Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
A plastic bag has lodged itself securely to a limb of a tree that I can see from my bedroom window. It distracts me sometimes with its movement, with its simulacrum of agency.
The seeming randomness of this newsletter’s paragraphs symbolize that sort of distraction. It is a common ailment of the 2020s.
Walking though the “alley” between C and D Streets with my anti-racism class yesterday, my students and I came upon Bill Buchanan, the journalist and host of the KDRT radio show and podcast Davisville. I wonder if my students thought that encounter was staged.
I have learned that if you walk for enough hours on the streets of Davis, sooner or later you will encounter a friend (or stranger who would make a good friend candidate).
My wife Kate is really good at Wordle, but she shares her Wordle victories only with me and a few other close friends. My Pub Quiz anagrams are more difficult than the daily Wordle, so I give context clues.
Speaking of games and friends, when I played chess over the table with my close friend Joe Mills, I won only about 60% of the time. Now we are playing online, so I have time to think between moves. He comes close to beating me sometimes. I’m grateful for his company and what I imagine is his patience.
My dad taught me how to give hugs and to play chess, for which I am grateful. He never taught me how to change the oil of a car, so I hire others to do that and play chess with Joe on my phone while I wait.
Of course, these days I also don’t drive the car. Instead of changing the oil, yesterday I stopped by Fleet Feet to replace my shoes. The salesman and I agreed that shoes with 2,000 miles on them deserve to be replaced.
I was a bit embarrassed not to have brought my shoes in earlier. My favorite BU professor, Christopher Ricks, wrote an entire book about embarrassment. It was titled Keats and Embarrassment. He was subsequently knighted by the Queen. Now he is Sir Christopher. He still teaches at Boston University, but he walks the streets of Cambridge, the Harvard University and MIT town that aspires to have as many bicyclists per capita as we do in Davis.
My dad loved to walk, and he loved the Muppets. He especially loved The Muppet Show because of the ways the show aspired (but usually failed) to approximate the success of the traveling vaudeville performers he got to see as a child. Such performers hooked him on show business. He would have been pleased that his grandson Jukie keeps asking for Muppet movies at home.
Jim Henson must have had an active imagination, as well as a team of puppet artisans to “materialize” that imagination. Poets like me don’t need a team of helpers to write a poem.
Valentine’s Day weekend requires the married poet to pay better attention to the images in his head, for he will have to assemble a number of them in the coming days in order to write something for his audience of one. Sometimes the resulting creation is shared more broadly.
Looking it over, I see that this week’s newsletter is more a disassembly, rather than an assembly. It reflects centrifugal forces, rather than centripetal. Richard Paul Evans, author of The Christmas Box, said, “The law of centrifugal force seems to be as true for the human condition as it is for the Newtonian mechanics. The faster our lives spin, the more things tend to fly apart.”
Ecclesiastes 3:5 says that there is “a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.”
We gather together in childhood – at my Waldorf school, we had “assemblies” – and we fly apart from those onetime friends as adults. Small children embrace all the time, and then those children take a brake from embracing, until, say in high school, the impulse to embrace returns with a vengeance.
February 12th is the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, most people’s favorite Republican, and Jim Parmelee, a Virginia Republican activist who I knew at that Waldorf school. We attended each other’s birthday parties in the late 1970s, but I haven’t shaken his hand since 1981. I don’t remember if we ever embraced.
The last time I talked to Jim Parmelee, it was for a 2001 interview on my radio show. He wanted to know when Al Gore was going to move out of the Vice Presidential Residence at One Observatory Circle in my old neighborhood so that Dick Cheney could move in. Even that sort of contentiousness seems sedate by today’s standards.
Speaking of divisions, in his 1858 “House Divided” speech at the Illinois State Republican Convention, Abraham Lincoln said, “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
Just the year before that speech, in 1857, Moby-Dick author Herman Melville published his novel The Confidence-Man, about a scam artist who repeatedly rooked people on a Mississippi River steamboat. Lincoln could spot a swindler.
Lincoln didn’t care for the sophistry of Stephen A. Douglas. In 1854, Lincoln said this: “It was a great trick among some public speakers to hurl a naked absurdity at his audience, with such confidence that they should be puzzled to know if the speaker didn’t see some point of great magnitude in it which entirely escaped their observation. A neatly varnished sophism would be readily penetrated, but a great, rough non sequitur was sometimes twice as dangerous as a well-polished fallacy.”
Too many of us have succumbed to well-polished fallacies when we should be standing firm with the truth. Once in 1862 President Lincoln was helping Civil War nurse Rebecca Pomeroy down from a carriage and onto the sidewalk. He said this to her, “All through life be sure you put your feet in the right place, and then stand firm.” Lincoln was always seeking an occasion to share aphorisms the way that a poet looks for occasions to share images.
Nurse Pomeroy was a first responder, an essential worker. She was the sort of citizen Lincoln would have had in mind when he tried to preserve the union, to challenge all the centrifugal forces that distract us or, at worst, drive us apart.
I hope you get to see this week’s Pub Quiz. It will feature questions about the following: anodynes, records, penguins, the economies of space, ultra-short Shakespearean poems, favorites, tennis dramas, opinions and reminiscences, elements you know, famous south coast islands, people named Lucy, patient guests, singer-songwriters, best sellers, American states, chocolate, resorts, glories and freedoms, staves, seasons, Black Kennedys, shoulder-spans, mixed woodlands, architects, adjacencies, gold standards, title questions, pale blue eyes, pioneers working with Adobe online, current events, and Shakespeare.
Thanks as always to the regular and heroic support of my patrons on Patreon. I wouldn’t be able to do this without you. Special thanks to The Original Vincibles, Quizimodo, and the Outside Agitators. Let’s add your name to this list! Subscribe today.
Stay well. As Kit Ramsey says, “Keep it together.”
Dr. Andy
Here are four questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:
- Science. Starting with the letter C, what sort of fruit pits do North and South Americans know best?
- Books and Authors. Underground Books, the Sacramento region’s only Black-owned bookstore can be found in the heart of what neighborhood?
- Current Events – Names in the News. According to a recent KCRA headline, “UC Davis Library To House Legacy Archive Of [an] Internationally Acclaimed Chef.” Name this chef who donated his legacy archive and all his cookbooks to UC Davis.
- Sports. First name Nathan, who is the first figure skater to have landed five types of quadruple jumps in competition?
P.S. Joe Wenderoth is our featured poet at the Natsoulas Gallery this coming Thursday night at 7. Find the details at Poetry in Davis.