The readies, by bob brown  (Page 23/22)

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THE READIES

BOB BROWN

ROVING EYE PRESS

BAD EMS

1930

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DEDICATED TO ALL EYE-WRITERS AND ALL READERS WHO WANT AN EYEFUL

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CONTENTS

Chapter I An Eyeful

Chapter II A Two-Way Fish

Chapter III My Reading Machine

Chapter IV Eye-Lingo

Chapter V A Story to be Read on the Reading Machine

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Chapter i: an eyeful

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The written word hasn’t kept up with the age. The movies have outmanoeuvered it. We have the talkies, but as yet no Readies.

I’m for new methods of reading and writing and I believe the up-to-date reader deserves an eye-ful when he buys something to read. I think the optical end of the written word has been hidden over a bushel too long. I’m out for a bloody revolution of the word.

I don’t mean maybe breakemup words I mean smashum (from the ancient Chinese ginseng root s a m s h u).

I Proustly rejoice in Jamesre.

I regurgitate with Gert.

I prefer E. E. Cummings word crumplets to R. L Stevenson’s crummy crawly Cummy scrawls. I say O.K. to Boyle. I like to read Hemingway, Carlos Williams, Sydney Hunt, Harry Crosby, K.T. Young, Links Gillespie, C.H. Ford, Herman Spector, Richard Johns, Norman MacLoed, Augustus Tiberius etc. I do not hiss in pronouncing Tzara’s name. t r a n s i t i o n is my transit. I bathe in Apollinaire.

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I’ll be end man in any Rabelasian rhetorical rabble.

As a youth I peeped through a knot hole at Stephen Crane’s ,,“Black Riders”, sniffed their jazzy inky blood as they read-raced by my bloodshot eye. I slaked word-thirstily in Blake. Grew rambunctious with Rimbaud. I Whitmanized.

From long gazing on the restful blank page for Poor Yorick in Tristram Shandy I began to get the idea. I learned to write m a r g i n a l i a without any text; I found myself flapping along quite happily without any words at all.

A dot and an angosturian dash with an hermaphroditic hypodermic hyphen is all that’s needed nowadays, with maybe a word here and a blind spot there to help the heavy-heads out of their frowsy mental beds. Here’s a poem, believe it not:

—

• 00

(Explain yourself)

• (Title)

(Bullet) — (Hyphen) 0 (Head)

(00 (Heads)

Bullet-Heads

—

• 00

Sure, break up the word and then throw all the broken bits away into a handy kaleidoscope. But keep a piece of each shattered statue, an arm of each Venus as a quarry specimen; preserve a hair of the dog you bit for publicity’s shrinking sake;

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dry a lee (now used only in the pl.), press it between the pages of a bibulous Bible, to serve as a shriveled club-footed langwich for future archeologists to munch upon in the finale of the Last Days of American Pumpeana.

Demosthenes was a long time training before he knew enough not to swallow the pebbles. It took thirty years for Whistler to learn to throw a pot of paint at a canvas. It took Joyce about the same to touch off a word into a sky-writing rocket. He is said to have Shakespeared his time, maybe he’s only skied it. It will take me all my little life to create a creation and my creation will be one word, many words, or simply more meaning and color of life, broadcasting with no words at all, and certainly reading done by machine in time with the age.