Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
As much as I love the food in our favorite Davis restaurants, especially de Vere’s Irish Pub, sometimes my family and I eat meals at home, even though cooking for my family is a tricky business. If you count the dog, four out of the six of us are vegetarians, my daughter Geneva has deadly food allergies, my son Jukie has a metabolic disorder requiring him to consume more cholesterol than an average kid, and our youngest Truman has what one might call a selective palate. Whenever we can find a meal that pleases everyone, we feel both surprised and victorious.
Despite these challenges, most mornings Kate makes me a delicious egg and tofu scramble with about five different kinds of vegetables and fungi (i.e., mushrooms). Because I share this daily morning delicacy with Jukie, and because of my love of greens, Kate mixes into the stir-fry all sorts of vegetables that Jukie enjoys too, including about a half-pound of spinach. When that meal is placed before me, I feel as joyful and territorial about my food as Dilly our bulldog feels about her kibble: breakfast is my favorite meal of the day.
Yesterday I came into the kitchen and smelled the most aromatic tofu, veggie and egg scramble that you can imagine. The room was filled with a full-blast banjo rendition of “You Are My Sunshine,” a love song that is appropriate to share over breakfast. Kate told me that she hoped that I like the music of Pete Seeger, “because that’s all we’re listening to for the next four years.” This was as much a political proclamation as it was a musical one.
Pete Seeger is finding new audiences, and not only with our kids at mealtime. One can also hear Seeger’s music at protests, marches, and demonstrations, such as those that took place at the State Capital a week ago Saturday, and in Sacramento International Airport yesterday, probably with a number of your Facebook friends participating in one or both. Protest songs have always sustained those who sought peacefully and collectively to confront immoral authorities. As novelist Nicholson Baker put it, “The nice thing about a protest song is that it takes the complaint, the fussing, the finger-pointing, and gives it an added component of sociable harmony.”
Kate reminded me that, as the daughter of a progressive minister in suburban Chicago, she often found her childhood home filled with guitar-strumming reformers, leftists, and parishioners who sought to confront the racism, bigotry, and other acts of intolerance that they encountered in their neighborhood and in their nation during the Nixon years, the war years. She remembers being upset by stories of people in her mostly-white neighborhood turning their hoses on new arrivals’ African-American and immigrant children as they walked to or from school, communicating that they were not welcome.
Whether they were listening to Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, or Malvina Reynolds, those progressives who practiced protest songs, constructed posters, and made plans in living rooms across the country didn’t want visitors, new immigrants, and people of color to think that their entire community embraced or even accepted that sort of intolerance.
One can only imagine how it might feel, coming of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to be seen by other countries as bigots and racists just because a plurality of our white voters supported a paranoid and authoritarian U.S. president’s plans to implement policies targeting minorities and immigrants, policies that were condemned internationally and domestically as short-sighted, immoral, and un-American. In retrospect, I have great admiration for the friends of Kate’s parents who chose to act – even if merely by singing a Pete Seeger song to a bunch of protesters standing at a police line – rather than watching silently as history passed them by.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on one or more topics raised above, and on the following: short candles, new jobs, speaking roles for women, sun kings, names in the news, Dorothy Crawford, the BBC, home, tempered wildness, prominent women, peninsulas that are visited by people from two countries, people named Murphy, mismatched protectors, gay icons, sunshine, famous artists, big religions, mutagens, a tent in which you would find cowards, Sherlock Holmes, anthems, notable villages, maritime weapons, raids, the reason that Curious George earned his medal, ornamental rope, auto-repeaters, bones we depend upon, expatriates, clock towers, conglomerates, and Shakespeare.
We start at 7, but it’s always good to arrive early to chat with your friends before the carnival barking begins. I will be wearing black.
Your Quizmaster
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Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
1. Books and Authors. Emily Dickinson lived all her life in the same western Mass. town with a current population of 38,000. Name the town.
2. Sports. What MLB pitcher has the records for the most wins and the most losses?
3. Shakespeare. The cube root of the even number of Shakespeare’s sonnets is 5.3601. How many sonnets did Shakespeare publish?
P.S. Speaking of sample questions, did you see which quizmaster has a new weekly column, if you can call it that, in the Davis Enterprise? I will tell you. It’s your quizmaster.
P.P.S. Poetry Night takes place on Thursday.
Poets Patrick Grizzell & Geoffrey Neill
Read at the John Natsoulas Gallery
February 2nd at 8PM
The Poetry Night Reading Series is proud to feature poets Patrick Grizzell and Geoffrey Neill on Thursday, February 2nd at 8 P.M. They will be performing at the John Natsoulas Gallery at 521 1st Street in Davis.
Geoffrey Neill is a Sacramento-area poet, as well as the founder of little m press. Little m press has published around twenty chapbooks for Sacramento poets who, for the most part, don’t have previous publications, and provides local poetry to local readers. Neill’s work has appeared in several anthologies including Late Peaches and Sacramento Voices. Neill has performed his work throughout California and hosts Joey Montoya’s Poetry Unplugged at Luna’s Café in Sacramento the second Thursday of each month.
Patrick Grizzell is a poet, songwriter and visual artist. His books include Dark Music, Chicken Months (about which Robert Bly wrote, “… the poems have a sweet spontaneity and tenderness”), Minotaure Into Night (with sumi paintings by Jimi Suzuki), and the more recently published chapbooks, 13 Poems, and It’s Like That. He has a new full length collection, Writing in Place, under way.
A founding member and previous director of the Sacramento Poetry Center, Grizzell was also editor of On the Wing, an arts magazine, and is an occasional contributor to ArtWeek and other publications. His interviews include conversations with Helene Pons, Fernando Alegria, Robert Bly, Aline Comisky Crumb, Gary Snyder, Ruth Bernhart, Will Durst and others. Grizzell has performed poetry and music with, among others, Allen Ginsberg, Leon Redbone, Jim Ringer and Mary McCaslin, Ed Sanders, Taj Mahal, Shizumi Shigeto, William Stafford, Robert Creeley and Anne Waldman. He studied art and literature at CSUS with Maya Angelou, Dennis Schmitz, Eugene Redmond, Kathryn Hohlwein, John Fitzgibbon, and others.
Grizzell’s band, Proxy Moon, will released a CD early this summer and are at work on another. John Lee Hooker once said he “sounds pretty good” on the dobro.
An open mic will follow the readings by the featured poets. Please bring your poems, short stories, and songs. Participants will be asked to limit their performances to five minutes or two items, whichever is shorter. The Poetry Night Reading Series is hosted by Dr. Andy Jones, the poet laureate of Davis. All are welcome.