Da Vinci’s Bicycle: Ten Stories By Guy Davenport Johns Hopkins, 185 pp., $12.95 “Whazzamallarya?” was how the ear of the late E. C. Segar registered the attempt of a Japanese-trained larynx on “What’s the matter with you?” A man curious over words and gifted in isolating their expressive gestures, Segar understood that men rarely speak in words: rather, in phrase-long utterances which scribal hands learned to analyze into words only after men had been speaking for a million years. The space was the last letter of the alphabet to be invented. It demarks word from word, in the same way as zero—another fundamental invention—demarks powers of a number base. Before they had the space at their disposal, scribes traced across the parchment an unbroken phonemic tune, just as they heard it: andramoiennepemousa: Tell me, Muse, of that man.
Having lost the strangeness of such a discovery, we say, “Tell me in simple words,” as if there were any.
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