half-deserted streets; muttering retreats

 

a painting of the poet T.S. Eliot

I have this book titled, The Art Of X-Ray Reading, by Roy Peter Clark.  

I start reading it, and he starts talking about T.S. Eliot's poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and I remember reading (and discussing, and analyzing) that poem in freshman year English literature class at Boston University.  15 students, approx., we sat around a table, and the professor sat with us, or walked around, talking and calling on people and writing stuff on a blackboard.

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        [beginning of the poem]

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

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.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo. ...

        [it continues]

______________________________

        Clark begins, in his Introduction:

Where do writers learn their best moves?  They learn them from a technique I call X-ray reading.  They read for information or vicarious experience or pleasure, as we all do.  But in their reading, they see something more.  It's as if they had a third eye or a pair of X-ray glasses....

        This special vision allows them to see beneath the surface of the text.  There they observe the machinery of making meaning, invisible to the rest of us.  Through a form of reverse engineering, a good phrase used by scholar Steven Pinker, they see the moving parts, the strategies that create the effects we experience from the page--effects such as clarity, suspense, humor, epiphany, and pain.  

These working parts are then stored in the writer's toolshed in boxes with names such as grammar, syntax, punctuation, spelling, semantics, etymology, poetics, and that big box--rhetoric.

        Let's get to work.

        Please put on your new X-ray reading glasses so we can examine the titles of a couple of famous literary works.  The first is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), by T.S. Eliot.  (The poet died in 1965, my senior year in high school, when I became the keyboard player in a rock band called T.S. and the Eliots.)

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