Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
The greatest benefit of my having hosted Pub Quizzes in Davis for the last several years has been all the friends I have made. I’ve joined Pub Quiz friends at films, picnics, dinners, and fundraisers, and during many unscheduled conversations at street-corners, bookstores, and art galleries. I enjoy being warmly greeted everywhere I go in Davis, usually by people I recognize.
One conversation after the last Poetry Night reminded me how much we tend to focus unduly – psychologists call it “perseverating” – on the topics or challenges that haunt us. I myself tend to forget individual pub quiz questions as soon as I conclude any particular week’s quiz. My reading in Zen Buddhism encourages me to have a “mind like water,” and thus not invest needless energy in what no longer concerns me. But some of you, I have learned, continue to remember and talk about missed pub quiz questions long after the prizes have been awarded. I know this feeling. Was Connie Chung the first female network anchor? I should know, for I was asked this question at a Pub Quiz about ten years ago, and I still remember where we sat as we agonized over the possible answers. Today, by contrast, I might ask such a question, and forget the answer a week or two later.
One Pub Quiz regular at this Poetry Night after-party brought up with alarming confidence the exact wording of questions I had asked one, six, or twelve months ago. He wanted to know how I researched and wrote my questions. I used a line from my father-in-law: “Well, one reads a certain amount.” But the truer answer comes more from my work as a poet than my work as a researcher and scholar. The poet is well-practiced at thinking associatively, of imagining the possible array of tangentially relevant associations to any particular word, person, or idea. To exemplify, I pointed out to him the basketball player Stephen Curry who was playing on the TV screen behind him. Curry, of course, reminded me of Indian food, of India, of Nehru jackets, of Ringo singing “Octopus’ Garden” and of the Indus River. I don’t know if he was playing close attention, but all these topics came up in the subsequent Pub Quizzes at de Vere’s, all prompted by a fleeting glance of Stephen Curry. A Quizmaster practices receptivity: Emerson spoke in Nature of the Transparent Eyeball, while Henry James said that a novelist is “one on whom nothing is lost.” Mostly I just pay attention, even if that means looking up from a screen from time to time, as I encourage you to do.
To practice associative and fairy-tale logic, I also read a poem both before bed and before writing the pub quiz, such as this one by MacArthur Fellow A.E. Stallings:
Fairy-tale Logic
Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:
Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
Select the prince from a row of identical masks,
Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks
And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,
Or learn the phone directory by rote.
Always it’s impossible what someone asks—
You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe
That you have something impossible up your sleeve,
The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,
An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,
The will to do whatever must be done:
Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.
In addition to a topic mentioned above, tonight’s Pub Quiz will include questions about air travel, storage, ABC News, Tony Stark, Dr. Seuss, coinage, English composers, NFL history, tropical trees, bones, 2,922-day terms of service, things that fly, Australia, hit films, Cuba, lowered wreathes, unusual sports, founding fathers, warriors, big rocks, chasing summer, electrifying men, Oedipal struggles that are not really sports, dummies, Dallas, canaries, mahogany, Shakespeare, and firstborn sons.
I hope you can join us for the fun this evening.
Your Quizmaster
https://www.yourquizmaster.com
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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
1. Mottos and Slogans. What California organization reminds us to “Slow for the Cone Zone”?
2. Internet Culture. The open source web application framework sometimes nicknamed RAILS runs on the Ruby programming language. What is the full three-word name of this web application framework?
3. Newspaper Headlines. According to a decision announced Saturday, girls will be allowed to play sports in private schools for the first time in what country with a population of 29 million people?
4. Four for Four. Which of the following, if any, were named after the Italian explorer Marco Polo? The airport in Venice, a swimming pool game in which the child who is “IT” pretends to keep his eyes closed, a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, a species of sheep.
5. Film Franchises. Released in your lifetime, what four-film film franchise starred Alexa Vega as Carmen Cortez and Daryl Sabara as Juni Cortez?
P.S. The prose writer Lynn Freed will be headlining Poetry Night at the John Natsoulas Gallery this coming Thursday. A creative writing professor at UC Davis, Lynn Freed is a South African writer and novelist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, Vogue, The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Her short story “Sunshine” won the 2011 PEN/O. Henry Prize, the nation’s highest honor for short fiction, and her story “Ma: A Memoir” was performed on NPR’s Selected Shorts. Several of her novels, as well as her collection of stories, The Curse of the Appropriate Man, have appeared on The New York Times “Notable Books of the Year” list.
Lynn Freed will be reading this coming Thursday, May 16th at 8 PM at the John Natsoulas Gallery. The open mic starts at 9, and the after-party at de Vere’s at about 10. Add yourself to the Facebook event at https://www.facebook.com/events/305985849531838/