Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
As I write this newsletter, I see gentle California hills on the left of me, along with the setting sun, and seemingly endless prairie on the right, interrupted on occasion with signs that ask me to “Build More Dams: Stop Man-Made Droughts,” to “Make California Safe Again,” to “Stop Dumping 78% of Our Water in the Ocean,” and to “RECALL NEWSOM.” As someone who has raised over $100,000 for Friends of the River to dismantle destructive dams, who favors gun control, and who voted for Gavin Newsom, I don’t think that I am the target demographic of these imperatives. Deep in the Central Valley, we are headed home, but we are still a long way from Davis.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe that Davis and Los Angeles are in the same state. This past (long) weekend my family and I got to drive down to LA to see my mom who, like many 85-year-olds, has been facing some significant health issues. Realizing that no octogenarian should weather a global pandemic by herself, my brother Oliver insisted that mom fly out west to spend the many pandemic months in his LA home with his wife, Sarah, and their daughter, Clementine. These beloveds exemplify the heroism and self-sacrifice which so many people have shown since March of 2020, the sort of heroism that I see locally in people who volunteer at the Yolo Food Bank, who spearhead an activist or political campaign that seeks to confront racism and other forms of injustice, or who create opportunities for children in a faraway village in Zimbabwe.
Oh, sometimes I get a good feeling, or so says the song I’m listening to right now. Sorry for the interruption.
We really like the variety of homes in my brother Oliver’s West Adams neighborhood. Check out this Harry Potter house, one of us said to another. It’s difficult to approximate the majesty of Hogwarts with 1,200 square feet, but somebody pulled it off. More exciting than that is the new bookstore that just opened a block from Oliver’s house: The Reparations Club. Containing almost exclusively books by African-American authors, the store is Black-owned and woman-owned. My mom and I each bought a book (an Octavia Butler novel for mom, and a Selected Works of Audre Lorde for me), and the two owners each introduced themselves to us by name as we were checking out. One of the owners was sure she has met another customer with my eyes, so I told her that she must mean my brother Oliver, who has started ordering his books through The Reparations Club instead of Amazon. She made me smile when she asked if my brother and I were twins, even though Oliver was born more than four years after me. You can’t see my grey beard under this mask, I told her.
Celebrate. Don’t wait until it’s too late, Daft Punk says. Celebrate, and dance so free. One more time. One more interruption.
My son Truman and I met a delightful woman in the checkout line at Ralphs Thursday night. Like Flash, the sloth cashier working the customer service counter at the Zootopia DMV, this 70-soemthing diminutive African-American woman was much more interested in unhurried conversations than in getting her frozen bacon bagged. As the conversation continued, I inched a bit closer to put my quarts of non-fat and full-fat milk on the counter, when she promptly asked me if I wouldn’t mind moving back “about two feet.”
With regard to social distancing, she was in the right, and I was in the wrong, but she could not see the smile on my masked face, so she started to deescalate what might otherwise be a moment of contention. She pointed out that this “young man” was almost as tall as his daddy, and that she was sure he was going places in this world. She asked him what he planned to do for a career once he graduated from college. When he replied “I will be an author,” she said, “That sounds real nice. What’s your backup?” He said that he might be an architect or start a business. “You always gotta have a backup. Your daddy knows that, because he knows what’s best. Ain’t that right?” “Yes, Ma’am,” I responded. I wanted to add that we wanted to adopt this woman as Truman’s backup grandma, but I kept that part to myself.
“If you gave me a chance, I’d take it. . . . As long as we’re together, there’s no place I would rather be,” he interrupted, quoting another song filling my ears. It pained me to leave the misused subjunctive in that first lyric, but as a journalist, I must quote accurately.
Speaking of tragic interruptions of life as we know it, my friend Dzokerayi Mukome and her family of five (three young children) lost much of their and possessions to a housefire on Friday. I know Dzokerayi from about ten different contexts, including her work with Sunrise Rotary, with the Tese Foundation that she created to support over 100 girls who are staying in school in Zimbabwe, and with the anti-racist marches that she organized in Davis this past summer (and which Jukie and I participated in). Just last week I wrote a 1022 word response to a long poem she had sent me. This is how I finished the email I sent to her the morning we left for LA, just a day before she lost her home:
“I wonder if you would be interested in the poems of Audre Lorde. Her poem “Coal” does an interesting job of exploring Blackness, while her poem “A Woman Speaks” reflects on the imagery that could contextualize a particular woman’s rhetorical stance and message. The Poetry Foundation has a small collection of her works, but I would encourage you to pick up a copy of one of her books.
Thanks again for sharing your work with me. I invite you to join us at my twice-monthly Poetry Night on Zoom. If you look over our webpage at Poetry In Davis, you will see that we have been featuring a great diversity of poets in the last year (and for years). Our next event is next Thursday, April 1st at 8 PM.”
The Mukome family has done so much for all of us in Davis. I hope you will join me in supporting these folks in their hour of need. I just donated to the GoFundMe effort from my phone, and I hope every author, architect, business owner and newsletter reader out there will help out, as well. Let’s see how generous we can be, for as the poet Khalil Gibran says, “Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need.”
Thanks to the patrons of the Pub Quiz who support this effort so generously. Teams such as The Outside Agitators, Quizimodo, The Original Vincibles, and Bono’s Pro Bono Oboe Bonobos make extra investments in this enterprise, and are rewarded weekly with audio and video versions of the Quiz. If you are a regular reader who is considering starting or upgrading a Patreon membership to support these newsletters and the quizzes that they presage, please let me know. I will send you the video quiz so you can get a sense of the bonus fun.
“We are never, ever going home,” sings Rani on this Post Malone song. Actually, the sun is kissing the western hills, and we just passed Tracy. We will be home before 9PM, thanks to helmswoman Kate, and thanks to the music that has fueled our road trip.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on issues raised above, as well as on the following: duplicity, Washington DC, stolen balls, divinations, world capitals, famous songs, botanical berries, Nirvana covers, Pearl Harbor, Catholic families, the new book by Julia Levine, jazz musicians, changes, Webby Awards, tourist destinations, famous thunder storms, bodyguards, animals, things to do on a ship, hipness, the most famous practitioner of a sport, Rolling Stone magazine, hello to tranquility, civil liberty concerns, derivations of five, current events, and Shakespeare. I wrote most of tonight’s Pub Quiz without internet access, so I have some serious fact-checking to do before this one is ready to be published. Luckily, as Kate did all the driving, I got a head start.
Best,
Dr. Andy
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P.S. Here are three questions from last week’s Pub Quiz (and different ones from those you can find in the Davis Enterprise every Sunday).
- Science. What food has only 75 calories but 7 grams of high-quality protein, 5 grams of fat, and 1.6 grams of saturated fat? An egg
- Books and Authors. In what decade did Fyodor Dostoevsky die? Was it the 1880s, the 1910s, or the 1940s? Answer: He died in 1881 at the age of 59
- Current Events – Names in the News. Today, the House Oversight Committee is holding a hearing entitled H.R. 51: Making BLANK the 51st State. Fill in the blank. D.C.
P.P.S. Thursday night, April 1st, is the first day of National Poetry Month. It’s also the night (at 8 PM via Zoom) that Davisite Julia Levine will be reading from her new book, Ordinary Psalms. Julia is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, winner of the Northern California Book Award for Poetry. She is also a recipient of the Discovery/The Nation Award and the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry from Nimrod. Her work has been widely published in journals such as Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner,and the Southern Review. Julia will be reading with Joseph Millar, whose poems have won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, as well as the Pushcart Prize. Please plan to join us via Zoom!
P.P.S. It was David Bailey who said that “Anybody can be a great photographer if they zoom in enough on what they love.”