Notable American Women by Ben Marcus Page B

sentences, which may be why the word “shyness” is frequently mispronounced as “crevasse.” “Wind,” when used in a sentence, means danger. When used alone on a page, no interpretation of “wind” will be required, but the page should not be allowed to remain open in an unattended room. An unattended room is an empty room, or a room with someone’s sleeping father in it. Sleep, when practiced by someone’s father, is also known as The Penalty Box. A father, in this book, no longer affects the population of a town or peopled area. The population of a town is computed as the number of people minus the fathers. No other interpretation is any longer required of fathers. Slamming the book shut produces wind on the face, a weather that is copyrighted by the author, and this wind may not be deployed without permission, nor may the pages be turned without express written permission.
    A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail. If “wind” is misspelled, for instance, as h-e-l-p, or i-t-h-u-r-t-s, then a storm can be expected, a hard sky, a short paralysis of rain. Rain is used as white noise when God is disgusted by too much prayer, when the sky is stuffed to bursting with the noise of what people need. If all the words of this book are misspelled, but accidentally spell other words correctly, and also accidentally fall into a grammatically coherent arrangement, where coherency is defined as whatever doesn’t upset people, it means this book is legally another book. Likewise, if another book is comprised entirely of misspelled words that, through accident or design, happen to spell correctly and in the proper order the so-called words of this book, which in fact will be proven not to be words at all, but birdcalls, then that book might be regarded as a camouflage enterprise or double for this book, though it would be impossible to detect whether this were ever the case, in which case something is always a decoy for something else, and the word “camouflage” simply means “to have a family.” In this book, the word “decoy” means “person.” A person is always camouflage for something small and soft and possibly buriable. Often he should be killed to discover what he has been aliasing, even if it is just the most perfect thing: a person-sized piece of empty space.
    Throughout the book, the names of children, people, heroes, gods, and things are generally given without accents, which are too personal to most readers (though other personal devices, such as women’s names, have been retained), and the spelling of such names is mainly that which accords most nearly with Old American pronunciation as specified by the Ohio Diction Team, who are considered to have the ideal mouth shape. Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth. If we didn’t spell them, they would hurt us more directly. The appearance of blood would indicate success. Spelling puts a corset on words, takes the knives out of them. Spelling a person’s name is the first step toward killing him. It takes him apart and empties him of meaning. This is why God is afraid to have his name spelled.
    Performance Notes
    This book is meant to be recited at libraries with a pound of linen ballasting the inside of the mouth of the orator or nanny; no one else may legally recite it. Rest rooms should be stationed near any reading of this book, as should fatigue houses and guilt huts. Women’s rest rooms should be guarded by a policeman wearing a gender helmet, even if such a helmet passes as a hairstyle. The doctor-to-audience ratio of a crowd listening to this book, by choice or by accident—since it is designed for recitation in public parks and heart-solving squares where unwitting customers of this book might be resting on blankets, waiting