The OLM Quiz:
Valentines Day!
It’s become direly apparent that some kind of conscious effort must be made to halt the downward spiral of the Open Letters Quiz. Rancor and animadversion in December gave way to insult and invective in January, and if steps aren’t taken now by all parties concerned, a once-mature quiz will sink to the level of guttural shrieking and hurled excrement more properly reserved for national political campaigns. Fortunately, the brief month of February offers a way to end the cycle of violence that has engulfed this feature, and that way has a name, and that name, alarmingly enough, is love.
| Just as it subsumed and subverted the Roman feasts of Saturnalia and the Lupercal, so too the Roman Catholic Church has twisted the date of an incendiary religious massacre into an occasion for packaging our most important emotion into sugared greeting cards and unbearably cutesy postings on the Internet. This is indeed a tawdry sort of salvation, but the Open Letters Quiz accepts it nonetheless, for the sake of the children. So here, hands clasped and smiles affixed, we all embark on a healing quiz. And as always, email answers to quiz@openlettersmonthly.com. |  |
1. What great Boston rock band penned the immortal song “Love Stinks”?
But no! We won’t be dragged back down that road! Ignore that opening question and forge ahead!
2. What great fictional hero gave this little peroration (extra points for naming the occasion):
Love – you’re better off without it, and I’m better off without mine. This ship – I give, she takes; she won’t permit me my life, I’ve got to live hers.
OK, come to think of it, that wasn’t much better. The theme is there, but not the healing so desperately needed. Let’s try this:
3. What devastated widower has this to – Hell and damnation! Clearly, malevolent momentum will be difficult to master. How about a neutrally-factual palate-cleanser? What famous English poet was actually present at the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre?
4. In the great American television series “Northern Exposure,” one of the main characters opines, “Gravity – it’s what keeps you rooted to the ground. In space, there’s not any gravity – you just kind of leave your feet and go floating around. Is that what it’s like, Holling? Being in love?” Who does this opining, and what’s the melancholy occasion?
5. Impossible not to notice that a melancholy occasion crept into that last question, and while that’s better than vitriol and vituperation, it’s not much better. Giddiness is needed, a sense of the transport love can induce. Here’s just the thing: in the great American musical ‘Call Me Madam,’ one character describes the happy, sorry state he’s in:
I hear talking but there’s no one there;
Songbirds singing, but the trees are bare.
All day long I seem to walk on air.
I wonder why – I wonder why!
I’ve been tossing in my sleep at night.
And what’s more, I’ve lost my appetite.
Stars that used to twinkle in the skies
Are twinkling in my eyes.
I wonder why!
Who’s the heartfelt singer? And for extra credit, what sage advice does his listener give him?
6. Which great English poet struck this gorgeously elegiac tone about the core emotion we’re dealing with:
God gives us love. Something to love
He lends us; but, when love is grown
To ripeness, that on which it throve
Falls off, and love is left alone.
7. Despite what you most certainly think, this writer is the one who wrote ‘How do I love thee, let me count the ways,’ not the one you think.
8. What relative unknown had this to say about our overriding emotion:
Love made me a poet,
And this I writ;
My heart did do it,
And not my wit.
9. Of course, in any quiz about love, somebody’s going to be carping about the mercantile nature of the whole enterprise. And it turns out this mentality was alive and well even two thousand years ago. Which poet at that time penned these disconcertingly evaluative words:
Believe me, my friend: every lover’s on active duty
And Cupid commands the field of engagement.
Fighting and loving belong to the same demographic.
In bed as on the battlefield, old men can’t do.
A commander looks to his troops for true performance;
A mistress can expect no less.
10. But we should end this healing quiz with a redemptive quote, a tirelessly intellectual excavation of something not at all intellectual – here conducted by just exactly the English poet you’d expect to so dramatically misread things and yet transmute them into beauty. Name the author:
I know the wayes of Pleasure, the sweet strains,
The lullings and the relishes of it;
The propositions of hot bloude and brains;
What mirth and musick mean; what love and wit
Have done these twentie hundred years, and more:
I know the projects of unbridled store;
My stuff is fleshe, not brasse; my senses live,
And grumble oft, that they may have more in me
Than he that curbs them, being but one to five:
Yet I love thee.
But it was nasty business coping with January’s acidic answers, and it’s cold comfort to award the wilted palm to Sarah Allingham of Hanover, New Hampshire. Sarah receives a copy of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, by the artist and social scallywag James M. Whistler. May it serve you well, Sarah! Here are the answers:
1. In the great American film Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, which character utters the immortal line “Pardon my French but you’re an asshole,” and what is the ruse?
-It was Cameron, pretending to be George Peterson.
2. In Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children, idiotic aristocrat Dolly Longstaff refers to the beautiful American Isabel Boncasson as a “pert poppet.” Who does he (yes, he – it’s short for ‘Adolphus’) say this to, and why is it a really bad idea to do so?
-He says it to Lord Silverbridge, who, unbeknownst to Dolly Longstaff, is passionately in love with the woman.
3. In the superb mini-series “Masada,” obsequious, treacherous Pomponius Falco (played with inimitable oil by David Warner) tells someone this: “You’re a bore, a boor, an ignoramus, and an overrated officer.” Who (character or actor will be sufficient) is on the receiving end of this snittery?
-Seige engineer Rubrius Gallus, played by Anthony Quayle
4. It’s an odd thing: for a poem as savage as the Iliad, it’s got comparatively little spittle and invective in it. One famous exception happens in Book One, here presented in the greatest English translation of them all. Name the speaker and the spoken-to – and of course name the translator.
… thou ever steep’t in wine,
Dog’s face, with heart but of a hart, that nor in th’ open eye
Of fight dar’st thrust into a prease, nor with our noblest lie
In secret ambush.
-Achilles is of course the speaker, yelling at Agamemnon, all translated by George Chapman
5. James Goldman’s hilariously dysfunctional play “The Lion in Winter” fairly bristles with finely-wrought name-calling. One can scarcely follow the abuse without a scorecard. See if you can keep up:
Who’s referred to as “that epic idiot, that monument to mock”?
-Henry II’s oldest son, young Henry
Who’s called “a device, he’s wheels and gears”?
-Henry II’s third son Geoffrey
Who’s being mocked here: “You’re a dull boy, dull as plainsong, la la la forever on one note. I gave the Church up out of boredom, I can do as much for you.”
-Henry II’s second son Richard
Which single character is variously referred to as all of the following: ‘Medusa,’ ‘dragon,’ ‘gorgon,’ ‘Medea to the teeth,’ ‘bag of bile,’ ‘tragedy,’ and ‘great bitch’?
-Eleanor of Acquitaine
Who’s called a “walking pustule”?
-Henry II’s youngest son John
Who’s referred to as an “unnatural animal”?
-Richard again
6. In Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, who’s called, among other things, a “butcher’s cur”?
-Cardinal Wolsey
7. In Emlyn Williams’ heartfelt play “The Corn is Green,” the ordinarily even-tempered L.C. Moffat is moved to call which character an “addlepated nincompoop”?
-The village Squire
8. The great American film critic Pauline Kael had this withering little assessment to make of which actor: “Physically he’s large, but his personality is small, pink, and shiny” (hint: he’d very likely have been stirred, not shaken, by the verdict)?
-Roger Moore
9. In the winsome twilight-Western Rooster Cogburn, prim and prissy schoolmarm Miss Goodnight is berating who – oops, whom – with this little tirade: “You’re in a sorry state. You’re unsteady on your feet, untidy in your person, rank with the smell of sweat and spirits”?
-Rooster Cogburn himself
10. Which writer did book critic Dale Peck famously – or infamously – refer to as “the worst writer of his generation”?
-Rick Moody
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