Day 151: Scrubs and T.S. Eliot

For those of you who don’t remember your high school English class, you probably read a poem by T.S. Eliot called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915).  You probably found it odd, and not at all like the Taylor Swift love songs my students are used to.  T.S. Eliot was a Harvard graduate (I lived across the hall from his room!) who moved to England shortly after graduation and never left.  His poetry often revolved around the world’s reaction to WWI for its thematic structure.  I had my students read Prufrock to expose them to stream of consciousness in poetry.  

Stream of consciousness is when an author writes as he thinks; people who “ramble” talk in stream of consciousness.  Sometimes the writing sound like a diary entry. The poems narrator, J. Alfred Prufrock, is a man in late middle age, reflecting on his life and his lack of decisive action. He worries about balding, about the futility of his decisions, and about seeing happiness but never experiencing it for himself. It’s really rather depressing, as it was written in response to the despair of WWI: the first major war of mustard gas, machine guns, airplanes, and ending with the Treaty of Versailles, which caused more problems than it solved.  

Since I am not a very good English teacher, I really wasn’t sure how to teach Prufrock, and due to my lack of planning didn’t give myself enough time to find out, so after reading we fixated on a few lines, including:

Dante’s Inferno

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,

Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.

Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo

Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,

Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

This introduction to the poem is from Dante’s Inferno; we briefly discussed the book with reference to the versions of the video games (They wanted to know if Beatrice was really as naked in the book as in the game).  They wanted to translate the stanza; I mentioned that it might be “old” Italian, like Beowulf was written in Old English, since it was written in the 14th century.  They didn’t know what I meant, so then I passed around Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf so they could see what Old English looks like and how it is totally unrecognizable as modern-day English.  It turns out Eliot’s excerpt is not “Old Italian” and one student did look it up, but it was a nice bit of trivia for them, and they asked if Prufrock the narrator thought his life was a circle of hell.

Yellow Fog

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

We briefly discussed the figurative language of the writer comparing the fog of the evening light to a cat. After discussing the impact of WWI on western societies and the advent of new war technologies, one student raised his hand and asked, “Mrs. H, do you think the ‘yellow fog’ might be referring to mustard gas?  Like, how it goes where it wants and no one can stop it, like a cat?”  

Well no, I don’t think the yellow fog referred to mustard gas, but this young man got serious snaps for the day - making text-to-world connections, thinking complexly and critically, and I was so proud.

“I measured my life in coffee spoons”

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

              So how should I presume?

I related this idea to a New York Times op-ed my roommate emailed me a few weeks ago about a man reminiscing about middle age and coming to the realization that his box of staples in his desk will outlive him; he will die before using all his office supplies.  My students and I discussed how people often measure their lives - by children (“Was that before or after Kate was born?”), by cars (“I remember, he was driving the red Pinto”), by monumental events (one student announced they had only 407 days until they graduated), or by deaths...but that measuring lives in staples or coffee spoons suggested much about the writers’ personal outlooks.

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Justifying Scrubs

We were blessed with Friday off school, and I took yesterday off to spend with my in-laws who were visiting for Easter, so I didn’t much feel like teaching on Thursday.  Instead, I decided to show an episode of Scrubs to my English 3 class.  Cop-out? You might think so. Teachers are occasionally known to have movie days that are totally irrelevant to their topic at hand with only the vaguest justification (i.e. watching Star Wars to decide if it’s part of the “Western” literary genre, or watching The Great Gatsby to learn about the Prohibition, or Finding Nemo to learn geography).  But I believe I have a fairly solid justification for my choice. We watched the eighth episode of the first season, titled, “My Fifteen Minutes,” when J.D. and Turk save a cameraman and become local heroes for a few days.

My rationale for Scrubs is as follows:

1) J.D. is a stream-of-consciousness character.  The viewer hears his thoughts as he has them, and he has fantasies that jump around just like Prufrock.

2) In the beginning of the episode, J.D. pictures himself and Turk as superheroes - but Turk is Batman and J.D. is Robin. The character comments, “How insecure am I that I am the sidekick in my own fantasy?”  Prufrock is also the “sidekick” in his own fantasy:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

3) A side plot of the episode is that the residents are getting evaluated, and Dr. Cox, J.D.’s mentor, refuses to do the evaluation, instead insisting J.D. evaluate himself. J.D. irreverently does so, and Dr. Cox puts him in his place, insisting that he stop caring so much about what other people think because the only person he ultimately needs to answer to is himself.  J. Alfred Prufrock encounters similar misgivings about how people view him, worrying about his balding head or how to roll his trousers instead of more substantial things.

4) The hospital’s lawyer character, Ted, is a sad, balding man who is pretty much Prufrock personified. If you’ve watched Scrubs and read the poem, you will know exactly what I mean.  

5) Oh, and there's a character named Eliot, and the poem was written by an Eliot. Just like Gatsby teaches the Prohibition, I guess. I called our objective, "Students will be able to make text-to-media connections between historical American poetry and modern-day televised fiction."