Read Online Notable American Women by Ben Marcus - Free Book Online

for their chance to feel nothing—should be 1:15 or better. This book sounds more clear, makes more sense, when recited through a megaphone, at night, under clear skies, in an area free of birds. When recited with a German accent, this book might induce crouching. A helicopter should be standing by at all times, unless the recitation occurs in an urban stadium within one mile of a hospital, in which case ambulances should be ready to cart the wounded to whatever local healing site obtains. A religious figure should be stationed near the site but not inside. Chances are that a religious figure will already be stationed there. If resources permit, for every hundred persons in the crowd, there should be at least one masseuse to rub and caress the listeners, using “literary hands,” which assist a person who can’t comprehend language. Public money should be used to deploy roving masseurs to caress citizens of our public areas so their bodies might better yield to the speech and weather broadcasts streaming from this book.
    Behind the Scenes: An Inventory of Accidents
    The author lost the use of his hands for three weeks while writing this book. During the period this book was written, he wept six times, one of which was used to secure sex as a sympathetic response to perceived sadness, a sex that produced in the author a diamond-cutter tumescence to his erection, leading him to conclude that weeping and arousal were intimately related, so that he often tried to weep before initiating intercourse, as foreplay; weeping became his most reliable seductive tool, at least for his own desire (because during sex he had first to seduce himself, an elusive and often unseduceable figure), though he was frequently merely alone to deploy his diamond-cutter, with two-person intercourse itself an imagined option at best, which he then concluded to be the actual best option, with real intercourse coming to seem contrived and imagined, ornate and implausible, too theatrical and overproduced, less vivid than the kind he conjured for himself in his mind, thus less realistic.
    He became choked up 412 times while reading books, watching films or television, talking to friends or acquaintances or strangers or children or himself, or sitting alone in a house or park or person booth or public-transport vehicle, such as a police cruiser, unable to talk to himself or think or speak aloud. Indeed, becoming choked up became such a constant experience, as familiar as breathing, though no less unbearable or inaccurate a method to keep time with the world, that he no longer noticed it and came to regard it as his stable mood, one that held weeping at bay only tenuously and foreshadowed an emotional release just moments away, all the time, yet never actually delivered this emotional release, thus foreshadowed it falsely, or did so truly only six times, as mentioned, but the other 406 times failed to deliver any emotional release whatsoever, only threatened to produce weeping, but in the end managed actually to produce the reverse of weeping—a series of emotional captures—deciding that his own person was akin to a correctional facility for feelings, which had been placed in his body under house arrest, his body a manner of tomb, and that he was the warden of all the various ways to feel, though it should be remarked that these captured feelings were in no way rehabilitated for later release while serving time in his body. They were put away for good.
    This man had a failure in his neck five times, which resulted in immobility of the torso and head and led to the use of an old foul-smelling neck brace once prescribed for him when these body failures were more frequent, then later used as a language diaper when uncontrollable speech was a symptom, a pillowy brace, shaped like a snake, that was saturated in all of his unwanted words, stinking of a version of himself he wasn’t able to share with the world, wrapped around his neck, a