Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Sometimes I don my Ph.D. in poetry hat, grab an anthology, and stand ready to profess about topics cultural and poetical. That said, on the weekend I’m not typically spending social time with people who are demanding my literary insights and interpretations. So I will try a few out on you.
In honor of the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, one of the subjects of my doctoral dissertation, I’ve been rereading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the best of Eliot’s early poems, and reliving its sublimity and explorations of anxiety.
To look at this favorite work after all these years, I had to engage in what the Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky called “Defamiliarization,” an attempt to see something one knows well outside the familiar context, which for me includes teaching the poem in a dozen or more classes over the last 32 years. Like many teenagers, I was introduced to Eliot’s first major poem in high school, and I remember sympathizing with the title character immediately. Few other writers I had encountered could so fittingly represent the awkwardness and discomfort teenagers such as myself felt when interacting with opposite sex peers.
For example, when J. Alfred Prufrock imagines a young woman surveying him and saying “That is not it at all,” he echoes the fears of rejection and general apprehensions of many adolescents, this despite the seemingly sophisticated veil of urbanity that the speaker of this poem employs to protect himself from what Prufrock interprets as the poem’s frightening aggressors, women who use social customs to manipulate others. Prufrock seemed urbane for me when I first read his work, though I doubt I even knew what “urbane” meant back then. I just knew that I enjoyed the music of his poetry:
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
While the poetry itself is magical to me, rereading Prufrock’s thoughts in the context of one’s original discovery of the poem is much like reading the diary from years one would sooner forget. Speaking from a place of barely-concealed insecurity, Prufrock speaks to a common need to mistrust the already provided answers and expectations–about religion, about human relations, about the universe–while being forced to cope with more immediate and less grand crises, social gatherings, meaningless chitchat, and tea-time menu choices.
Many of Prufrock’s social anxieties, when looked at individually, seem typical of a man who is rooted in the customs of interacting with and thinking about women that we associate with the Victorian age. Yet, when looked at as a whole, the patterns of anxiety in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” do not merely reveal the study of a historically dated persona; rather they portray a man who, as I was when I studied this poem as a high school student, seems flustered and confounded by the women about him. Prufrock’s frustration and confusion regarding the poem’s women is so complete that I believed his anxiety transcends merely Victorian-era shyness.
My youthful reflections on unstable poetic narrators such as Prufrock not only informed my eventual dissertation, but they also helped me make sense of my own literary, creative, and even social obstacles and goals. Rereading the poem today is like opening an emotional time capsule, a historic cache of goods that reflects my own early attempts at intellectual interpretation and artistic awakening.
I’m curious to know what works of literature, music, or art spark similar aesthetic nostalgia for you.
Thanks to everyone who subscribes to the Pub Quiz. I hope you get to see it this week – it’s challenging in a crafty way. Expect questions on topics raised above, and on the following: places to get equipment, Davis schools, elephants outside the room, flip-flops, challenging approaches to hockey, an uncle’s court, Asian countries, people named Max, animated TV shows for children, sunlight, fast-growing economies, inside and outside of walls, film projectors, magic words, days of the week, Christian traditions, woeful names, penitent jellies, music festivals, sandwiches, straps, modesty, bowling, 19th-century creations, leaves, warships, shoes, Greek and Roman gods, mottos and slogans, news of the world, and Shakespeare.
Thanks to all the supporters on Patreon who make all this happen, especially the Outside Agitators, the Original Vincibles, and Quizimodo. I’m always grateful to players who pledge for their entire team. Please subscribe so you can share the fun of the Pub Quiz with your friends and competitors!
I’m hosting three Thursday-night poetry readings this month. I invite you to join us for one or more of them. Find details at PoetryinDavis.com.
Best,
Dr. Andy
P.S. Here are three questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:
- Know Your American Rivers. Starting with the letter S, and at 444 miles long, what is the longest river on the East Coast of the United States?
- Etymological Confluences. What language was named after a beverage that was named after an island?
- Science. Lipase and amylase are both examples of what E word?
P.S. I received the sweetest note from a new reader named Judy in response to last week’s Star Wars-focused newsletter, a version of which also appeared this weekend in The Davis Enterprise:
Andy,
Your article in the Davis Enterprise brought back some fond memories. When Star Wars came out, we were visiting my sister-in-law took us to the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to see it because she knew we were all sci-fi nerds. What we saw was a line from the box office to around the corner. We went home and saw it in our hometown theater in Michigan. When the giant spaceship rumbled across the screen, I fell in love with the movie. So did my husband, my daughter age 9, and son age 7.
The kids’ favorite story involves the second movie. When the Empire Strikes Back came to town in 1980, the first showing was at 3 p.m. on Friday. The only problem was the kids didn’t get out of school until 3:30. So I wrote a note that said I would be picking up both my kids at 2:30 because they had appointments. We were some of the first people in line and enjoyed watching the show while munching on popcorn and candy bars. It was a worthwhile “appointment.”
May the Force be with you,
Judy