In "One Art" Elizabeth Bishop wrote one of my favorite poems. It is among the seminal poems of the 20th century. In it she moves deftly from humor to tenderness to sadness. If you don't know the poem already, you can read it here.
One of my favorite lines in the poem is "So many things filled with the intent/ to be lost that their loss is no disaster." Beside the fact that these lines are lovely, they also contain the seed of a premise around which the rest of the poem revolves: that losing things should not be the reason for our feelings of loss.
You may well ask why the poetry lesson? Isn't this a blog about a trivia team? Well a strange thing happens to me while I try to figure out what to write about here: I start to learn about the answers.
Facts are funny things. Dig deep enough and you'll come out in a place you'd never expect. And even though they seem to lead you to strange connections, what I've come to understand is that those connections say more about you than about the facts you're exploring.
The questions were devilish this week and we were without The Brain and another key team member. Not only were the questions difficult, but we also missed a few easy ones, one about Picasso and one about Chuck Woolery. Woolery, it turns out, was the first host of Wheel of Fortune.
I found it fascinating to learn that all of Woolery's episodes of Wheel are lost. NBC wiped their shows at that time. So perhaps it was understandable that we didn't know that question. Learning that fact, however, I began to think about lost artifacts and lost art.
Pablo Picasso is one of my favorite painters. Let me explain something about writers: we all wish we were visual artists. Listen to Frank O'Hara's "Why I Am Not a Painter" here to see what I mean. There's something about being able to utilize color and shape instead of words that really appeals to us.
Picasso is one of the most recognizable artists who has ever lived so it is perhaps not surprising that his work is stolen more often than any other. Many of these pieces resurface later after the thief sells them on the black market. Some are still at large. Rarely, however, a work of art is lost forever. When I find out about one of these, I cannot help but feel sad. A work of genius that will be forgotten to time, NBC wiping the tape.
The Internet is an amazing thing. Google "lost Picasso paintings" and you can see them all. One of the most stunning paintings and stories is that of "The Painter" lost aboard swissair flight 111 when it went down over the Atlantic in 1998.
The tragedy of that flight (almost 300 people died) is only magnified by the fact that a priceless work of art was destroyed in the crash. Perhaps it goes without saying that I value the lives more than the painting, but I'll say it just to make sure. An object is only worth something in relation to our own humanity. Elizabeth Bishop would agree.
A slow week at trivia: the most interesting decision we made was our wager for the final question. We sat in third with 54 points. Only 4 other teams made it to the end. They had 61, 60, 47 and 34 points respectively. The question was: which year was Simon and Garfunkel's Concert in the Park. We knew it was in the early 80s but not much else.
In the end we decided that the top two teams were going to have to bet the maximum. So we bet 6 points, figuring that we could protect against the team below us betting zero and still catch one or both of the top two teams if they got the question wrong.
In the end, it didn't matter. We got the question wrong (the answer was 1981), but so did everyone below us. The top two teams did bet the maximum but got the question correct. Another week, another order of nachos.
Halftime Question:
Who played the male lead opposite of Sandra Bullock in the following movies:
1. Speed
2. All About Steve
3. Speed 2
4. Forces of Nature
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