Chapter 1: An Eyeful

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 samshu).

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. transition is my transit. I bathe in Apollinaire.

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 marginalia 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; 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.

I operate on words. I gild ’em and then geld ’em (Ref. classical Quatre-arts Ball costume.) it’s my specialty. I’ve been at it twenty-five years and never lost an Upper Case. For 8,890 nights I have lugged bulky, bulgy bundles of words home to dissect by violet ray before I went to bed. I get out my micro and my scope, breathe mystically 26 Abracadabras, one for each letter in the alphabet, and go to it with nothing up my rolled sleeves.

In my laboratory I have found that long-winded maundering words like Pseudepigraphous just go Puff when pricked with a pin, and pompous, prolix, sesquipedalian, Johnsonian inflations like infundibuliform when lightly poked in the bladder instantly inspissate and whortle down the funnel. Nearly all clearly classical words fray easily, some wooly ones show undeniable traces of cotton and are a scant twenty-seven letters wide. Many make-believe altiloquential words merely shiver, shrivel up and subside when dropped into a specimen jar of alcohol, but most jolly ones expand slightly and agitate the liquor like little ivory-toothed nigger boys diving for pennies. Weevil words bore. Wassail ones make whoopee. The assembled or modernly compiled word which stood the acid test best was the familiar five-legged one OKMNX.

But even for the sake of weariness I will not recount more of my recondite research. I only wanted that you should carry away from this chatty reading tonight the picture of a serious little word-wonderer at work among his retorts and cabalistic paraphernalia (Ref. to Rodin’s The Tinker) dissecting words for you, TeeTerToTTering on Their T-bones, Playing PoPeep with sheePish PPPs, Oozing thrOugh adenOidal OOs, Zipping in Zig-Zags with the Zany Zeds.

Words and I are one. (Formula WW + I =1)

I have only to bend my finger in a beckon and words, birds of words, hop on it, chirping.

There are midwives of the word and word specialists. To perform a Caesarian, a specialist is required. To deliver a norm head-or-foot-first all that’s needed is a midwife.

Only savages and specialists bite off the umbilical cord, midwives invariably hack at it with dull rusty knives at so much the yard-hour.

H o c h a c h t u n g s v o l l is a good Valkyrian German greeting, but it’s long on letters, sort of teratological, like a medieval turtle lubbering along with its hard case carved full of mossy initials. Skoll (Scandinavian) or Ole (Spanish) is preferable, or just Skolle: (Scanspan), quaint and friendly, Volapuckish.

The pidgin English rendering of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be, that is the question”, into “Can do no can do. How fashion?” short-suits me.

I’ll take RSVP at its face value. INRI, YMCA, SPQR, WCTU (deriv. W. C.) and other four-letter words I am willing to leave entirely alone, without any amplification whatsoever.

Shortening words I understand better than dragging them out. Eftsoons”: linking letters in festoons I abhor. Underslung German dachshund, blown-up bumpy blimp, sausage words may be salivary to the starving mind but they’re enough to shatter my meticulous monocle. Temptation to new word-bunglers is to make meaningless mouthings like “Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination…"”; the formula of officialdom used for years on French Railway conductor’s tickets reads: “Decomposition de la Perception par Tarif"”, which is undoubtedly the key to much modern subconscious writing or unconscious humor.

From actual laboratory tests I have proved that long drawn-out gutta-percha words when stretched to the limit of elasticity invariably snap back and hit the experimenter on the nose with unexpected violence.

Cross-word puzzle fans blow the intellectual bellows of the time, fans with philological flares for flapping flaming fl-ashes back to ashes. They leave me cold; hearthless; cross. They’ve crossed my fingers for me. Crossed my eyes. Christ! how he must have suffered.

Making puns is as dangerous as making bombs. T.N.Tless, purely toothless, optical, gum-chewing puns as in opposition to the skull-grinning oral kind are not so risky, not so likely to go off in the hand. It is possible to turn out harmless eye-ticklers without undue hazard, though not without experience. Word-plays to fill the elegant eye more than to cram the merry mouth. Yet they may be judicially mixed while holding in a covered metallic receptacle at arm’s length, as:

Gants (Or, even) gants

Pants more Daring- pants

Louis Quince ly Experi- louisquince

Your (mental.) your

Gants Louey! Not pants! louey

Your For your

Pants Quince! (Neophytes) gants! cants

Amateur alchymists while trying to magnetize mystical oracular utterances into glowing rosicrutian word-formulas will find it convenient to hold their noses firmly pinched, owing to the noxious gases given off.

Fumblers for the Philosopher’s Stone or stones and Elixir Vitae chasers will always take the Precatalanian caution of drawing the gants firmly over the pants and topsy-turvically.

Social experimenters in b e l l e s l e t t r e s will realize that a taste for acquired words is as exacting as a Bell Mare hostess who requires green gloves to be worn throughout the olive course. But don’t let that make you a modest literary wall-flower. Try all the new good forms; one at a time or in the altogether; Romp with the Rhomboids, take home a Hexagon to Give your Hetaera the Gapes.

Bull-fights are optical grand opera; but just because one Brooklyn boy has bit the sand of a bloody arena in the s o l and s o m b r a of Sevilla don’t let that tempt you out of your eye-teeth.

Word-weaving makes pleasing patterns refreshing to the patinaed retina, now that there’s not so much written oratory and reading aloud of literary lullabies, except by radio at bed-time.

I fear for my word only when egotistical hoarse bronchial word-busters forgetting their troches, ride out brandybreathed, brandishing branding irons at tropes, lassos writing around their hollow heads, screaming, “Write ’em, Cowboy, write ’m.”

Maiming words for some whets the appetite; for me, wets my throaty-apple pie-eye. These desperanto language-melangers spik English writers who threaten to internationalize the word horrify, scarify me, as the Bolshevik Bogy of socializing intent hobgoblined all virtuous kept women five years ago. I tremble lest the Rooseveltian Harangueoutanging Rough-riders of the Word bully us back to the Hog-Latin of our youth for full esoteric expression, or drop us into the inky pool of twinkling gypsy thieves jargon, or even invent for our punishment an international crook-word-code like the one uncovered in Brazil. The air about me becomes hazily thick with ,,“finifs"”, ,,“swell-mobs"”, ,,“gaycats"s”, and raucous uncouth racketeerings. I am stifflicated. Gagged by bushbeating wild word hunters, bound by a m b a g e s and bombastically flung into the see-thing alphabet soup.

I, who take my alphabet soup clear, daintily sipping it from the edge of the moon.

I, who had enough of Melanguages back in Milwaukee when I was a bleating kid.

Der cow hat over
Der fence gejumped
Und der cabbages
Goddamaged.

What is that alongside of the Halstead Street American lyrical purist speech of that pailer (ref. The unforgettable “Pail Period” in the U.S.A.) mauver, less decayed period (British: full stop)..:
Up through the alley
And over the fence
I got the can
Who’s got ten cents?

When I see words abused I volunteer, swear in instantly as an enforcement officer of the S. P. C. W. My word-sense shudders like a kicked sensitive plant at the sickening sight of over-worded loads struggling up slippery verbiaged hills. I quiver when their brave bandy-worded little furry legs tremble. I’m afraid they’ll slip back and suffocate in the green-whiskered Pond of Ezrasperanto Despond.

If it comes to words my heart is very tendrily. I cannot even bear to see them eaten. I weep long-bearded trickles from oystery eyes and turn from the slobbery sight as Lewis Carrol did and must do today over and over in his brillig grave.

As volunteer enforcement officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Words I arrest all word-offenders and pretenders. I firmly ask the lowing carnivorous judge to give them sixty days and seventy lashes with the dipthongs.

The Bible was once called the Word, and somehow I can’t come to care how much the evolutionists monkey with that. But when it comes to regular human seven-day-a-week uninspired words I find myself of two minds and both of them lipstickily made up.

My answer to a Revolution of the Word is emphatically Yes to the No, No to the Yes, a determined Yezno — — — Oyez, Oyez, Oyez — — — Noyez.

The world is again threatened by an Uncivil War, already it is breaking up into small exclusive modern Browning Societies, word-diggers, mutual sentence — (back and elsewhere) ­-- scratching cooteries. It isn’t so much Browning who’s to be feared, but the little Brownies who follow each other and yourself around.

Wasteful war! The words that will be spilt! And these mad revolutionists mean business, for several years they have been snooping around decapitalizing the whole vocabulary, lowering its case.

Oh, the words that will be spoilt: German sausage-word atrocities. I quiver-shiver. I rake-shake. Think of all those happy playful lisping harebell-lipped Mother-tonguetied words dragged down by leech-sucking Revolutionary Redundunces tugging at their tender-tipped dugs. I shudder at the thought-sight of it. Words orphaned, siamese-twined ones torn apart and thrown to grinning Siamese cats.

I won’t have them exposed to the epidemic of onomatopeia, ravished by aneamic pernicious all-iteration germs. Snuffed out by Punditsters. Bitten by churlish word-lice. Punned over cloddishly by Pierglass Ploughboys. I simply can’t stand to see them honorificabilitainilatin-type-ized into humdrum bores. I prefer them exactly as they are, happy, hedonistic thoughtless drumhums.

And yet somehow I want words to be made free. I only shudder at the thought of their being made free with.

The right of the writer to have his will with words is obvious. Words have always been defenceless and never wholly virginal. But I fear rotting, tumorish bad words may be slipped in (again, I don’t mean curt, cute four-letter classics but fourteen-legged lecherridinous, centipedicular, ampapfibsimian enchondromatas) among my butter-cup-eyed innocents.

In a word — — Oh, my word.

I have never felt cynical about the individual and collective helplessness of all m o t s. In my youth, ironing things out for myself I wrote ironically (following Carl Van Vechten’s advice that the word irony should be carefully underlined):

Always my soft heart has beat with adulation
For people who edit and criticize writing
Worthy folk, going about wiping the noses of croupy phrases;
Tucking exclamation points into strange beds
Picking moth webs out of warm, fur-bearing sentences
And on top of that splitting cords of infinitives
To get up an appetite for a book review
I hold my breath when I come into the presence of these people
I feel highly humble

I’m still holding my breath and being humiliated; fearing what will happen when writers are let looser.

I’m afraid I’ll lose my life-long companions, my play-mots of the dark glowering pause that is known as the laboratory hour; I fear something untoward will behap them:

I play with words
Tossing in the air an armful, as a child reveling in autumn leaves
Loving the crisp rustle as they cascade about my ears
Again picking them up as wet pebbles, aglisten on a cool sea beach
Making patterns of them — pictures — filling spaces with words as artists do with paints
I pet and fondle a sentimental word until it purrs and clash with a rough one till it growls
I am as human with words as I am with you
Never exploiting them
Never giving them an inch of advantage over me
I know words
And they seek me out
We are together
Important, both of us
And entirely useless
Unless you need the thing we give.

I repeat (having been set the example by our recentest writers) that I love every lovable Dublintender word James Joyce ever wrote and I gurgle with delight in the joyous jugfuls of Gertrude Stein (As a Wife Has a Cow — a Love Story, is a brimming pitcherful title). I know words can do anything, become anything, all I hold out for is more and better reading of the words we’ve got. With more modern methods of reading, words would take care of themselves, the fittest would survive and bear fruity normal new ones, with velvety fuzz covering the soft spots in their heads and collicy didy smiles lighting up their heavenly blue faces.

Writing must become more optical, more eye-teasing, more eye-tasty, to give the word its due and tune-in on the age. Books are antiquated word containers. Quick-brown-fox-leaping-over-lazy-doggy, uptodate, modern word-conveyors are needed now, reading will have to be done by machine; microscopic type on a movable tape running beneath a slot equipped with a magnifying glass and brought up to life size before the reader’s birdlike eye, saving white space, making words more moving, out-distancing the flatulent winded ones and bringing the moment brightly to us.