subject of one of my favorite nihilist Thomas Hood poems, titled “No!”:
No sun—no moon!
No morn—no noon—
No dawn—
No sky—no earthly view—
No distance looking blue—
No road—no street—no “t’other side the way”—
No end to any Row—
No indications where the Crescents go—
No top to any steeple—
No recognitions of familiar people—
No courtesies for showing ’em—
No knowing ’em!
No traveling at all—no locomotion,
No inkling of the way—no notion—
“No go”—by land or ocean—
No mail—no post—
No news from any foreign coast—
No park—no ring—no afternoon gentility—
No company—no nobility—
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
November!
Thomas Hood died in his birthplace of London about 150 years before I spent an entire November (and fall) in that same Sunday, so I remember what would have gotten him down. Despite the darkness, I’m grateful for everything that England and London in particular had to offer me when I lived there. All that rain meant that I got to spend even more time with Kate, my propitious London roommate, who to this day brightens even the shortest and gloomiest days that November has had in store for me.
Rain has a different meaning in drought-stricken California than it did during our London adventures. Ironically, our recent record one-day rainstorm brought many dry parts of Davis to life. Walking from south Davis towards the underpass to get to downtown Davis yesterday, my son Jukie and I noticed that the typically dry field – what in cities we call an “empty lot” – between West Chiles Road and Putah Creek, where local firefighters test their enormous hoses, had turned from brown to green. Imagine all those seedlings waiting for enough hydration to sprout, even though it is so late in the calendar year.
Yesterday I also saw a pair of California Towhees frolicking in our back yard, digging at something among the puddles and the tufts of new grass, as if they were snowy plovers or other shorebirds scouting the beach for morsels of marine worms and crustaceans. Such ornithological excitement and joy a rain shower brings!
We turn to the cycles of nature to bring us comfort when plagued by melancholy, as I am now, thinking of the recent deaths of friends and former students (Goodbye, Rasar. Goodbye, David Kim / DK). Sometimes we turn to poetry when we seek to make sense of the shocking, the unfair, or the unfathomable. The winter poems of Robert Frost leaned into the sort of melancholy that we imagine the poet felt. Consider, for example, the opening stanza of his poem for this time of year, titled “My November Guest”:
My sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
How strange not only to gender and to personify one’s sorrow, but also to imagine what she sees as beautiful, as if she were a companion who, like my constant walking buddy, points out with her upward gazes what beauty can be found in the trees after the leaves have parted.
The word “sodden” suggests that Frost’s New England Novembers were wetter than ours, while the word “pasture” suggests that denizens of that part of the world a century ago came home with muddy boots, while my son Jukie and I in our walking shoes enjoy the benefits of paved footpaths that ring our South Davis neighborhood.
In both cases, November is more inviting to the afternoon perambulator than the coming winter months, with their frigid temperatures and soaking rains. Normally I would look forward to autumnal gatherings with friends in local restaurants, and with Jukie in our neighborhood art galleries, bookstores, and movie theatres, but the virus will keep us outside, no matter the weather. Unhampered by the welcome rains, we will continue to walk Davis streets and greenbelts, as Hood or Frost once did, searching for images that reflect our November spirits.
I hope you get to see this week’s pub quiz, an ongoing enterprise sustained by my patrons on Patreon, especially the teams Quizimodo, Original Vincibles, and Outside Agitators. Join their ranks to receive engaging trivia content – the address is https://www.patreon.com/yourquizmaster.
This week’s quiz may touch on topics raised above, as well as the following: running animals, European capitals, roller coasters, Meryl Streep accomplishments, oddly-named parents, aged competitors, the Bureau of Transportation, obduracy, colts, Nobel laureates, mechanisms, famous rebellions, genres of dance, mermaids, superheroes, French things, famous journals, restaurants that have not closed, Popeye, thugs in southern literature, Tuesday voices, time in space, aging bodies, Princeton graduates, tissues, pumpkins, baseball terms, current events, and Shakespeare.
Tomorrow night’s poetry reading at the Natsoulas Gallery with Miles Miniaci should be fun. I will have to miss it, as Kate and I will be celebrating her November birthday! Be well.
Dr. Andy
P.S. Here are three questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:
- Famous Bankruptcies. What investment bank had almost $600 billion in assets when they declared bankruptcy on September 15, 2008?
- Pop Culture – Music. A duet sung by Freddie Mercury and Michael Jackson remained unfinished because Mercury walked out of the recording. He couldn’t tolerate Jackson bringing his grass-eating pet mammal into the studio. Name the species of animal.
- Sports. What former Cuban-American Oakland Athletic was the first foreign-born player to reach the four-hundred home runs plateau?
P.P.S. “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.” Anatole France