The OLM Quiz: We Celebrate Ourselves
| March is insistent in its fecundities. Winter’s grasp is loosened, though not relinquished, the idea of spring becomes tenable again, and the citizens of South Boston engage in the destructive – but ultimately regenerative – gotterdamerung of drinking, smoking, and face-breaking that is the South Boston Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. Likewise in literature: many great and notable names first saw the world when it was draped in wan March sunlight. Robert Lowell, Tennessee Williams, W.H. Auden, Jack Kerouac, Tom Wolfe, Flannery O’Connor, Vita Sackville-West, Ring Lardner – all are March-born. |  |
So too is Open Letters Monthly, the very online venue you’re currently examining (and, one hopes, enjoying), which began its squalling, disputatious life last March, when Sam Sacks, John Cotter, and Steve Donoghue decided that since they were forever reading books and talking about them with each other, they might as well do so officially. It would be no overstatement to say the success of the venture surprised all three: in the brief year of its existence, Open Letters has fielded some of the sharpest, smartest, most heartfelt, and funniest literary and arts criticism to be found anywhere, online or in print. In honor of that achievement, the Open Letters Quiz for March takes as its theme … Open Letters itself. Cast your mind back over the last twelve fun months, and try to identify the following quotes (and, naturally, email your obsequious answers to quiz [at] openlettersmonthly [dot] com):
1. Taboos are meat and drink for young writers because they are irrational (inasmuch as people accept them without thinking or reasoning) and therefore represent the weakest points in the foundation of an old order. Violating them has always been the surest way to get your face on TV.
2. When I first came across the photos of Afghani beggar women entirely hidden from view in their soiled burqas, I felt the kind of anger that pricks righteous tears.
3. The army’s benevolent insularity is not without consequences; by operating as a secretive club, the military makes it easier for civilian politicians and journalists to mythologize soldiers. It’s a familiar complaint among those opposed to the Iraq war that the rhetoric of military heroism shuts down reasoned debate
4. The process His Holiness describes might not be linear, but it does indeed have one indisputable direction: right over the Jews, since one of the central pillars of the Jewish faith is that the Messiah hasn’t come yet—in other words (although the Jews themselves have usually been too courteous to put it this way), that Jesus Wasn’t It.
5. A phenomenon people who read are familiar with: book in hand, hours pass unnoticed. A book has so engaged the mind that the hard desk chair, the unheated library, the downstairs neighbor’s murderous lovers’ spat go unnoticed. To emerge from such a state is like waking from an afternoon nap: sleep snatched during normal business hours, dreams lucid.
6. The pacifying effect of even a relatively stable democracy on internal conflict is evident here in the United States, where fundamentalists with ideas nearly as radical as the terrorists we face are content to broadcast their views on television or the radio
7. Gypsies, dancing bears, sea-dogs and mountebanks lose no time in making their appearance, and when they appear the reader’s hopes that this might be a sober, scholarly work begin to vanish. Not much in the ensuing hundreds of pages will invite those hopes back. This is mostly the cuss-and-codpiece kind of historical biography that yearns not to be the best but to be a bestseller.
8. This anthology’s stories, essays, and interviews trace the development of a people’s consciousness through literature; they respond to the demoralizing effects of colonization, the struggle for independence, and inevitable new-nation jitters and false steps. What results is a literature of witness to events that never happened, a witness so detailed, so painstakingly drawn, in a language so unlike anyone else’s, that you believe the events themselves and the place are real. How can they not be real when these stories are so fully realized?
9. Big books have always occupied a special place in my imagination: lacking any sense of proportion, they simply feel ponderous, like inexhaustible, thick slags of raw culture that I can wallow in for hours on end. One day, I believe, when I’m very old and all tired out by life I’ll find myself somewhere with a stack of the thickest books I can think of, and I will love it.
10. The two alternating chapter themes create a negative space: veganism is a ridiculous, doomed enterprise; the swordfish special is all diamond-in-the-rough, workaday beauty. One person changes the world by being determined not to be responsible for the death of animals, however misguided; another person changes the world with a paring knife and some garde manger 101 lessons, however thoughtless.
11. As a result, the plays themselves were almost certainly in a state of constant flux - being cut for certain venues, being expanded for other venues, etc. Capturing some of these changes into a more or less permanent form would have been the task of the author’s ‘foul papers,’ or the theater’s prompt book, or the theater’s fair copy. All these things ‘were’ the play, and none of them was. It’s an Aristotelian nightmare.
12. We’re all too used to finding in the august pages of The New York Times the tepid ambivalence of a reviewer trying fastidiously to make nice in case he should come across the novelist at a party. It’s likely that Paul Auster and Granta are no longer on speaking terms and perhaps someone’s feelings may be hurt at a coming Park Slope sip-and-quip, but gentle reader, what is that to us? We need the severity of high standards and the aplomb of honesty
The mushy, cloying, hand-holdy February quiz yielded a full inbox of Valentines, and the respondent of our dreams was James Fielder out of Houston, Texas, with six correct answers. James, we’re totally crushing, and will send you a great CD, “My Funny Valentine: The Rodgers and Hart Songbook.” The answers follow. Swoon!
1. What great Boston rock band penned the immortal song “Love Stinks”?
—The J. Geils Band
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.
—Captain James Tiberius Kirk
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?
—Sir Philip Sidney
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?
—Maurice Minnifield, who has lost Shelly Tambo, the girl of his dreams, to Holling
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?
—Donald O’Connor is the singer and the sage advice is “You’re not sick, you’re just in love.”
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.
—Lord Alfred Tennyson
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.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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.
—Elizabeth, Lady Canfield
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.
—Ovid
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.
—George Herbert
Print This Article
