Peter Schjeldahl
Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Thanks to everyone who came to my birthday party after the Pub Quiz last Monday. I collected a significant number of thoughtful birthday cards, including several from players that I get to see most Monday nights. I also enjoyed catching up with a bevy of friends from many different parts of my California life, including friends representing (directly or indirectly) five different continents. The 9 o’clock start time was too late for most of my academic colleagues, but totally appropriate for people I know in the poetry community. We closed the Pub down!
Speaking of poetry, I got to have lunch on my actual birthday with New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, author of many books of poetry and criticism. When I shared an anecdote about a piano player with a long memory, he said, “That’s brilliant,” so of course I asked if I could quote him on the cover of my next book. And then we all laughed the knowing laugh of people who have been friends of W.H. Auden and the Beastie Boys, and who live on St. Marks Place in the East Village. Or at least one of us did. And then we enjoyed some pie.
Schjeldahl said that he was supporting Hillary Clinton because, unlike young Bernie Sanders supporters, Peter doesn’t anticipate surviving the fallout of the Sanders revolution, should the Vermont senator become president. Schjeldahl said that he appreciates the stability and competence that he anticipates from a Hillary Clinton presidency. Others might feel that stability is overrated during desperate times. Another high-level administrator at UC Davis told me that while her husband is “feeling the Bern,” she herself is “feeling the c(H)ill,” a phrase I hadn’t yet heard. Not so many people I encounter are “feeling the Trump.” I suspect that Trump will not carry California, should he be given that opportunity. But nobody knows for sure. Schwarzenegger did well here.
I wonder if intellectuals and poets such as Peter Schjeldahl consider the literary acumen of the different candidates for president. In college, Barack Obama was thoroughly knowledgeable on the poetry and philosophies of T.S. Eliot, or so we learned from a recent article in the New York Review of Books. And we know that Bill Clinton was a fan of Walt Whitman, giving a copy of Leaves of Grass to a “friend.” But what of today’s candidates – have any of them made room for poetry in their lives? We know that Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem for Bernie Sanders in 1986 when Sanders was Mayor of Burlington:
Socialist snow on the streets
Socialist talk in the Maverick bookstore
Socialist kids sucking socialist lollipops
Socialist poetry in socialist mouths
—aren’t the birds frozen socialists?
Aren’t the snowclouds blocking the airfield
Social Democratic Appeasement?
Isn’t the socialist sky owned by
the socialist sun?
Earth itself socialist, forests, rivers, lakes
furry mountains, socialist salt
in oceans?
Isn’t this poem socialist? It doesn’t
belong to me anymore.
Hillary Clinton recently quoted Mario Cuomo: “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” From a strictly literary point of view, I would say that Donald Trump campaigns in neither poetry nor prose. He campaigns in crayon.
Speaking of poetry, my new book of poetry is now out (though the formal launch will take place in April, National Poetry Month). If you would like me to sign you a copy of In the Almond Orchard: Coming Home from War, I will have some on hand this evening before and after the Pub Quiz. The books are a mere $10, and the funds support the Charles Ternes Creativity Prize for veteran students at UC Davis. This prize is another way we can thank veterans for their service.
In addition to one or more topics raised above, tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on the following: felines, collaboration tools, newspaper headlines, Japanese trains, famous daughters, hermits with odd servants nursing grudges, sports of choice, the Ten Commandments, Shelley, views from mountains, astrology, romantic comedies, significant Sacramento commutes, chiefs of staff, cities of more than one million people in countries neither of us has visited, the brain, screenplays, the OED, military terms, pastry, ancient Greeks, Gages, mathematical sets, adorable puns, counting digits, getting to work, duets, Romantic Thunderdomes, under my foreign thumb, somewhat great Americans who spend most (but not all) of their time outside of prison, fish, Stonehenge, polygons, and Shakespeare.
I hope to see you tonight. There may be an extra table available, so you should convince an extra team to join us. In addition to buying my book, if they are there tonight, you should also congratulate The Outside Agitators. That team came in first at Saturday night’s Rotary Trivia Challenge, winning $2,000 for Communicare Health Centers. What a terrific event, and a noble cause!
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Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
- Mottos and Slogans. Starting with the letter I, what calls itself “The Last Great Race on Earth”?
- Animated Film. Flynn Rider is an antagonist and then love interest in what Disney film?
- Pop Culture – Music. Born in 1962, Anthony Kiedis is the lead singer of what American rock band that has sold more than 80 million albums?
P.S. March 17th is Poetry Night. Come by the Natsoulas Gallery at 8 before heading to the Irish Pub thereafter (or before and after). Ta.