The readies, by bob brown  (Page 17/22)

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we got in this machine age, only Bruce Rogers and more glittering comely type to make into beautifully commonplace words which can’t tell us much more than the labored chisellings of the stone age, beautiful but dumb books as clumsy in their way as the Rozetti Stone.

Let’s let writing out of books, give it a chance and see what it does with its liberty. Maybe beside moths there are butterflies in the core of those cloth-cased cocoons stacked away in libraries. Let them out and have a look. With reading-words freely conveyed maybe books will become as rare as horses after the advent of the auto, perhaps they will be maintained only for personal pleasure or traditional show, as the gorgeously-trapped brewery steeds of Munich. Books may go out of style as pansy parlor paintings did after the camera came along.

Let’s look for literary renaissance through the Readie: a modern, moving, word spectacle. Let’s have a new reading medium in time with our day, so that industrious delvers in the Word-Pile may be rapidly read and quickly understood by their own generation at least.

The Readies are no more unusual than the Talkies, and not a scratch on television. As soon as my reading machine becomes a daily necessity certainly it will be out of date. Pocket reading machines will be the vogue then, reading matter will be radioed as it is today to newsies on shipboard and words perhaps eventually will be recorded directly on the palpitating ether. But the endless imaginative possibilities of the new med-

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ium need not lead us astray. The low-brows are presently revelling in their Movies and Talkies while almost extinct high-brow is content to sit at home sipping his thin alphabet soup out of archaic volumes of columns, mewling a little like a puling baby taking mush from the tip of an awkward wooden spoon too gross for his musical rose-buddy temperamental mouth.

Those Obfuscates who can’t make out the Readies on the dim literary horizon of the day will be the first to accept them as a commonplace tomorrow and they will be the loudest in grumbling if anything happens to the readie mechanism to interrupt the eager optical word flow for as much as a b i l l i m e t e r - a u g e n b l i c k.

Chapter v: a story to be read on the reading machine

Harry-virtuoso-born-musical-mid-Midwest-mellow-

mooing-farm-milky-mooey-farm-;-lullaby-mother-,-

chirping-jigging-Irish-father-.-Spring-red-bursting--

throated-robbins-croaking-frogs-honking-ducks-.--

Music-singing-rails-one-Milwauke-trip-sounds----

Harry-smiling-angel-faced-sound-sensitive-.-----

His-first-violin-lesson-placid-German-local-talent-teacher-Ach-Harry-dont-jiggle-so!-Play-so!-Harry-

fiddling-idolatrous-Mooey-Ma-dishwashing-----scrubbing-floors-.-Harry-fiddling-down-all-harsh--

uncouth-sounds-brothers-made-banging-sordid---

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shiny-milk-pails------Harry’s-curls-his-individual

egg-shell-mother-bought-coffee-cup-different-from-