Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
According to the title of my favorite car, Kate and I bought a forest-green four-door Saturn SL2 20 years ago next month, a mere four years after we got married. I know this because last week I gave the car to a friend and former student, and now I am feeling nostalgic, especially for the front passenger seat.
Six of my favorite writers have spent time in that seat, and three of those writers I will never see again.
- My wife Kate is my favorite of all authors, and one whom I see every day. Just this morning she published her most recent blog entry on how much the family will miss my daughter Geneva, now that we are driving her off to college in Wisconsin. As you can read in “The Dividing of Our Grief,” Geneva’s brother Truman will miss her most of all. Speaking of our kids, Kate also co-authored the book Where’s Jukie?, now in an expanded edition.
- Joe Mills is a poet and essayist who spent significant time in the Saturn when we first bought it. A constant chess buddy, hiking buddy, and occasional wine-drinking buddy, Joe moved with his wife Danielle to North Carolina to become a professor and dean at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Joe holds the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities, and has published six collections of poetry with Press 53.
- Another Joe, Joe Wenderoth, prefers not to ride a bike around Davis. In fact, Joe chooses to disregard any number of social conventions. Just as Donald Trump prefers unpredictability when it comes to his foreign policy, Wenderoth prefers a different sort of shock and awe at cocktail parties. Perhaps these are some of the qualities that make him one of my favorite California poets.
- Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott once rode in my Saturn. He seemed neither impressed with me nor my car when he was visiting campus about 14 years ago, but the world has been impressed with him. An author of more than 60 books, Sir Derek, KCSL OBE OCC, has had even more books written about him.
- The late New Jersey poet laureate and Beat Generation icon Amiri Baraka did most of the talking during our ride from SFO to Davis when he visited California 11 years ago. His generosity of spirit filled the car with energy and expectation. When the Saturn was stolen a couple years later, the thieves took a number of “valuables,” but left behind an autographed copy of Baraka’s book Transbluency: Selected Poems, which I have next to me as I write.
- The final writer is my dad, Davey Marlin-Jones, who for the last 14 years has been the most missed writer of them all, at least to me. In addition to his early books and plays, my dad wrote and performed thousands of televised movie reviews in the 1970s and 80s. That car seat was the last piece of furniture we owned where he sat and talked with me about his reminiscences and plans, as he was always so full of love and ideas. I thought of him when the car pulled out of our driveway for the first time, empty except for its new owner, and all my memories.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions about vitamin intake, love and smoke, championships, comma rules, lessons to be learned from an Olive, American heroes, people happy to be stuck on an island, historical drinks, what it means to be western, the decades of favorite epics, notable lesbians, baseball, bedding and such, words that start with V, ancient Greeks, the advantages of iron, prime numbers (an actual math question), recognizable widths, cars that are more expensive than my departed Saturn, poets that are worth rereading out loud, the relative price of happiness, returning investigators, the U.S. Constitution which I keep in my breast pocket, quiet protests, Elwood’s inspiration, bonds, the letter X, the TV show Empire, choosing your own adventure, petunias, scientific discoveries, the needs of veterans, Harry Potter, sustainability, and Shakespeare.
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Here are three questions from last year’s (2015) quiz:
- Four for Four. Which of the following, if any, are names of actual fish? Common fangtooth, Jamaican goathead, obese dragonfish, Splashing tetra.
- American Cities. There are two words and six letters in the name of the American city that lost the most people between July 2013 to July 2014, at 1.02%. Name this 19th-largest city in the U.S.
- Food and Drink. What M word fills in the blank from this sentence? “The key to the formation of a good BLANK is the formation of stiff peaks by denaturing the protein ovalbumin (a protein in the egg whites) via mechanical shear.”
P.S. Poetry Night Thursday features Chris Erickson at the John Natsoulas Gallery.