Readies for Bob Brown's Machine: A Critical Facsimile Edition 9781474455060

Citation preview

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Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine

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Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine

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A Critical Facsimile Edition

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Edited by Craig J. Saper and Eric B. White

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

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Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ

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© the facsimile chapters Roving Eye Press and their several authors, 2020 © organisation and editorial matter Craig J. Saper and Eric B. White, 2020 © Introduction and Invent(st)ory chapters Craig J. Saper, 2020 © Foreword Eric B. White, 2020

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Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN 978 1 4744 5505 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5506 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5507 7 (epub)

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Contents

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Acknowledgements Foreword Eric B. White

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Introduction and Notes on the Text:—Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine—Machine Art—Conceptual Poetry—Political Engagement—e-Literacies— xix Craig J. Saper lviii–lix

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Prospectus for Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine

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Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine Table of Contents Preface by Hilaire Hiler Contributors’ Readies Appendix by Bob Brown ‘Eyes on the Half-Shell’ by Bob Brown

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Invent(st)ory: The Contributors and Their Readies Craig J. Saper

1 5–8 9–151 153–162 163–208

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Acknowledgements

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The editors gratefully acknowledge the support of our publishing team at Edinburgh University Press, in particular Jackie Jones and Ersev Ersoy, who have guided this challenging project with wise advice and great ideas since its inception. We would also like to thank the Imaging team at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, who provided the images for our primary text, and the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which provided the images for Bob Brown’s prospectus for Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine. Funding from the Dresher Center for the Humanities at UMBC provided the necessary resources for the production of the facsimile. Our colleagues at Oxford Brookes and UMBC enhanced the edition in more ways than they know. Lynn Tomlinson made crucial editorial corrections to the introduction. We also owe a debt to the edition’s anonymous readers, who provided excellent advice about how to substantively improve the volume. Every effort has been made to obtain permissions and clear copyright for the material collected in this book. Should we have overlooked anyone, notwithstanding good faith efforts, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. The editors are grateful to Bob Brown’s grandchildren and greatgrandchildren for permission to reproduce published and unpublished/ archival copyrighted work by Bob Brown, Rose Brown and Robert Carlton Brown III, © The Grandchildren and Great-Grandchildren of Bob Brown, 2019. The editors gratefully acknowledge permission to reproduce the work of the following artists and writers in Bob Brown, Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine (Cagnes-sur-Mer: Roving Eye Press, 1931) from the following agencies: John Banting, © The John Banting Estate – Bridgeman Images, 2019; Kay Boyle, © The Estate of Kay Boyle, 2019; Nancy Cunard, © The Literary Estate of Nancy Cunard,

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Acknowledgements

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2019; Charles Henri Ford, © The Estate of Charles Henri Ford, 2019; Eugène Jolas, © The Eugène Jolas Estate, 2019; Rue Menken, Permission of Robin Menken, 2019; and Gertrude Stein, © The Literary Estate of Gertrude Stein – David Higham Associates Limited, 2019. The work of Paul Bowles is copyright © Rodrigo Rey Rosa, 1931, 2019. The work of Ezra Pound is copyright © 2019 by Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Grateful acknowledgement is given to Carcanet Press Ltd for permission to reproduce the copyrighted work of William Carlos Williams, which is published in the following work: ‘Readie Pome’, in William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems Volume 1: 1909– 1939, ed. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd, 2000), p. 356. The editors are grateful to Elffin Burrill for permission to reproduce his original digital painting of the prototype of Bob Brown’s Machine for the cover image, © Elffin Burrill, 2019.

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Foreword

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Eric B. White

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Like most great ideas, Bob Brown’s reading machine began as a fairly simple thought experiment: how could technology transform the everyday act of reading to such an extent that modernists’ literary experiments not only looked ‘normal’, but also formed the basis for an entirely new media landscape? By the time the Paris Tribune unveiled his plans to build a ‘book reading machine’ in January 1930, he appeared to have found his solution. With tongue-in-cheek hyperbole, the anonymous journalist Montparno announced that Brown’s device would help their Left Bank expatriate peers ‘Absorb [A] Dozen Gertrude Stein Novels in [An] Afternoon’. In his interview, Brown explained that his machine would ‘resemble a typewriter in shape’, but ‘be much smaller’. He planned to print the text on ‘a ribbon of tough impressionable material’ using ‘type so small the human eye cannot read it’. The medium would scroll across a magnification screen with ‘the speed and direction controlled by pressing buttons’ and be stored in a ‘pill box’-sized container between uses. As well as delivering a suite of Taylorist efficiencies to the masses, Brown promised that his reading revolution would also ensure that ‘modernist writers will have some praise in their own day’.1 One by one, as an article of faith, dozens of those ‘modernist writers’, including F. T. Marinetti, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Stein herself, sent Brown sample texts for the prospective machine. Whether or not his wares could actually deliver on the promise of simultaneously speeding reading and decoding modernist novels for the masses was almost beside the point.2 By the summer of 1930, Brown had effectively brokered a new relationship between specialist and mass market readerships with a new technology. The literary upshot of this encounter – the ‘readies’ – spawned a new sub-genre of modernist writing.

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Foreword

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Named after the recently introduced ‘talkies’ in cinema, the ‘readies’ in the anthology’s title, Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine, heralded a ‘Revolution of the Word’ taking shape in the American expatriate colonies of France. Part technographic treatise, part Dada-Surrealist ensemble, Brown’s 1931 anthology and its fortythree contributors provided the blueprint for that revolution.3 For the first time since that original publication, Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine: A Critical Facsimile Edition restores the hyperkinetic writing and explosive visual wit of this crucial modernist text to print. Framed by Craig Saper’s illuminating introduction and biographical notes on ‘The Contributors and Their Readies’, this presentation aims to make its cultural contexts and network of contributors accessible to a broader readership. As modernist and media studies scholars will know, Saper has been instrumental both in highlighting Brown’s ongoing cultural significance and in bringing his work back to public attention. Saper’s online version of this anthology at readies.org also shows how the texts in this edition would have looked when ‘readified’.4 The experience of ‘streaming’ the texts in RFBBM is instructive, as it reveals the limitations of Brown’s proposal as much as its potential. Yet this new facsimile edition confirms that the printed readies were never ‘static’ texts to begin with: their typographical richness stimulates readerly processes of anticipation, recursion and paratactical cross-referencing without the need for a machine. Nevertheless, Brown always identified both his writing and his extraordinary career with that device. And they are all embedded in the story of modernism itself, at the intersection of multiple spheres of cultural activity. The reading machine has an intriguing foundation narrative, which remains remarkably consistent across Brown’s various writings, even if corroborating evidence is sometimes elusive. It begins in Greenwich Village in 1915 with Brown hunched over ‘tape-tickers in Wall Street’ between readings of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Brown combined freelance day trading with mass market fiction writing and an editorial position on the socialist journal The Masses, turning his hand to composing imagist free verse in his spare time.5 In his unpublished memoirs, Brown recalls the ‘eureka moment’ when he began combining his many specialist discourses into a new modernist idiom. For Brown, ‘[t]he ticker tape with its meaningless jumble of letters and figures was a dull code compared to that of Stein.’ However, inspired by Stein’s experiments with language (and possibly the optical effects of staring at stock tickers all day), he began to read

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stock market updates in reverse, and the ‘Dow Jones hot market’ began ‘ticking backwards’. Re-processing these streams of specialist data into new creative forms suggested a new machine-assisted reading medium, which in turn inspired ‘my reading machine, the first, so far as I knew’.6 Brown’s second breakthrough was his optical poem ‘Eyes’, which depicted predatory, camera-like ‘eyes on the half-shell’ zooming in on and revolving around an absent subject. First published in The Blind Man, Brown redrew and reproduced the piece in several subsequent publications, including RFBBM (p. 163).7 Unlike the ‘dull code’ of the stock ticker, this visual language anticipated the kinetic experience of reading by machine, and the possibility of integrating ideogrammatic and alphanumeric reading. Like many of his Greenwich Village peers, Brown’s avant-garde experiments came to an abrupt halt in the summer of 1917. Following America’s intervention in WWI, political opponents of the war (which included Brown’s colleagues on The Masses and other little magazines) were subjected to harassment and detention under the pretext of impending anti-sedition laws. Together with famous modernists Arthur Cravan and Mina Loy, Rogue editor Allen Norton, and his future wife Rose (née Watson), the Browns formed a mock-battalion they called ‘Battery J’. They fled the United States to Mexico, joining numerous other political exiles known as ‘slackers’ who made similar journeys.8 From the autumn of 1917 until the end of 1918, the group lived a precarious life south of the border until they disbanded following Cravan’s probable death.9 The Browns eked out a subsistence in South America before a bizarre twist of fate helped them secure jobs with the American propaganda service Compub – an agency sponsored by the very forces that they had fled from in the US.10 They left these posts as quickly as possible, and began publishing a series of successful business communications magazines in 1920. Their flagship journal, The Brazilian American, quickly became a template for a new publishing empire. Brown often found himself gazing at ‘a monotype’ in its press plant, ‘watch[ing] molten letters pour through it into an endless stream of words’.11 It was during this period that he recorded the first surviving evidence that describes his experimental reading machine. While in Rio de Janeiro, Brown composed a holograph manuscript entitled ‘The Six Books of Bob Brown’ on 14 June 1923. Introduced by some brief notes on Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Brown outlined the basic design of ‘a simple machine run by a motor to carry a tape under a reading glass’.12 In keeping with his visual writing, he inserted an illustration of the readies medium in the text,

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Foreword

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which he later reproduced in 1450–1950 as part of his untitled calligrammatic ‘self portrait’.13 On a business trip to London in 1925, Brown discussed his idea for the reading machine with the pioneering microphotography firm behind the August Hunter photocomposing machine (see ‘Appendix’, p. 173, p. 180). Together they formed tentative plans to develop the micro-printed readies using photo-compositing methods, but these were never realised. Later, in the winter of 1926, Brown met another potential collaborator, Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske, at the opulent Waldorf Hotel in New York.14 A retired naval officer and serial inventor, Fiske had patented a non-motorised reading machine device in 1922, which received widespread press coverage, but few sales.15 Fiske’s device resembled a monocular microfiche reader, with micrographic texts arranged in columns on printed paper. Brown’s proposal for a mechanised apparatus did not inspire Fiske’s confidence, however, since Fiske believed that streaming texts would cause eye strain, and that Brown would eventually run into patent problems. Indeed, versions of these same complaints, along with problems sourcing a suitable material for the readies medium, continued to haunt Brown as he developed the reading machine (although as I argue elsewhere, they certainly did not derail the project, as most critics believe).16 However, Brown had valid reservations about Fiske’s device too, and their meeting helped Brown clarify his own niche (see ‘Appendix’, pp. 173–6, pp. 180–3). Thereafter he focused on promoting his reading machine ensemble as a unified media ecology: the readies. The Browns arrived in Paris in 1928 after selling their publishing empire and embarking on luxurious travel across the globe.17 Sustained by these funds, Brown returned to avant-garde writing with a vengeance. His work, like that of his many modernist peers, combined textual experiment with visual composition, which in turn stimulated his work in the field of publishing – both traditional and speculative. The readies project evolved into a socio-technical ensemble that spanned the modernist transatlantic, and which took shape across Brown’s key avant-garde publications: his book of optical poems 1450–1950 (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1929); his foundational essay ‘The Readies’, published in the summer 1930 issue of transition; ‘Writing Readies’, a selection of extracts from RFBBM introduced by Brown and collected in The Morada 5 (December 1930); his radical self-published volume The Readies (Bad Ems: Roving Eye Press, 1930); his book of poetry and micrographic gloss-poems Words (Paris: Hours Press, 1931); and of course the present multi-author anthology RFBBM, which was published on 31 December 1931.18

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In 1450–1950, Brown included not only a sketch of the readies medium in his ‘self portrait’ calligramme, but also a sample of his new ‘readie’ in miniature 3-point diamond type, which promised a ‘simple-foolproof-machine-with-printed-tape-like-typewriterribbon-running-on-before-readers-eyes’.19 He reproduced this readie ‘prototype’ in ‘The Readies’, his crucial 1930 essay-cum-manifesto for transition and its ‘Revolution of the Word’. This essay formed the urtext of Brown’s project: he included an edited version as chapters 3 and 4 of his experimental pamphlet The Readies, and truncated that version for his ‘Appendix’ in RFBBM (pp. 176–87). The Readies also provided a sample ‘Story to be Read on the Reading Machine’, which featured the ceaselessly ticking hyphens that Brown used ‘to suggest movement, continuity of words, word flow’ in his new machine-age idiom (‘Appendix’, p. 195).20 In this sense, RFBBM is not just an anthology of other writers’ readies – it is also a collection of Brown’s own readies-writing. As Saper explains in the introduction to this volume, Brown and his collaborators wanted the readies to achieve a wide range of specific effects, from efficiencies and speed-reading applications to ‘a hieroglyphic visual and tactile’ form of ‘para-literacy’ (p. xxiv). However, as Saper also notes, these speculative properties of the readies were also grounded in ‘practical no-nonsense’ technological ‘solution[s]’ (p. xxii). Indeed, contrary to his reputation, Brown usually supported his claims with evidence in one form or another, but it is sometimes hard to find, especially in RFBBM. For example, he does not mention that he included ten micrographically printed poems, which he had previously published in Words, as a textual border for the illustrations of the reading machines on the anthology’s flyleaf.21 In RFBBM, these microtexts not only provide a proof-of-concept, but also gloss the possible futures for the readies medium, which in ‘New York 1930’ Brown imagines joining the mechanised transportation and communications infrastructure of the Big Apple.22 Armed with these texts, readers could connect the dots and imagine the fullsized contributions to RFBBM as magnified miniature readies, set in motion by Brown’s machine. Combined with the endorsement of leading experimental and mass market writers, as well as specialists from other fields (including publishing and engineering), readers theoretically had all the proof they needed that Brown’s new medium was viable. But what about the machine that powered this ensemble? Brown insists in his ‘Appendix’ that the machine is ‘ready now . . . and you can come to Cagnes-sur-Mer any day and see it in the flesh’ (‘Appendix’, p. 68). Brown was referring to the boxy

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Foreword

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prototype pictured at the top of the anthology’s flyleaf. Although critics remain sceptical about the machine’s viability, there is little reason to suppose that it didn’t work. Built by the American Surrealist painter Ross Saunders, ‘an engineer’ by profession,23 the prototype was ‘in the process of construction’ in the spring of 1931 and reportedly finished by the summer, a full year and a half since Brown first announced the project.24 However, even discounting Saunders’s professional credentials and Hilaire Hiler’s considerable technical knowhow, Saunders’s prototype very probably functioned exactly as Hiler described in his preface (pp. 5–8; p. 5, p. 7). Clare Brackett, Brown’s cousin and president of the manufacturing firm commissioned to build the device, was not deterred by the basic electromechanical system, which his chief engineer Albert Stoll confirmed by correspondence quoted in Hiler’s preface (pp. 6–7). Accordingly, the National Machine Products Company agreed to manufacture a model based on the proposed ‘laptop’-style commercial design sketched out by Hiler, Saunders, or Stoll’s team, which is pictured below the prototype, and described in detail by Hiler in his preface (p. 5).25 My annotated illustration helps clarify the components identified in the blurry notations of the original, revealing a surprisingly streamlined and ergonomic device, rather than the inscrutable blueprints of a poorly defined contraption (Figure 1). The problem with the readies’ commercial development process, as Michael North and others have pointed out, was to find a material strong, translucent, and flexible enough to serve as the micrographic medium.26 Although the prevailing narrative is that the inability to find a suitable readies medium eventually sunk the project, my research suggests that the Browns and their collaborators produced not just one but several working reading machines. The problem is that readers and critics are not predisposed to believe this, possibly because the very qualities that align RFBBM with the utopian/dystopian dialectics of late modernism discourage readers from associating the project with the real business of technological prototyping. In addition, Brown and the contributors often failed in their writing to distinguish between Saunders’s basic model, the proposed commercial design being developed in Detroit, and the speculative features of possible future reading machines. Consequently, in RFBBM, the reader lacked a synoptic overview of the invention that clearly sketched out its relationship with the anthology’s content, and its paratext. As it happens, Brown did provide one – just not in the original version. In this critical edition we have republished for the first time Brown’s elusive prospectus for RFBBM, which serves as its ‘missing’ introduction. With one small

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SP.B. Stop Button

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S.B. Reverse (black button)

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S.R. Speed Regulating Screw

T.T. Tape with microscopic type

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Figure 1. Eric White’s annotated version of the Commercial Prototype Reading Machine illustration in RFBBM (p. 4).

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exception (the inclusion of writer-editor Kathleen Tankersley Young as a last-minute addition), the prospectus preserves the first-name alphabetical arrangement of the anthology’s extraordinary list of contributors, which for many readers has remained the most important feature of Brown’s project.27 Saper has done more than any other scholar to bring Bob Brown’s extraordinary life and work back to wider attention, and to restore Brown’s status as a serious player in multiple modernist formations, and beyond. In the present volume, Saper’s ‘Introduction and Notes on the Text’ recovers both the well-known and the scarcely known collaborative networks that converge in this literary chronotope, and unites them with Derridean strategies of reading. At the same time, he responds to recent critical receptions of RFBBM to provide a new way of framing the contributors’ controversial interventions. In doing so, Saper invites us to challenge our own preconceptions of modernist history. His biographical ‘The Contributors and Their Readies’ entries provide important information about the wellknown modernists and lesser-known contributors who have awaited rediscovery for decades. In the process, he gives readers a far richer, more variegated account of a modernist legacy that is only now being recovered. Brown famously invited his own generation to ‘see words machinewise’ (p. 183). Along with reprinting the results of his experiments, the goal of this critical edition has been to provide new lenses with which to inspect the intricate parts of a well-known but elusive modernist machine. The major cogs of that ensemble will still gleam brightly, but the overlooked, vital components finally have their chance to shine. We invite Brown’s ‘machinewise’ readers to see those words anew, and to reread the machine.

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1. Montparno, ‘Left Bankers Believe Bob Brown’s Pill Box Book Reading Machine Will Help Them Absorb Dozen Gertrude Stein Novels in Afternoon’, Chicago Tribune and the Daily News New York [aka Paris Tribune], no. 4562 (13 January 1930), p. 3. 2. On Bob Brown’s readies and the mass market, see Robbie Moore, ‘Ticker Tape and the Superhuman Reader’, in Sean Pryor and David Trotter (eds), Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies (London: Open Humanities Press, 2016), pp. 137–52. 3. Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine, ed. Bob Brown (Cagnes-sur-Mer: Roving Eye Press, 1931); cited as RFBBM hereafter.

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4. Craig Saper, readies.org [database: digital presentation of RFBBM], (last accessed 24 April 2019). Depending on the viewer and the viewing speed selected, the scrolling text can introduce optical illusions, which can include motion-blurring and the apparent reversal of the texts’ direction (an effect that Brown seems to have noticed as well while speed-reading stock ticker tape). Other mechanically assisted speed-reading devices, such as the tachistoscope, had already proven effective, and were well established by the time Brown launched his invention – though they were often large devices quite different from the portable experience Brown imagined. Scrolling texts on billboards, smart watches and phones, teleprompters and various television programmes to some extent attest to the viability of Brown’s idea of mechanically scrolling texts, but not necessarily as a speedreading technology in the traditional sense. For further background on speed-reading, see Sue Currell, ‘Streamlining the Eye: Speed Reading and the Revolution of Words, 1870–1940’, in Charles R. Acland (ed.), Residual Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 344–60. 5. See Robert Carlton [Bob] Brown, Tahiti: 10 Rhythms, Bruno Chap Books 1.4 (March 1915), and My Marjonary (Boston: John W. Luce & Company, 1916). 6. Bob Brown, ‘1915’, in I Don’t Die: The Autobiography of Bob Brown (aka Autobiog.) [unpublished TS], Bob Brown Papers, Collection 723, Box 32, University of California Los Angeles Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library (‘UCLA Brown’ hereafter). Brown wrote the manuscript in the late 1940s. 7. Robert Carlton [Bob] Brown, ‘Eyes’, The Blind Man 2 (May 1917), p. 3. The Blind Man (aka The Blindman) was a short-lived little magazine edited by Marcel Duchamp with Walter Conrad Arensberg, Henri-Pierre Roché and Mina Loy. Brown redrew ‘Eyes’ for 1450–1950 (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1929), which was reissued as Bob Brown, 1450–1950 (New York: Jargon Books, 1959); this version was reissued again with an introduction by Craig Saper, and contributions by Charles Bernstein, Jeremy Braddock and the artists Anna Banana, Amaranth Borsuk and Jonathan Eburne (Baltimore: Roving Eye Press, 2015). Further citations are from the Roving Eye Press edition. 8. See Craig Saper, The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown: A Real-Life Zelig Who Wrote His Way Through the 20th Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), pp. 112–15. 9. Ibid. p. 142; also see pp. 111–45 and Caroline Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), pp. 234–71. Brown produced a fictional account of this period in his ‘slacker novel’ You Gotta Live (London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1932). 10. See Saper, Amazing Adventures, pp. 141–5.

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11. Bob Brown, ‘Appendix’, in RFBBM, pp. 153–208 (p. 160); cited in text as ‘Appendix’ hereafter. 12. Bob Brown, ‘The Six Books of Bob Brown Vol. 1, 14 June 1923’ [unpublished MS], Box 32, UCLA Brown. Only one page of this document survives. 13. Bob Brown, untitled [‘self portrait’], 1450–1950, p. 83. 14. Details of Brown’s meeting with Fiske are preserved in a copy of Bob Brown to Rear-Admiral Bradley A. Fiske [copy], 5 January 1932, Box 32, UCLA Brown. 15. Fiske’s invention was US patent number 1,411,008, which he filed one year before Brown’s first recorded evidence of the reading machine idea. See S. R. Winters, ‘Stretching the Five-Foot Shelf: An Invention That May Reduce the Size of Our Books to a Fraction of Their Present Bulk’, Scientific American 126.6 (June 1922), p. 407. For further background on micrographic publishing, see Craig Saper, ‘Microfilm Lasts Half a Millennium’, The Atlantic, 22 July 2018, (last accessed 24 April 2019). 16. My forthcoming book, provisionally titled Avant-Gardes, Technology, and the Everyday (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), provides a new account of Brown’s reading machine that extends beyond the exclusively modernist contexts with which it is usually associated. 17. See Saper, Amazing Adventures, pp. 141–5. 18. See Bob Brown, ‘The Readies’, transition 19–20 (June 1930), pp. 167–73, and ‘Writing Readies’, The Morada 5 (December 1930), pp. 16–19. In addition to 1450–1950, the revamped Roving Eye Press has reissued facsimiles of Brown’s original texts, including Bob Brown, The Readies, ed. and with an introduction by Craig Saper (Baltimore: Roving Eye Press, 2014), and Words: A Facsimile, ed. and with an introduction by Craig Saper (Baltimore: Roving Eye Press, 2014). On the RFBBM publication date, see Edgar Marquess Branch, A Paris Year: Dorothy and James T. Farrell, 1931–1932 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998), p. 117. These examples only account for Brown’s avant-garde publications about the readies. Many more appeared in non-modernist periodicals. 19. Brown, ‘Untitled’ [‘Without any whirr or splutter’], 1450–1950, p. 30. 20. The ‘Story to be Read on the Reading Machine’ originally appeared in The Readies (pp. 47–58) and is reproduced with minor changes in ‘Appendix’ on pp. 187–96. 21. Cunard and Brown failed to obtain the diamond type used for 1450– 1950 from Caresse Crosby. As Hugh Ford explains, in the absence of this type, the ‘only solution, a costly one, was to print the miniature poems from specially engraved plates, the whole to measure not more than one-eighth of an inch when completed’; Published in Paris: American and British Writers, Printers, and Publishers in Paris, 1920–1939

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(London: Garnstone Press Limited, 1975), pp. 286–7. Craig Saper adds that these ‘efforts to engrave the copper plates and relief-print the text produced mixed results, with many letters either appearing – even with magnification – as dots, smudges, or typed over’; ‘For Words’, in Brown, Words: A Facsimile, pp. vii–xxi (p. xi). Neither Hilaire Hiler nor Brown makes any reference to the micrographic texts reprinted from Words in RFBBM, and perhaps that is why the inclusion of these poems has not yet (to my knowledge) been mentioned by scholars. It is a baffling oversight on Brown’s part – even given the patchy results, the micrographic process Cunard devised with him was still a remarkable technical achievement. The poems are all available in Saper’s excellent edition of Words, which, especially in the electronic version, allows the reader to zoom in on the poems in a way not possible in this edition. The versions in the present facsimile edition (followed in parentheses by their appearance in Words), left to right across the top of the page, are: ‘untitled [Varlet, bring me paper]’ (Words, p. 20); ‘untitled [It isn’t]’ (p. 23); ‘untitled [‘Music’]’ (p. 17); ‘Death of Words’ (p. 3); ‘untitled [‘The Natural Cynicism of a / Newspaper Man’]’ (p. 11). Left to right across the bottom of the page the poems are: ‘Big fat gaping minds’ (lower right, p. 13); ‘I, Who Am God’ (p. 12); ‘New York, 1930’ (p. 16); ‘Is Not Serene’ (p. 4); ‘Pandora At Play’ (p. 9). Wambly Bald, ‘La Vie de Bohème’, Chicago Tribune and the Daily News New York, no. 5472 (12 July 1932), p. 4. Although he was clearly influential in his time, I have only been able to locate traces of information about Ross Saunders – another elusive modernist figure awaiting recovery. Wambly Bald, ‘La Vie de Bohème’, Chicago Tribune and the Daily News New York, no. 5033 (19 May 1931), p. 4. See Clare Brackett to Bob Brown, 24 September 1930, Box 32, UCLA Brown. See Michael North, Camera Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 75. Published separately as a pamphlet in December 1931, Brown’s Prospectus is tipped in to the Beinecke’s copy of the anthology. In our presentation, the prospectus precedes the anthology’s cover to preserve its status as a distinct publication while still serving as the volume’s ‘missing introduction’.

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Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine

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Introduction and Notes on the Text:—Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine—Machine Art— Conceptual Poetry—Political Engagement— e-Literacies—

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Craig J. Saper

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Extracting the dainty reading roll from its pill box container the reader slips it smoothly into its slot in the machine, sets the speed regulator, turns on the electric current and the whole 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 or million words spill out before his eyes . . . in one continuous line of type . . . My machine is equipped with controls so the reading record can be turned back or shot ahead . . . magnifying glass . . . moved nearer or farther from the type, so the reader may browse in 6 point, 8, 10, 12, 16 or any size that suits him.1 Bob Brown’s instructions on how to use his machine

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When the afterhistory of modernism is written, this collection [Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine] . . . will be recognized as a work of signal importance. Jerome McGann, 1993

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Context of Discovery, I: In the Archive

I first encountered the original edition of this odd book, Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine (1931), during one of my many visits to the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry. The archive was located improbably in their large modern house on an island just west of Miami Beach, Florida – a town more famous for beaches, waves and humidity than for hosting one of the largest private collections of visual poetry on paper.2 Almost every room, including walk-in closets and a bathroom, was carefully curated to show off some aspect of the collection, with the bulk of the collection stored in archival green boxes on two floors of shelves in their living-room-cum-library.

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Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine

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During one extended visit in the late 1990s, Marvin was helping me locate sources for my book-length study, Networked Art (2001). That book speculatively traced a lineage from the late-, and post-, modernist poetries of Lettrisme (Letterism in English), concrete poetry and Fluxus, to sociopoetic works. Those sociopoetic works used the networking and publishing processes as a canvas. Studying these types of works suggested a connection between contemporary projects that used electronic networks as part of the art or poetry and the earlier modernist visual poetry.3 In addition to my research for the book, I was also preparing for an exhibition using items from their collection.4 One day in the archive, Marvin asked me to follow him to another room of his archive-museum-house; he opened up a nook in the dining-room that looked like a liquor cabinet, but instead of bottles of booze, the shelves were filled with a distillation of the collection; he said he kept the ‘really good stuff’ in there. He pulled a plain absinthegreen bound book with no cover illustrations from the cabinet and handed it to me. I opened it carefully and saw a blurry image of an odd-looking box pasted opposite the title page. I quickly scanned the list of contributors and noticed that many involved in the project were important players in the 1920s expatriate avant-garde. The table of contents lists over forty contributors of ‘readies’, including luminaries of the avant-garde, from F. W. Marinetti and Ezra Pound, to Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams; many other important experimental poets and painters; and even those known now as important politically engaged realist writers, like Kay Boyle and James T. Farrell. This book is a new edition of that volume, originally published and copyrighted by Bob Brown in 1931 by his own Roving Eye Press, a collection of experimental writings supposedly to be fed into what Brown calls a ‘reading machine’. Each contributor made one speculative text for the machine. Each text, different in length, shows different approaches to the prompt to write for a modernist machine. Some of the contributors were unknown to the expatriate modernists, and some have remained unknown until now. When Brown created the neologism, readies, it created some lasting ambiguity about what precisely readies means: a style, a chapter, a genre, or a name of this book. The ambiguity has led later scholars to refer to the readies, readie, Readies, ‘Readies’, or Readies. If it is a style, then one might call it readies. If it is a name of this volume’s contributions, then perhaps each individual chapter is one readie, and the plural is readies. If it is a genre, or perhaps a brand-name, then one might capitalise it as Readies or put it in quotes as ‘Readies’.

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Introduction and Notes on the Text

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If it is simply the name of this volume, then it seems appropriate to capitalise and italicise the word as Readies. The neologism jumped out at me even at that first encounter. This volume challenged me to ask how it fits into the goals of the modernist avant-garde. Why had I heard nothing of Bob Brown or many of the contributors to this volume? All of this poured over me in a flash as I returned the rare copy of this Readies collection to the cabinet, and then turned to look out across the room.5 Across from the liquor cabinet/rare book nook in the Sackners’ dining-room hung a framed visual poem, scribbled in pencil by the same Bob Brown, called ‘Eyes on the Half-Shell’ (1917), that is probably the first modernist visual poem.6 What was the connection between the handdrawn visual poem and this volume of experimental writing, and what was the context of their creation?

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Context of Discovery, II: Sociopoetics

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Instead of offering only a context of justification, this introduction creates a context of discovery. Instead of justifying the reading machine by whether or not the plans for the machine work in terms of current technologies and literacy standards, this introduction offers multiple ways to look at the discovery of readies, Bob Brown’s machine, a new literacy (or e-literacy) tool, and the modernist effort to think through reading in light of other media ecologies like movies, phonographs, and plans for television in the late 1920s and very early 1930s. The locus of this context, about the creation of the RFBBM collection, is situated at the unlikely intersection of three lineages: machine art, streamlined poetry, and pragmatic plans for more efficient libraries and large-scale distribution of all writing. It is an unusual intersection of apparently mutually exclusive components. As an artwork, with many artists involved in the collection, it might appear to build on a melange of Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism and Precisionism. As a venue for poetry, with many poets involved, the Imagist and Objectivist poetics seem at odds with the pragmatic engineering of an earnest effort at improving literacy and access to libraries’ collections. The effort to work toward a streamlined poetry allowed for a wide breadth of style from social realists to nonrepresentational abstractions. In an unpublished note to another readie contributor, Charles Henri Ford, about Ford’s style in a novel, William Carlos Williams seems to have written the coda for the Readies volume and summarised in a few words the ethos of the

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entire project’s goals. Williams wrote: ‘my old obsessions coming up again: compression, tautology, omission of the unnecessary word– cut, cut, cut–explain nothing.’7 Williams’s own three-line readie in this volume, ‘Readie Pome’, demonstrates precisely this strategy,8 and his line here provides the instructions of this type of modernism. The name of the textual contributions themselves, ‘readies’, alludes to the talkies, sound films popularised in 1927 by The Jazz Singer. At first glance, readies look like visual–poetry–experiments–more– linear–than–concrete–poems–with–dashes–appearing–to–separate– every–word–as–if–reading–a–telegraphic–or–ticker–tape–print–out. Flip through this book and see for yourself. But much of Hilaire Hiler’s original preface champions the use of Brown’s machine as a practical no-nonsense solution to libraries looking to increase storage space, provide faster delivery of books, and help improve reading teachers’ toolbox of strategies. Hiler explains that ‘The use of hyphens, arrows, other connectives and punctuation is solely to suggest that the reading matter is to pass in a pleasant reading size at a pleasing speed before the reader’s eye on a tape unrolled by a motor. Each writer has endeavoured to suggest the possibilities of a new medium of reading which might be called speed-reading, although one may also read as slowly by machine as one reads by book.’9 Perhaps it is a contradiction only in hindsight because the modernists saw their experiments in scientific terms. These experimental works were worthy as practical inventions in both senses: contraptions that were often concoctions. Reproduced in this new edition are the puzzling images of the supposed prototypes of the reading machine: one constructed by Ross Saunders with help from Hilaire Hiler, built between late 1930 and early 1931, following Bob Brown’s instructions; the other an annotated image for an engineer. In my memory, the photograph was glued on a flyleaf at the front of each of the 150 copies of Readies; in the copy we used for this edition, it was a halftone printed insert. What Brown intended was a small, mass-produced mechanism, fabricated of metal. Some scholars, like this volume’s co-editor Eric White, think Brown did eventually produce a more professionally constructed machine, and that an iteration of the machine was included in an exhibit about future technologies in the 1930s at the Waldorf Hotel in New York City. Perhaps the professionally produced machine may still exist in some warehouse, waiting to be discovered. Maybe a reader of this new edition of Brown’s collection of readies will find that machine and bring it to the Antiques Roadshow, where the stumped evaluator will no doubt announce that it

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Introduction and Notes on the Text

has ‘sentimental value’ only. As is clear from even this brief discussion, the project vacillates, or flickers, among quite different goals:

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1) its potential uses as a pragmatic tool for libraries to store and disseminate ‘through the ether’ massive stores of all literature and writing; 2) a mechanism for those libraries to deliver, in condensed form, reading material; 3) a machine with elements of a microfilm machine; 4) or, perhaps, a machine with elements of a tachistoscope, the mechanism now often simulated online that flashes individual words in variable speed in increasingly rapid succession for those wanting to increase their speed of reading; 5) as a visual or conceptual poetry that breaks down written language to individual words until it becomes a literal blur of words with the machine; 6) readies that suggest a figurative marker of telegraphic speed; 7) or readies that suggest a poetry beyond just literate meaning; 8) a machine-art stunt that alludes to other contemporary avantgarde machines that produced noise, nonsense and hypnotic hallucinations; 9) a device, event and style of writing that was a part of the emerging art movement that sought to add speed and dimensional form to static two-dimensional surfaces like a painting canvas or a printed page; 10) or, an artefact of the contributors’, and editor’s, entrepreneurial communism.

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Brown wanted to do for reading what the movies did for pictures, and he wanted the outcome to be controlled by the reader just like a film editor would advance film through a viewer for editing or synchronisation of the sound track. This procedure, with the user controlling and increasing the speed of the words, moving either linearly or one word at a time, closely resembles speed-reading machines introduced in the 1960s and online versions of those machines available today. Brown planned to print the type ‘microscopically by the new photographic process on a transparent tough tissue roll’ (Appendix to the Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine, p. 177) and this roll, ‘no bigger than a typewriter ribbon’, would unroll ‘beneath a narrow

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strip of strong magnifying glass’.10 It resembled a microfilm reader (at least in one iteration). The machine was intended specifically to ‘rid’ the reader ‘at last of the cumbersome book, the inconvenience of holding its bulk, turning its pages, keeping them clean’.11 The texts were prepared for the machine, according to Hiler’s and Brown’s descriptions and explanations, by eliminating ‘unnecessary’ words, like many conjunctions, pronouns and prepositions, and replacing them with em dashes, en dashes or hyphens, so that at first glance the texts look like telegraphic or ticker-tape transcripts. The literal linearity intensifies the interpretive discontinuity as the reader must quickly fill in the blanks created by the dashes. This visual effect was intensified, especially if, as intended, the readies were fed through a machine at a much more rapid pace than a normal reading speed. Their surrounding commentary about the dashes or hyphens mostly concerns their ability to increase reading speed and efficiency. If we read the punctuation marks in the readies project as analogies for cinematographic zooms, close-ups and special effects, then reading becomes an unfamiliar process – moving not toward literacy, but toward a hieroglyphic visual and tactile para-literacy. Brown, alluding to telegrams and telegraphic writing styles, predicted that one would be able to transmit readies by radio ‘as easily as . . . newsies [were transmitted] on shipboard and words perhaps eventually will be recorded directly on the palpitating ether’.12 The instant, easy and efficient distribution of materials would also have political effects. Brown saw his future plans for the machine as a democratising tool with its efficient distribution of all writing to everyone everywhere. The readies bring literature, writing and knowledge to a wider audience by adopting elements of texts generally disregarded by literary critics, like linear single-line ticker-tape news reports, secret codes, cartoon visual poems, advertisements and telegraphic communications. Brown explicitly contrasted the machine with his earlier work: writing pulp fiction, publishing and printing magazines, reading the ticker tape as a stock trader, book dealing, and working in advertising.13 For Brown, the machine produced writing that was analogous to a pared-down machine-age style. The fascination with machines as alternatives to codex and other traditional forms of representation was not new to the avant-garde poets and artists of that era. In the early 1920s, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara wanted to know if he ‘could transcribe at top speed everything that fell, rolled, opened, flew, and continued’ within his head.14 In Cagnes-sur-Mer, Brown started talking with expatriate writers and artists like George Antheil and the eccentric Abraham ‘Link’

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Introduction and Notes on the Text

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Gillespie. All three shared an interest in building ‘critical machines’ – critical of the complacent, invisibly efficient and quiet machines of modern culture. Antheil, self-proclaimed ‘Futurist-terrible’, provoked audiences, with the help of his friends in the crowd, to riot during his machine concerts by using his wind machine to produce cacophonous sounds in his musical composition Mechanism (1923). Bob wanted to build a similar machine combining elements from a series of other machines, each of which, in keeping with the time, may have been a real invention or a fabricated art stunt: Gelett Burgess’s apocryphal ‘Nonsense Machine No. 2’, which appeared to promise to produce nonsense poetry in a ticker-tape-like machine; Antheil’s cacophonous art-stunt sound machine; Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Rotorelief’ optical toys, which included spinning wheels and 3D optical effects from the corkscrewshaped designs on each disk; and Raymond Roussel’s writing, which used punctuation, like ellipses and brackets, as an experiment in concision much like Brown’s readies. In terms of these similar experiments, Brown sought a corollary in composing readies to the polyphonic music, Futurist and Cubist painting, and Surrealist and Dada machines that were in the air at the time.15 He sought this Cubistic speed-reading by processing texts that replaced conventional grammatical rules, created neologisms, omitted unnecessary words, and added purely visual effects. Brown considered the readies as a type of word processing, with dashes or hyphens and specific edits, of found texts – in fact, a processing of the entire canon of literature in all of the world’s libraries. He did investigate applying for a patent, and worked with at least one engineering company to try to build a working model. If the potential of Brown’s conceptual project was ever fully realised, it would be the largest conceptual writing project ever and a translation of all print literate cultural output into a moving, optical, hyphenated, experiential and visceral form of writing.16 The fascination with machine aesthetics was very much of the moment in June 1930. In the June issue of the modernist magazine transition, in which Brown announced his machine, the magazine’s editor, Eugène Jolas, another contributor to RFBBM, discussed more in the ‘Contributors’ chapter in this new edition, declared, The mechanical surrounds us like a flood. The machine and its relations to man is doubtless one of the major problems of the age. Ever more accelerated becomes the tempo, ever more whirling are the pistons, ever more violent is the influence of this titanic instrument upon the thoughts and acts of man.17

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In ‘A Day in the Life of a Robot’, Murray Godwin imagined everyday activities from the fantastic perspective of a machine or robot.18 Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Hemingway and others were working, in the 1920s, with a prose style that moved writing toward a cinematic style simply by eliminating the ‘unnecessary’ literary conventions (conjunctions, prepositions and other short words). This left a slightly more disjunctive style: clear, crisp, almost flickering, with the stress on nouns and verbs – things in action. Brown was also interested in the pared-down writing style most closely associated with Gertrude Stein. For the entire transition group, art and writing were part of a dreamed-for revolutionary transition to a liberated wor(l)d. Bob Brown saw this condensed and abbreviated form as a new take on his same fascinations with reading, machines and visual poetry. The reading machine has aspects of both popular culture and avant-garde art, in the style of Tzara, Duchamp and Antheil. One could read the plans for the reading machine as a promotion for a product, ready-made to serve a mass market, or as a parodic performance. One might find the plans advertised in a sci-fi pulp magazine or as a manifesto in an avant-garde proclamation. It is a truism of literary and art studies that the avant-garde opposes, by definition, mass-marketed products, and even the expatriate vanguardists saw themselves in this romantic light; the artists, like Marcel Duchamp, and the writers, like Gertrude Stein, saw themselves as in direct contact with the market, and with popular technologies, as part of their work. The different reading technologies and practices that informed Brown’s shorthand included a wide array of systems. He studied wartime code machines, movies and ticker-tape machines. Brown, thinking of the machine as a useful product, hoped that the spools of reading materials would one day be available like safety razors in stores, and even available for purchase in telephone booths.19 Although mobile phones have made phone booths obsolete, in the twenty-first century those phones’ ability to download reading materials fits perfectly with the vision of a future wherein texts are ‘tele-vistically’ delivered over the airwaves. Can a parodic art stunt also function as a practical tool? In terms of this introductory essay, can an attack on traditional reading practices serve an audience of library users? Does Brown’s project present an intentionally paradoxical formation or does it represent an unresolved contradiction in his project and career? While Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine did not initiate an avant-garde group or movement, like Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism or Precisionism, Brown’s manifesto-like description of the entire project now seems to presciently describe the digital revolution in reading and publishing.

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Introduction and Notes on the Text

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From the descriptions in the collection, and the photograph of the Ross Saunders prototype of the machine, one can imagine how the device would unspool ‘one moving line of type before the eye, not blurred by the presence of lines above and below’.20 The machine resembles other viewing machines, like the proto-cinematic Nickelodeon Kinetoscope, that involve looking through binocular-like viewers placed on top of a free-standing box with a hand-cranked mechanism. The specially prepared transcripts of the poems would be cranked on the cylinder, thus producing a completely different reading experience. The readies were to function as a transcript that one could supposedly feed into the reading machine. The machine also looks vaguely like a smaller and more primitive version of a Moviola, and as the first version of a Moviola was invented in 1924 as a home projector, it is appropriate that Brown’s home reading machine, first proposed in 1929, would resemble this home movie viewer. Brown had been involved in early movie-making nearly two decades earlier when he wrote the magazine stories used for the first serialised movies produced in 1912; he even briefly considered starting his own movie-making company as part of a short-lived advertising venture he co-founded. In 1932, a year after the reading machine prototype was built, Bob Brown claimed that Sergei Eisenstein, the influential early Soviet filmmaker, a hero to both the modernist avant-garde and Hollywood film directors, wrote about the first serialised film series, What Happened to Mary (1912); Brown had written the serialised stories that were simultaneously released with each episode of the serialised movies. Perhaps Eisenstein, in an essay on montage (film editing), did mention the What Happened to Mary serialised films as important; although I couldn’t find it mentioned, others may find the reference in a periodical or newspaper. Perhaps he confused Eisenstein’s discussion of a later serial, or intentionally conflated Eisenstein’s thoughts with Brown’s own writing on montage. Brown built on Eisenstein’s idea of film as an ‘art machine’ that could directly influence thinking, and Brown intended the reading machine to provoke something like a super-condensed inner speech. In a January 1932 newspaper column announcing the appearance of Brown’s Readies collection, Wambly Bald made the connection. What does the Left Bank think about? The avant-garde, the poets, the hermits – what do they think about? Why do they forsake the ordinary? It’s the inner eye. The inner eye goads them on; it forces their dreams with promises of extra-terrestrial booty. . . . bright tokens beyond value. Bob Brown has a new idea. He played with it for 15 years, and now it pops without ceremony.21

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Eisenstein’s Soviet contemporary Lev Vygotsky developed the theory of inner speech, which describes how thinking involves combining images and words in a rapid succession of hieroglyphics, producing thoughts not yet fully available to be shared socially in talking or speech, and hence still inner speech. Inner speech, first discussed in relation to child development by Vygotsky, was later shared by A. R. Luria with the Russian formalist theorist Boris Eikhenbaum, and with Eisenstein just as he was developing the mechanism to use film, and especially editing, to provoke an ‘intellectual’ response from the audience. Eikhenbaum theorised inner speech as analogous to a series of film images forming a meaningful whole only in the spectator’s mind. First, film is a series of discontinuous frames before it is projected or seen by a viewer. Second, in Eikhenbaum’s theory, one’s mind combines the frames not as stills, but as movement.22 Brown’s machine seems to be trying to turn literature back into inner speech.23 As Eikhenbaum explains, the viewer ‘must continually form a chain of film-phrases or else he will not understand anything’.24 One literary or aesthetic formal device struggles, in Eikhenbaum’s Darwinian analysis, for dominance, and the modernists sought to challenge the dominant paradigms of literary expression. The modernists involved in the readies project sought to specifically challenge a window-on-the-world realism by fracturing the window of reading with dashes. In 1927, Boris Eikhenbaum ‘contended that the cinema did not simply escape the bias of words, but rather constituted their dis-placement in what he [Eikhenbaum] took to be the process of internal speech’.25 His explanation sounds like a description of Brown’s attempt to escape the bias of words. Brown described his machine’s effect as ‘optical balloon juice’.26 The words would spin by your eyes so fast that their meaning and legibility would evaporate. Eisenstein had also employed this notion of the word-image in his use of inner speech to apply ‘instead to a non-verbal psychic associationism’,27 and the surrealist associational logic of Brown’s machine would make sense in relation to Eisenstein’s film as an art ‘machine’. Hiler and Brown, like many in their avant-garde circles, were enthralled with Eisenstein’s theories and films, especially after Eisenstein met in 1929, in Paris, with James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Robert Desnos and others – who equally influenced Eisenstein’s thinking.28 Eisenstein’s film as an art ‘machine’ sought to process ‘the raw material of film’ into, for Eisenstein, ‘a series of shocks set off in the spectator’, and in that way the cinema was ‘a kind of psychological machine’.29 Brown saw himself as heavily influenced by the Surrealists. When I first looked through RFBBM and at the snapshot of the

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Introduction and Notes on the Text

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machine, it had, for me, the psychic associational logic of Surrealism, and pointed to the same Eisensteinian effort to affect the reader. When Eisenstein described the cinematic apparatus – sets, the bio-mechanics of acting, camera, film, processing equipment, editing equipment, projector and more – as an art machine, he was clearly drawing from the Constructivists and their effort to merge art and engineering, machine and worker, and culture and labour. These were the same seemingly contradictory goals as Brown’s machine, a merger of pedagogical engineering and, to borrow the key term of the Russian formalists, a defamiliarising art machine. The connection between inner speech, the short-hand image-thinking juxtapositions of thoughts, and both concrete poetry and Brown’s machine appears unwittingly in Dudley Andrew’s description of Eisenstein’s use of inner speech in his films: ‘Like inner speech, film uses a concrete language in which sense comes . . . from the fullness of the individual attractions’ in the ‘grammar of juxtapositions’ rather than the individual meanings of a word or image.30 Both the visual poets and the early filmmakers understood their art as derived from a concrete language appearing in superimpositions, juxtapositions and formal design, rather than as a window on a reality through descriptive words. Certainly, Eisenstein was a huge influence on Brown and the modernists after the premiere of Battleship Potemkin in 1925. The connection between the Surrealists and the avant-garde filmmakers is well known, and nicely summarised by film critic and renowned screenwriter Paul Schrader: ‘The Moviola appeared in 1924 and remained the standard editing system until the Sixties. . . . The Surrealists were among the first to realize . . . what Eisenstein and Kuleshov were talking about’ and soon the Surrealist filmmakers like ‘Man Ray, [Luis] Buñuel in Un Chien Andalou (1929), and [Jean] Cocteau in Blood of a Poet (1932) understood the power of editing’.31 Gregory L. Ulmer describes the ‘alternative cognition’ of Surrealist writing in which ‘inner speech’ can be used to ‘describe an alternative mode of reasoning’.32 The argument that a reading technology could provoke an alternative mode of reasoning, a bit of science fiction when Brown described it in his plans for the machine, appears regularly in the twenty-first century’s mainstream press reports and in academic scholarship. One 2011 study estimates that the average Internet-connected person reads/watches/accesses the equivalent of 174 newspapers, or nearly 15,000 pages, every day – more than that same person would read in an entire lifetime pre-Internet access.33 Brown’s description of the machine as eventually sending out ‘televistically’ all of the library’s contents through the ‘ether’ sounds like e-readers, smartphones and

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Context of Discovery, IV: Tone and Poetics of Readies

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other database-accessing Internet-linked electronic devices. The ‘alternative cognition’ is now the mainstream of information gathering and memory. Our new types of reading have rewired our cognition. As Brown describes, Bradley A. Fiske had already held a patent (Patent 1,411,008) for a ‘reading machine’ since 28 March 1922, about a decade before Brown’s prototype, and many versions had existed since the late nineteenth century. Fiske’s device became the model for the microfiche and microfilm machines that were widely adopted by libraries and archives after World War II, when engineers connected printers to the readers. Bob Brown corresponded with Fiske enthusiastically, offering to help develop the machine. He consulted with engineers to develop his own machine.

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The contributors to the volume, like Hilaire Hiler, thought about the analogy between a possible future of reading and the experiments in the visual arts and music. Hiler is now best known as a modernist painter. As one of the contributing editors, his choices of contributors to Readies drew on a wide range of visual artists that he knew and admired: Laurence Vail, Sidney Hunt, John Banting and others who are often associated loosely with Surrealism, Jazz-inflected Cubism, and later with Precisionism. Hiler saw the readies as something like what his father, Meyer Hiler, who had earlier done vaudeville, called ‘Hile(r)ogryphics’ in his own readie – punning on the family’s name and the picture-writing system that many in the volume were interested in exploring. In fact, although Hiler the younger knew that many would see the readies as a quixotic endeavour to reinvent reading, Hiler père created in his readie a string of puns to illuminate how this new post-literacy might look and sound: ‘Reetie – Rite – Rotie – Ronquiotee / Nice place to use the R’s – Wreeting – Writing – Writhmatiking’. The combination of punning portmanteau and nonsense words and the echoic overlap of reading and writing as a ceremonial and contortionist’s act is part of the project’s goals. Brown claimed to get the idea from reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) while simultaneously reading a stock ticker machine in 1916. So, his notion of reading a horizontal scroll with instantaneous information transmitted electrically, and now electronically, over long distances, with data about the companies and their stock prices, reminded Brown, and contemporary literary critics

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studying Brown, of Stein’s notion of a ‘continuous present’. As Paul Stephens notes, ‘the fractured, cubist syntax of Stein seemed like language in motion to Brown. He thought her modernist experiments were a parallel development to reading facilitated by machines, and he predicted that our pace of reading would accelerate.’34 Instead, for Stephens, Brown, in the afterword of the Readies collection, ‘saw an ever-increasing acceleration of reading, and parodied himself as being like a book or a book machine’.35 Stephens describes the situation that a pocket reading machine, like Brown’s dreamed-of device, will mean (and now does mean) for literature and memory.

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What does it mean to instantaneously remember something? Poetry is an ideal example of this because traditionally it’s mnemonic; rhyme and rhythm make it stick in our heads. Popular music too is characterised by rhyme and repetition so that we can’t get [it] out of our heads. There’s something about having millions of songs at your disposal that makes the individual songs not mean as much.36

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Gertrude Stein’s ‘Absolutely As Bob Brown or Bobbed Brown’ alludes to Brown’s call to process all texts in a telegraphic cut-up style that eliminates all unnecessary words. With Stein’s poetic allusion in mind, the readies’ writers and editors bobbed sentences as flappers bobbed (cut short) their hair. Stein had cut her hair in a bob a few years before and saw the bobbed style, and Bobbed Brown, as quintessentially modern. Although Stein’s readie does not, at the beginning, follow the constraints of the project, not even a little, it does present Stein’s characteristically ‘pleasing’, non-representational and declarative style. Stein does eventually use a form of the dashes, by using = signs. As a major influence on the readies’ style, it is not surprising that Stein’s entire readie, one of the longest examples in this volume, produces ‘A delight by reason = Of certainty and certainty = Depends upon a result = ’ and perhaps signals, if not exactly signifying, her pleasure with the reading machine. The style of the readies fits perfectly with the modernist expatriate journal transition’s call for a ‘revolution of the word’, and a prescient notion of a poetry of only the essential words.37 Although Brown lived and published mostly abroad, including among the Parisian avant-garde, his direct and explicit influence on later concrete poetry began in the late 1950s when he returned from Brazil, where he had been living since the mid-1940s on his small banana plantation, to Greenwich Village, where he had lived from 1908 until 1917. He restarted Roving Eye Press. In the late 1920s and very

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early 1930s, while living in Europe, he had published RFBBM with his newly form Roving Eye Press, but it had closed between the mid1930s and the early 1950s. Soon Jonathan Williams’s Jargon Press republished another small collection of Brown’s visual poems, titled 1450–1950.38 At the same time film theorists were rediscovering Eisenstein’s Constructivist film theories via the British journal Screen, there was a parallel interest in new avant-garde poetry that looked to the avant-garde for a lineage, and to theorists, like Eisenstein and the Russian formalists, for a theoretical foundation. It was in that context of visual poetry that Brown’s readies began to reappear, in the mid-1970s, as part of an American lineage of poetry in Jerome Rothenberg’s anthology Revolution of the Word: A New Gathering of American Avant Garde Poetry, 1914–1945.39 As Douglas Messereli recalled more than forty years later, Rothenberg introduced Brown ‘to those of us of a certain generation, hinting at the wealth of visual poems’ Brown had created. Rothenberg had discussed the Readies collection, included an excerpt from Brown’s 1916 My Marjonary, and suggested a ‘close kinship with the later New York School writers’ from the 1950s and 1960s.40 Brown’s readies experiments were part of the lineage of visual poetries constructed in hindsight in the 1960s and early 1970s. Those poets worked in tandem with the contemporary art scene, both championing abstract expressionism and finding analogues in their poetry for those innovations in art. Visual poetics plays an outsized role in Brown’s readies. With words and dashes spinning by the reader’s eyes, the readies resembled the New York School’s concrete and visual poetry, including animated, electronic and machinic poetries. While the later visual poets referenced the aspects of the page effaced by traditional poetry’s emphasis on lines of metred language, Brown’s work anticipated the further movement of texts off the page that would not be fully explored until much later, with what is now called electronic poetry. Brown himself framed his planned machine and the processed texts, readies, in relation to a third category apart from the binary of prose and poetry. I’m not really interested in writing either prose or poetry. All I want is words. Words with the punch of hieroglyphics, words with the sweep and colour of a painter’s lines . . . Words with optical interest whenever possible.41

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Although Brown describes words in terms of the ‘sweep and colour of a painter’s lines’, literary scholars led the way in studying Brown’s experimental works, and, as of yet, art historians, and artists, have been slow to discover Brown’s work in relation to modernist avantgarde art. Studying the readies as performative intermedia or transfusion might make more sense than studying them as literature. When one reads punctuation as a visual cue, rather than as a cue to speaking the lines of text (what scholars might call the logocentric phonological reading), then these textual cues make reading into a dramatic scene: the readies function as an allegory of the process of reading. As the words run on ‘before the eye continuously’, the machine demonstrates writing in the age of machines, as all of the scholarship on Brown’s project notes, and, as in much modernist art, one becomes aware of the general processes of composition, or, in this case, of the process by which one might read/think différantly (this term, used in poststructuralist theory starting with Jacques Derrida, demonstrates a disjunction between a visual difference of the apparently misspelled, in both French and English, term, and the homophonic sameness, or graphic silence, of its pronunciation and meaning). Read aloud for literate meaning, there is no difference; read visually, it highlights the art of reading with what Jacques Derrida would call a différance.42 Brown’s machine also pointed out the gap between visual and literate sonic meaning. Readies and the reading machine illuminate the form of a process, rather than only the form of a medium. Mechanical poetics (like Duchamp’s descriptions of an impossible fourth dimension) magnify reading as a cultural and technological medium without a single essential form. Using punctuation in this way, as a visual score rather than as a set of cues for reading aloud and creating an endless array of portmanteau words (the most obvious and important of these was combining ‘ready’, ‘read’, ‘movies’ and ‘talkies’ into ‘readies’), as Brown so enthusiastically does, makes literary interpretation difficult but places the project within other Surrealist efforts to change everyday life. Precisely because punctuation marks usually function to guide the voice to read prosody, the use of punctuation as an analogy for motion, and as an optical effect, shifts the understanding of what it means to read. Instead of reading involving only the interpretation of words, mostly in connection with an author’s voice, the design of RFBBM stressed a type of reading more attuned to words’ design, visual aesthetics and movement.

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Readies do not efface expressivity, but they put the tone of voice in doubt. A line functions as a dash, a mark of redaction and/or a speed mark, perhaps telling a future machine operator when to press down to increase the speed. That kind of visual logic, in which a simple line took on many meanings, was common in Surreal art at the time. The innovation in Brown’s machine was applying strategies from avant-garde art and writing to the very foundation of literacy. In that way, the machine speaks to concerns with what might replace print literacy. Much like Duchamp’s claim to speak to future audiences, studying his work fifty years in the future, Brown’s manifesto contains language that seems encrypted for a future audience to more fully understand how to read readies as reading reads itself. The speculation on the machine’s impact on reading, literacy and cognitive processes in Brown’s plans might suggest its intended function. Using the machine brings to the foreground a distributed attention, distinct from the focused word-by-word comprehension in print literacy; the readies, read through a machine, have few fixed meanings or even fixed positions – they are literally moving and cannot be fully cognised without a mobile attention. The words are literally no longer inanimate. In that sense, the readies function as ‘nonhuman actors’ rather than static objects, dead on the page.43 The words come to life, impacting perception and fuelling the visceral and affective aspects of reading. In a book review of recent studies of affect as something like a literary form or device, Anna Ioanes notes that the body’s ‘moment of perception’, what we call the gut reaction, is the ‘moment where the aesthetic and the affective meet and intermingle’.44 For example, in terms of the affective mood provoked by using the machine, one editor confessed that using my new online reading machine at readies.org made him dizzy and slightly nauseous – it made him feel bad. The feelings and cognitive perceptions associated with, and provoked by, reading have become nearly hardwired. Print literacy allowed for an ‘external memory’ on the page, and now, in the future Brown predicted, a memory held online and in the cloud. Reading is a prosthetic device, a machine from its start, that changed the neural networks of our evolving brains.45 Playing with the online version of the machine might suggest a future extension of human memory, intelligence and reading into the language of machines: the language of readies. In that sense, readies are like a message sent through the ether from a future type of reading that no longer depends on humans as its locus. It now floats freely like a roving eye severed from any human perception or literacy.

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When Bob Brown sent a copy of the Readies manifesto to Gertrude Stein, she loved his invention and laughed aloud at his playful presentation of plans and ideas. She answered his plan with an essay celebrating his unique style. Perhaps this is because the avant-garde had objected to academic disciplinary boundaries in favour of what Brown calls ‘words with optical interest’. One might see the machine as an example of intermedia, a term coined by Dick Higgins. It is within that intermedia tradition that one might place, retroactively, Brown’s reading machine. Indeed, it seems fitting that Brown would call the processed texts ‘readies’ – explicitly alluding to talkies and movies and implicitly, as an inside joke, to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, as well as alluding to ‘ready writers’, the phrase used to describe a writer who was ready to write thousands of words in any genre to fill a space in a pulp magazine.

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Context of Discovery, V: Readies Critics

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To state the obvious, Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine, originally published by Brown’s Roving Eye Press in 1931 in Cagnes-sur-Mer as a book, not as a digital app or database e-literature experiment, is now considered an important work, one that speaks to an array of digital media technologies including reading machines, display systems, and the baggage of the digital humanities’ gullible utopianism.46 As Michael North explains,

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The checkered history of the electronic book, for example, ought certainly to include the Readies of Bob Brown, conceived in the late 1920s, a time even more gullibly fascinated by new means of transmission than our own. Brown’s reading machine managed in some ways to make literature even more linear than did the conventional codex, and thus it remained light years away from hypertext, but the excitement and the doubts it inspired both seem almost uncannily familiar in the early twenty-first century. In other words, many of the issues current in discussions of the new media predate the personal computer; some arise as early as the invention of mechanical recording in the nineteenth century.47

In relation to the e-book, Jessica Pressman, in Digital Modernism (2014), performs an ‘excavation’ by ‘reading the Readies in relation to recent machine-informed poetics’, and specifically in terms of the ‘electronic literature’ in ‘William Poundstone’s Project for the

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Tachistoscope (Bottomless Pit, 2005)’.48 Pressman notes how the reading machine proposed for the readies project uses ‘speed toward poetic ends . . . dependent upon the reading machine and also inseparable from it’.49 The connection of Brown to contemporary e-poetry, in Digital Modernism, has added to the interest in Brown’s work as a precursor to contemporary conceptual and electronic poetry. Pressman connects the machine to new reading practices and sets Brown’s work in the context of later concrete poetry, as do I in Networked Art (2001). Paul Stephens, in The Poetics of Information Overload, also has a brilliantly insightful chapter on Brown’s machines, which he places in the context of the modernist interest in information overload,50 and Eric White uses Brown’s machine as an inspiration for his own augmented reality reading machine in a series of works with his AGAST group, and, in his next book, for reconceptualising the machine-age avant-gardes.51 Craig Dworkin expands the study of Brown’s writing to include a few other important texts, especially GEMS.52 Others have placed Brown’s readies in a tradition of experimental writing and poetry. N. Katherine Hayles’s survey of electronic literature mentions Brown and cites Pressman’s work.53 The poet-scholar Amaranth Borsuk places RFBBM in an experimental-poetry tradition between page and screen.54 Stephen Pasqualina explains that ‘In her first public lecture, “Composition as Explanation” (1926), Gertrude Stein identifies her writing as the construction of a “continuous present,” a “beginning again and again and again” inspired by cinema and the assembly line’.55 Michael North carefully articulates how Brown’s work was, in practice, a vain and failed attempt to overcome the cultural prejudices by adding speed and movement to the stasis of printed pages to achieve a transcendent present; we take this claim up more fully below.56 Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery place RFBBM in the context of experimental writing,57 and Jerome Rothenberg and Jerome McGann see it as key in understanding modernist experiments in writing.58 Craig Dworkin focuses on a couple of Brown’s other experiments that also connect Brown to a modernist poetic tradition as it informs more recent conceptual poetries.59 Hugh Ford places Brown, his machine and his Roving Eye Press in the context of a group of publishers among the expatriate avant-garde in, and around, Paris in the 1920s.60 In the introductory chapter in her coedited volume on New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (2006), Adelaide Morris places Brown directly in the tradition of technopoetry and avant-garde modernist writing:

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second-generation electronic texts tend to be compressed, multilayered, and time-driven – closer to Mallarmé than to Balzac, more like Dickinson than Frost, riders in a posse that includes such enduring outlaws as Stein’s Tender Buttons, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the concrete and visual poetry of Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Bob Brown’s ‘Readies,’ John Cage’s mesostics, and OULIPO’s ‘potential literature.’61

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My own earlier scholarship placed the readies and the reading machine in a historical and biographical context that sees Brown’s relationship to reading with machines, like reading stock-symbols off ticker-tape machines, or from his own typewriters, as building toward and culminating in his proposed invention. Jessica Pressman, and others, draw a connection between Brown’s modernist project and contemporary electronic writing: ‘[i]mplicit in Brown’s discussion of the Readies machine is a feedback loop between literature and its technologies of transmission, specifically between words and reading machines. . . . changing the way we read, would in turn change literature.’62 Pressman argues that ‘[w]hat seems normal, deep, or hyper about our reading practices is always shaped by historical contexts and media formats. Reading practices, literary poetics, and reading machines emerge from and adapt to specific cultural ecologies.’63 The machine defamiliarises reading, making it strange. To see this in practice, it is helpful to understand Pressman’s peculiar interpretation of how Brown’s machine would have operated. The ‘human reader’ focuses ‘on a single spot at the centre of the Readies’ interface, and upon this spot, the machine would flash a stream of words in a tachistoscopic manner’.64 Pressman draws a connection between Brown’s hope for a practical application and the educators who sought to improve reading comprehension using tachistoscopes, a machine that flashed individual words on a screen in rapid succession, as early as 1910, as well as the military engineers throughout the 1940s who built training devices for pilots, and the public, who looked for tech-supported self-help programmes to increase reading speed and comprehension in the 1950s and 1960s.65 Today, we have phone apps and e-books to help us read. One cannot help but project these possibilities from the suggestive, if ambiguous, image of Brown’s machine. Whereas Brown’s machine sought to intensify and, in the Russian formalists’ terminology, defamiliarise the reading process, postmodern poetry, like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, uses a ‘textual process for revealing the conventions, and the conventionalities, of our common discursive formations’.66 This writing’s ‘ironic self-representation’,

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according to Jerome McGann, ‘situates poet and poem firmly in the social, institutional, and even the economic heart of things . . . an imagination of writing that knows it inhabits a world ruled by Mammon’.67 McGann’s readings, or his ‘reading machine’, functions as a useful tool for understanding Brown’s readies as a meta-commentary on books, literature, reading and libraries. The textual surface and ironic metacommentary found in language poetry ‘flaunts its core idea’, in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Charles Bernstein’s phrase, ‘as candy coating’ (p. 380 in the first edition). In one of the essays in McGann’s Black Riders: The Visual Language of Modernism, a traditional scholarly work analysing a Bernstein poem suddenly turns into a script, an argument between two speakers. A disgruntled and humorous speaker, a sort of curmudgeon, argues that Bernstein’s poem is nothing more than a transcription of everything lifted off a page with a correction tape. The other character in the script, a more earnest narrator, counters the curmudgeon’s literal interpretation by arguing that Bernstein’s poem ‘foregrounds the machinery of writing’.68 The curmudgeon, disgruntled and suspicious of experimental poetry, answers that the poem literally foregrounds the machinery. For the curmudgeon, unwittingly similar to Ezra Pound and his dismissal of Brown’s poetry as ‘pink popcorn’, the poem is a clever one-line joke; or, as it might apply to Brown, the one-line joke of speeding up reading beyond comprehension in order to allow for a paradoxical comprehension of the information explosion already starting in the early twentieth century. For the more earnest and reflective narrator, the Bernstein poem, and the readies, figuratively foreground the process of producing poetic texts in our text-saturated world.

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Context of Discovery, VI: The Readies’ Campy Modernism and Queer Politics?

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Some of the readies use racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, homophobic and phallogocentric language, including in chapters by Robert McAlmon, Laurence Vail, Ezra Pound and Samuel Putnam. Putnam uses particularly offensive language, and one could argue that counter to the modernist dream of using the speed of the machine and the style of the readies to overcome prejudice, the obvious cultural allusions in Putnam’s chapter expose the failure of the entire project. Of course, like others included in the RFBBM anthology, Putnam was increasingly interested in a social realism, and saw this style as a vehicle to explore social issues. Although the offensive

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language might seem appropriate for a story about the thinking of the White character involved in a Klan attack, the offensive language seems gratuitous. Whether for shock effect or simply as a reflection of their troubling prejudices, the gratuitous use of the offensive language in a handful of readies damages the entire project. Do these obvious cultural allusions damage modernism’s goal as inherently contradictory because the experiments fail to overcome the prejudices the experimental forms promise to overcome? Or do the scenes depicted highlight a key goal of the readies’ variant of modernism to create a psychological social realism through experimental forms? Because the volume was rare, the offensive language was narrated by a few critics who have access to archival copies. With this new edition, readers can draw new conclusions. Although the best scholars of Brown’s readies, most notably Michael North, have noted how the overall explicit intent of the readies project, and aspects of modernism in general, was supposedly to transcend prejudice, the project, in that frame, fails, with the prevalence of phallogocentric and racist language as the condemning evidence. The actual individual readies do not efface expressivity, and when we read each closely and individually with the specific authors in mind, we get a very different picture of the overall goals and achievements of the volume. Putnam’s offensive chapter-title in this volume, topic and racist language look the most objectionable, at least at first glance. His use of the n-word is meant to portray critically, in the modernist flickering style, the stream-of-consciousness thinking of a participant in a Ku Klux Klan attack. On the one hand, Putnam looks naïvely racist, and he did appear to have either true or opportunistic sympathies for Italian fascism in 1932, a year after his contribution to this volume was published.69 On the other hand, Putnam, also a journalist who wrote for various communist newspapers and magazines, and who soon denounced the fascists and his own naïveté in ‘believing that fascism and the arts could coexist’, appears to have consistently denounced racism.70 In this chapter, he uses a stream-of-consciousness style to get inside the thinking of a racist White supremacist. A careful reading of Putnam’s readie reveals that it is explicitly condemning the horror of the Klan and the pathetic resentments of the main character. The offensive title refers to the Klansman’s racist epithet, spoken at the end of the story after the vicious mob lynches the Black man. Samuel Putnam, of Jewish heritage and living in Europe in the early 1930s, closely identified with the main character in his story, and used the n-word not as a slur, but in resistance to the violent racism in the Klan’s and

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the Nazis’ use of hateful language. In that sense, Putnam intended to expose the language, and knew of Countee Cullen’s ‘Incident’ (1925) that tells the autobiographical story of Cullen, a Black man, being called the n-word as a child in Baltimore, Maryland, and the lasting pain Cullen felt (the only thing he remembered about Baltimore).71 Today, the offensive language, set in a context deeply critical of the speaker, would appear as similar to the n-word in Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘the self-solace’ or the movie The Blackkklansman, directed by Spike Lee.72 The Black identity of Cullen, Brooks or Lee changes the success of the strategy, since the harm is from the perspective of the Black characters rather than from inside the head of the pathetic racist. In all of these examples of racist characters, or those masquerading as eager recruits to the Klan, the authors contextualise the racist language and expose the weakness of the speakers or, in Putnam’s story, the mind of the character. Rather than intending to have the reader identify with the racist characters, Putnam’s stream of consciousness of an angry racist White man’s thoughts distances the reader from those thoughts and ensures that he or she finds them repulsive. Putnam names the characters whose racist views he exposes. The stream of consciousness is about them, and the style of writing describes the scene in which those characters ‘Smile–scorn– contempt’ (56) for a Black man who even dares to look at a White woman. The main character, Lou Hiram, imagines that the ‘good– ole–Klan . . . Church–Home– – –Flag–Rights–Womanhood–women– folks’ (56) will ‘pertect’ the supposed purity of the White women. He wants to re-establish the desired grovelling respect for his own imagined superiority and supremacy even as his language makes his own imperfections obvious. The White character’s mispronunciation and absurd resentments and anxieties are the focus of Putnam’s entire story. The White character already imagines that he will ‘–kill– him’ (‘him’ being Mose, the Black man). The entire story, much like Spike Lee’s movie, is about the hypocrisy and misplaced resentfulness of the named White characters. Putnam’s story is about using the language not to demean the Black character, but to see into the stream of consciousness of the southern American racists. Putnam’s title is, perhaps, the most shocking, and he might have failed in his tone-deafness by not also having the Mose character’s viewpoint expressed, but his approach, like many in the volume, and throughout modernism, was satirical rather than naïve prejudice. As Putnam became increasingly dedicated to an engaged social realism in the 1930s, he clearly saw the story as a politically progressive criticism of the cartoonish, if nevertheless pernicious, White

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Americans. The reactions against the modernists by the censors at the time, and by some critics many decades later, resemble struggles to appreciate satire and parody in general or, perhaps, to recognise when it falls flat; the context is crucial.73 Putnam is not using the offensive language to gain entrance into Black culture, or to signal familiarity, or as a sign of hipness; he uses it only to expose it as disgusting.74 That said, for the American expatriates in particular, but not exclusively, there is an unresolved contradiction that Suzanne W. Churchill sees repeated in modernist studies in an effort to conserve the aesthetic importance of these projects that ‘helps sustain silences and gaps in the academic formation of modernism’.75 The lacuna of modernist studies might include the illegal identity of many involved in the modernist project; it was, in the early 1930s, increasingly becoming illegal to be identified as Jewish in Europe, illegal to be Black disobeying apartheid rules in America, illegal to be an anti-war activist, hold seditious views, or be a communist (especially after the United States enacted laws against sedition in 1917 and throughout the next forty years), illegal to be gay or lesbian (throughout two-thirds of the twentieth century in the United States), illegal to cross national boundaries (deportation, arrest of alien residents, arrest of certain ethnic groups, and blocking refugees from entering the United States was intense during much of the twentieth century), illegal to be women seeking autonomy over their bodies (especially after sections of the Comstock acts), illegal to be someone involved in miscegenation, and illegal even to advocate for any of these identities’ rights. Perhaps most pertinent to this argument, it was often illegal to be labelled as a ‘decadent’ modernist seeking to claim the right to experiment with life and even literacy. These crimes were met with exclusion, arrest, exile or even death. There was a risk to modernism, and the expatriate avant-garde’s strategies and even campy decadence were a risky political act. That the satirical criticism in this volume was missed or discounted because of the use of offensive language might have more to do with the decontextualised literalism of the critics than with the satirical tone, or, in the case of Charles Henri Ford and others, the camp gay pride of the original contributors. Brown had an unusual and telling name, ‘hermaphroditic hypodermic hyphen’, for the crucial stylistic effect of the em and en dash punctuation marks. The hermaphroditic dashes suggest a strategy from the twenty-first century: queering the reading process. The phrase highlights a machine’s genderless situation as something more and different: the potential of a robot- or cyber-sexuality. In machine

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reading, Brown discovered a possibility of a reading beyond binaries (male/female) with what he called a hermaphrologics, in which the hyphen visually opened a space by occupying the blanks. In the twenty-first century, readers will now take heightened notice of the term used to describe these dashes, ‘hermaphroditic’; many of those readers will have also considered the erotic intimate life of the cyborg.76 Along these lines of a cyborg sexuality, Daphne Carr’s readie does not follow the constraints of eliminating words, using dashes, or the telegraphic style, but introduces a fictionalised account of, at the time, purely science-fiction ‘vibrometres’, a device that was not developed until the 1980s. It was a riff on Brown’s machine except that, instead of a reading device, Carr’s device read psychic and sexual vibrations. At one point, the main character thinks about the ‘tingling with static under your pants for half an hour’.77 Although the fragment of a story does not elaborate further, one imagines the conversations where Carr and others thought of various other psychic vibration reading devices and orgone-like vibration-reading sexmachines besides Brown’s machine for libraries. The sci-fi campiness of Carr’s readie is unmistakable. In general, given the mix of cleverness, artifice and pop-hyperbolic exaggerations throughout the readies project with that ‘hermaphroditic hypodermic hyphen’ em or en dash, one would have to go to great effort not to recognise the campy sensibility of the contributors, editor, and of an entire offshoot of modernism. The machine’s camp aesthetic possibilities are not my later invention, but were very much in the minds of those involved in the readies project. For example, someone suggested to Bob that he create a readies version of the books of the famously campy gay novelist Ronald Firbank on ‘lavendar tape’.78 The analogy between alternative sexualities as well as revolutionary social relations and the extension of reading also provoked someone else to suggest to Bob that he include an ‘appliance’ with his machine that would ‘release ducts of perfume to win the reader after each chapter’; considering the topics of many of the chapters, the smells released would be similar to the 1981 ‘Odorama’ by an icon of contemporary campy films, John Waters.79 Reading many of the chapters as camp also benefits from understanding the personalities of the contributors, and although a separate chapter in this critical edition talks about each individual contributor and some of their readies, it is valuable to look at a few here as their biographies are relevant to my argument about camp sensibility. As Alexander Howard explains, Charles Henri Ford’s

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‘high camp modernism’ has a serious intent even as it flaunts irreverent humour, racy sex and American slang. Howard concludes his monograph on Ford by wondering if this ‘camp aesthetic sensibility’ will prove to define Ford’s lasting legacy as a champion of a variant of Surrealist modernism.80 Ford’s Surrealist camp aesthetic, in which ‘you . . . plume yourself with the gospel of art and you are as proud of it as there are men proud of the size of their genitals’ (133), is easily missed with an earnest and literal literary critical approach which sees the campiness and excess as phallogocentric instead of pridefully queer, especially in the contributions by the openly gay men. Ford published the first graphically explicit ‘gay novel’ with Obelisk Press, run by the British Jack Kahane. Kahane, who was Jewish, published both what is now considered pornography and experimental writing; Obelisk is most famous for publishing Henry Miller’s The Tropic of Cancer (1934), which combines experimental writing with graphic sex scenes. Ford’s novel, still considered a landmark in gay literature, portrayed the fictionalised loves, sex and lives of these queer poets. Ford’s influence on art and poetry was profound and prolific from the mid-1930s until his death in 2002; when the readies appeared, he was just a nineteen-year-old poet full of potential, and although he doesn’t follow the readies’ constraints, he uses provocative phallic images and ends the readie with a suggestive piece of advice to ‘never let your step be less high or your mind less sure than when you said the only thing i have against life is that it spoils young men’s mouths’ [sic].81 The biographical context changes the meaning of both images, and impacts our reading of the goals of the readies project specifically, and the larger avant-garde ‘revolution of the word’. Sidney Hunt, the British draughtsman, painter, poet and editor of the art magazine Ray, had connections to the international avantgarde. Like many involved in the readies project, Hunt’s artworks had an obvious homoerotic component with nude young male figures often entwined in abstract designs. Hunt, like Ford, wrote about queer sexuality in ways that were banned in the United States; he published a poem about a young hermaphrodite in Seed magazine, and it is interesting that Brown used a play on that term to describe the function of the dashes. Hunt also worked as a model builder for the now world-famous British animator Len Lye, who was associated with the avant-garde. Brown’s acceptance and celebration of Axton Clark, and Brown’s admiration for, friendships with and inclusion of the many very

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openly gay male contributors in the anthology, like John Banting, Charles Henri Ford, Paul Bowles and Sidney Hunt, to name just four, led to rumours about Brown’s own sexuality, and attest to the intended politics of the volume. Axton Clark was previously known as Donald Clark when he attended graduate school at Harvard University. At age twenty-four, Clark was expelled from a doctoral programme in philosophy and fired as an assistant professor. He was accused of alleged ‘favourable statements about homosexuality in his psychology lectures’. Clark vociferously and consistently denied the charges; he was also allegedly propositioning a student, which Clark also, at first, denied.82 Under withering interrogation, Clark finally broke down in tears and admitted to homosexual desires, fantasies and perhaps activities; explaining that he was trying unsuccessfully to ‘cure’ himself when he talked suggestively with the student, he did not confess to any unwanted advances or activities. Perhaps the real scandal was the inappropriate personal involvement of the homophobic A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s President, who, ‘with barely controlled anger’, personally fired Clark during the questioning, without due process or appeal, and later redacted Clark’s name from the record books of its employees.83 Clark would probably not fare much better today than he did at Harvard then. If he did proposition the student, which he denied, he would now face suspension and not go on to a distinguished career, as Clark did at Mills College and as a poet. As Axton Clark, he went on to translate Heinrich Mann’s Berlin: The Land of the Cockaigne (1929) and publish his own poetry after he worked on the readies; he taught at Mills College, where in 1927 he started one of the first programmes in Cultural Studies.84 Missing or disregarding the context of discovery, the stories surrounding the readies project’s creation, makes for a very different reading. The RFBBM, read in this context, intended to condemn homophobic repression not promote a patriarchal phallogocentricism. Kathleen Tankersley Young and Charles Henri Ford worked together on Blues, and Young had an unrequited crush on Ford. One finds little written about Young in spite of her importance to modernist poetry, leading the co-editor of this new edition of the Readies volume, Eric White, to note that her ‘name appears like a cipher’ in discussions of little magazines and poets of the Harlem Renaissance.85 She is often referred to as an African-American poet, but her race is ambiguous, perhaps because her parents passed as white in official documents like marriage certificates, or because neither she nor any of her contemporaries ever mentions her race or even anything about her appearance. Perhaps the most important

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reason surrounding the ambiguity about Young was her own personality. She had a wry, ironic and self-deprecating sense of humour, and in a letter to another contributor to this volume, Richard Johns, she described herself as ‘reticent, peculiar, avoiding questionings regarding myself, but I mean to be amiable, kind, and am interested in people if they do not come too close range, I like people, and do not believe myself fundamentally disagreeable altho [sic] I’m supposed to be – ’.86 She was, like all of the others in this volume, an outsider. Reading the volume through Young’s eyes, the entire readies project had a farcical air targeted against normative practices and prejudices on the level of content as well as – and often separately from – form. In terms of class consciousness, James Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy would later establish him as an important realist novelist, portraying the regular working labourer, but there, as in a few of the readies, the offensive language is meant to alienate the reader from the main character, not valorise Studs Lonigan’s world-view. Rather than employ a non-representational style, Farrell (and others, including Kay Boyle) had found in Brown’s constraints a foundation for a politically engaged writing of the street – associated with socialist realism and naturalism. Brown had championed the work of Farrell and other politically engaged writers as part of the ‘revolution of the word’. Farrell’s deeply troubling anti-Semitic language in his chapter falls flat and seems counter to his progressive goals. The language looks especially troubling in the context of the early 1930s in a European publication, as the Nazi Party had the year before become the second largest political party in Germany’s legislature. That said, Farrell attempts to get into the mind of the anti-Semite and, as in the later Studs Lonigan trilogy, create a distance between the reader and the limited world-view of a working-class man. Farrell played a large role in the readies project, and wrote, or ‘readified’, two of his stories, ‘Jeff’ and ‘Sylvester McGullick’, and also ‘readified’ his brother John A. Farrell’s story ‘One of the Many’. James also ‘adapted’ Lloyd Stern’s story ‘Percentage’. Again, with just the slightest context about the author and his large body of work (especially Studs Lonigan, which the readies influenced), one recognises Farrell’s efforts not to in any way celebrate this language, but to get inside the head and consciousness of those who do. As Ann Douglas explains, Farrell’s entire oeuvre, from beginning to end, described those who lived under the American mythology of individual success, and lived it as a ‘failure’ and a ‘Chamber of Horrors’. Placing Farrell in a lineage of great American fiction writers, Douglas

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explains that ‘For Farrell, as for [Richard] Wright, terror was meant as a wakeup call, the wailing siren, the gunshot that tells people they are in an emergency zone . . . He [Farrell] wrote with a political, personal, and artistic intensity’ and mixed modernist experiment with progressive politics.87 As Eric White explains, Farrell’s modernist experiment foregrounded, ‘from a deliberately rigid nativist perspective’, like Putnam’s readies, a way of thinking that he sought to alienate the reader away from facilely accepting. Farrell wanted to get inside the head of those working-class Irish immigrants more fully articulated in the Studs Lonigan trilogy.88 The anti-Semitism in the volume must also be read in context. For example, Hilaire Hiler’s parents, under the threat of anti-Semitism in the United States, where Jews were still considered racially alien, rather than White, changed their surname, Harzberg, to a less identifiably German-Jewish surname. Hiler later returned to the United States in 1936, when it became untenable to live in Europe with the Nazis on the rise. Reuben Menken had changed his first name to Rue for similar reasons. The contributors to the volume were outsiders, often in exile, and not many were in Paris, or the south of France, by choice. These expatriates included communists in forced exile, after being deported or fleeing, since the United States entered World War I, gay men fired from American universities, and Jews under constant threat by racist governments, on both sides of the Atlantic, as non-White aliens with international allegiances. The progressive agenda had already begun among the expatriate avant-garde, and the readies project’s techno-futurist socially progressive media ecology may speak to contemporary audiences in the third decade of the twenty-first century.

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The readies project was part of this streamlined modernism, but also sprang from Bob Brown’s biography. In The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown, the first (and as of 2019 the only) biography of Robert Carlton Brown (1886–1959), I track Brown’s development of the machine back through his entire life and over multiple careers; in this facsimile of the original Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine, Brown explains that its development emerged over decades and through his life as a publisher, writer and voracious, even machine-like, reader of every imaginable text, from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons to stockmarket ticker tape.89 One of the readies contributors to this volume,

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Walter Lowenfels, wrote a eulogy for Brown that illuminates, in one line, the breadth of Brown’s work and adventures: ‘Bob had been not just one person, but Bob1, Bob2, Bob3, etc.’90 Reading the readies in the context of the editor’s and contributors’ biographies also highlights the many familial and amorous relationships among the contributors.91 Four parent and adult child pairings appear in the volume, as well as various romantic connections, including pairs of gay men. Bob Brown, like Kay Boyle and other parents among the modernists, was not an exemplary parent, but his work and life were all about family and long-lasting circles of familial friends; his was not a solitary life, and the scene among the contributors was open to experimentation and inclusiveness in life and art. Speaking to that inclusiveness, one contributor, the journalist Wambly Bald, described how ‘almost every Left Bank writer we can think of – good, bad, and hopeless – will be represented in Bob Brown’s forthcoming anthology’.92 Six months later, in January 1932, Bald returned in his Chicago Tribune column to writing about Brown’s machine, and in condensed form summarised the readies project and its ultimate goal:

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Bob offers the world a reading machine. It functions like a Wall Street ticker: words are to be printed in microscopic type on a winding spool of tape and read under a strong glass. Books will no longer be necessary, and 100,000 words may be concealed in a hollow tooth. Bob hopes by this process to speed up reading. If only he could speed up the human brain, the machine would be a wow, but it is not that modern.93

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The potential ability of modern technology, then and now, to speed up, condense and intensify thinking was both the goal and the sardonic target of the modernists. In a letter to James Farrell, Brown described his machine’s ability to give a ‘face-lift to the art of reading . . . to take writing out of books, where too long it had been bottled up’ in order to recover the ‘art-quality of writing’.94 The Readies collection created a sensation, or at least a fun distraction, among the expatriate avant-garde, who greeted the readies with enthusiasm. However, because there were no subsequent editions until now, the Readies collection, and Brown’s reputation itself, would pass into obscurity. The two other strikes against Brown – his success in popular writing and the great genre variability in his writing – have made it challenging for scholars to find a place for him in either modernist avant-garde circles or popular culture studies of pulps, movies and cookbooks. Brown’s work as both popular

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writer and avant-garde innovator makes those genre lines, generally used to divide publishers’ lists of books as well as scholars’ areas of study, an irrelevancy. With this new edition of Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine, with this new introduction and essay on its contributors, the Readies’ significance in literary and artistic history and technology’s impact on reading might become more apparent outside the circle of specialised scholars and poets. The plans for the machine, and the demonstration of the readies style of writing, promoted in the few years the Browns spent in Europe from 1928 to early 1932, allude to a wide array of similar projects and to a possible future of reading. This introduction began with my memories of the scene of my discovery of the original edition of this book, and it concludes here by describing the Surreal associations surrounding the original publication of RFBBM, the unveiling of the prototype of the machine, and the contexts of its discovery. Although the reading machine prototype disappeared, and the entire readies project languished in obscurity until now, this new edition might allow for our rediscovery of this crucially important Surrealist project. This paragraph from my biography of Bob Brown sets the scene of this rediscovery:

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The condensation of time and geography, the folds and overlaps in simple chronologies, and the revolutionary poetic intensity gave those few years the feel of a jazzy cubist painting by their good friend Stuart Davis, a Surrealist story told from multiple perspectives and mixes of genres. It was as if Mrs. Dalloway, the eponymous character from Virginia Woolf’s novel, preparing for her party, stopped off to visit a print shop that telescoped into a Surrealist game: an automatic reading spun out by a machine, one that responded to others in the avant-garde circles, including Duchamp’s machines and ready-mades, Stein’s abbreviated writing style, Marinetti’s machinaphilic poetry, Tzara’s transcriptions, Léger’s film about machines, Antheil’s music by machines, and the entire transition group’s call for a revolution of the wor(l)d. Like much else in Bob Brown’s life, the reading machine prototype was lost, and never seen again.95

Notes 1. Bob Brown, ‘Appendix’, in Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine, ed. Bob Brown (Cagnes-sur-Mer: Roving Eye Press, 1931), pp. 153–208 (p. 178). The anthology is cited as RFBBM hereafter. Although the contributors got their copies at a New Year’s Eve party on 31 December 1931, whether it was after midnight or not, only the revellers know.

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The 300 copies of the book itself weren’t for sale to the public until early in 1932. The Sackner Archive (not to be confused with the unrelated Sackler collection) later moved to apartments in Miami – a penthouse, with a second apartment holding more of the collection. After Ruth passed away in 2016, some of the collection was located at the contemporary art museum in Miami. Craig Saper, Networked Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Craig Saper, Networking Artists & Poets: Assemblings from the Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1997). Presented in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title at the University of Pennsylvania Rosenwald Gallery Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, 17 April–27 June 1997,

(last accessed 29 April 2019). In spite of its value to collectors, and its importance in modernism, the book is not well known outside of a small, but growing, circle of scholars. See for example the ‘Winter 2018’ rare book catalogue of James S. Jaffe Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Literary Art. Jaffe’s book-seller’s catalogue lists an original edition of RFBBM for $3,500. The value will certainly increase. Brown had published his ‘Eyes on the Half-Shell’, with his full name, Robert Carlton Brown, a year before Apollinaire’s ‘Calligrammes’ experiments (published in 1918); Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes; poèmes de la paix et da la guerre, 1913–1916, with a portrait of the author by Pablo Picasso (Paris: Mercure de France, 1918). Like Brown, Apollinaire saw his visual poetry as announcing a shift from traditional typography to cinematic possibilities applied to verse. Compare that date to Brown’s earliest visual poem, ‘Eyes on the Half-Shell’, in Marcel Duchamp’s The Blind Man 2 (May 1917), p. 3. The poem, appearing on the same page as another poem by Brown, is the lead piece in the issue before Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph of R. Mutt’s ‘Fountain’ on page 4, and just after the advertisement for the Blind Man’s Ball, of which Brown was the impresario, to raise money for Duchamp’s publication. Brown’s crucial involvement in Duchamp’s early work and events is largely unknown, and deserves a study of its own. William Carlos Williams, unpublished letter to Charles Henri Ford, 25 March 1937, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, (last accessed 29 April 2019). William Carlos Williams, ‘Readie Pome’, in RFBBM, p. 114. Hilaire Hiler, ‘Preface’, in RFBBM, pp. 5–8 (p. 7). Brown, ‘Appendix’, pp. 177–8 (in this volume).

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11. Bob Brown, The Readies, ed. and with an introduction by Craig Saper (Baltimore: Roving Eye Press, 2014), pp. 28–9. 12. Saper, Networked Art, p. 40. 13. For a complete and detailed description of Bob, Rose and Cora Brown’s publications and multiple careers, see Craig Saper, The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown: A Real-Life Zelig Who Wrote His Way Through the 20th Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). To give you a sense of some of the Browns’ publications after 1931, one might begin the list with Bob’s contribution to an anthology of Surrealist work like the 1932 Americans Abroad and, in 1933, essays and poems in American Mercury, American Spectator, Americana, Panorama, and other magazines. He also published two booklets, including Houdini, with Kathleen Tankersley Young’s Modern Editions Press in 1933. In 1934, Cora, Rose and Bob Brown published The Wine Cook Book, Being a Selection of Incomparable Recipes from France, from the Far East, from the South and Elsewhere, All of Which Owe Their Final Excellence to the Skillful Use of Wine in Their Preparation. In 1937, Bob was the uncredited writer for a story treatment for the Hollywood movie comedy Nobody’s Baby. In 1942, Rose and Bob wrote Amazing Amazon. And this is just a small selection from the decade after RFBBM appeared. 14. Tristan Tzara, Faites vos jeux, in Les Feuilles libres 31 (March–April 1923), n.p., as quoted in Mary Ann Caws, The Poetry of Dada and Surrealism: Aragon, Breton, Tzara, Eluard, and Desnos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 17. 15. See the image of Burgess and his ‘Nonsense Machine No. 2’ in The Bookman: A Magazine of Literature and Life, 1912, pp. 13–14. For a reading of the effects in Duchamp’s optical toys, the rotoreliefs, see Claire Voon, ‘Duchamp’s Spinning Optical Experiments’, Hyperallergic, 26 September 2016, (last accessed 29 April 2019). For more on how Roussel’s work influenced, and inspired, the Surrealists, and to read examples of this work, see Manuel Borja-Villel, João Fernandes and François Piron, Locus Solus. Impressions de Raymond Roussel, exhibition catalogue, 25 October 2011 to 27 February 2012, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Oporto: Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2011). For an example of Roussel’s proto-readies writing, see Raymond Roussel, with Mark Ford and Henri-A. Zo (translators), New Impressions of Africa (Nouvelles Impressions D’afrique) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 16. For more on conceptual art and writing, see Robert Bailey, Art & Language International: Conceptual Art between Art Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Daniel Marzona, Conceptual Art (Cologne: Taschen,

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2006); Sarah Cook (ed.), Information (London and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery, MIT Press, 2016). For the specific discussion of Brown’s GEMS, see Craig Dworkin, Reading the Illegible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003). Eugène Jolas, ‘The Machine and “Mystic America”’, transition: an international quarterly for creative experiment 19–20 (June 1930), p. 379. Murray Godwin, ‘A Day in the Life of a Robot: A Prose Pantomime in Four Parts’, transition 13 (Summer 1928), pp. 148–71. Brown, ‘Appendix’, p. 179. See also The Readies (Bad Ems: Roving Eye Press, 1930), p. 31. Brown, The Readies, ed. Saper, p. 29. See also Bob Brown, ‘Readies’, in In Transition: A Paris Anthology (Writing and Art from Transition Magazine, 1927–30), introduction by Noel Riley Fitch (New York: Anchor Books Doubleday, 1990); originally published in the June 1930 issue of transition, pp. 59–65. Wambly Bald, On the Left Bank, 1929–1933, ed. Benjamin Franklin V (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987), p. 89. For evidence that the sensation of movement and live action in a movie is not based on ‘persistence of vision’, see Joseph and Barbara Anderson, ‘The Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited’, Journal of Film and Video 45.1 (Spring 1993), pp. 3–12. Boris Eikhenbaum, ‘Problems of Cinema Stylistics’, in Herbert Eagle (ed. and trans.), Russian Formalist Film Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), pp. 55–80. See also the same article, ‘Problems of Film Stylistics’, trans. Thomas Aman, Screen 15.3 (Autumn 1974), pp. 7–32. See also Ronald Levaco, ‘Eikhenbaum, Inner Speech and Film Stylistics’, Screen 15.4 (Winter 1974–75), pp. 47–58, and Paul Willemen, ‘Reflections on Eikhenbaum’s Concept of Internal Speech in the Cinema’, Screen 15.4 (Winter 1974–75), pp. 59–70. See also Boris Eikhenbaum, ‘The Theory of the “Formal Method”’, in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (trans. and intro.), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), pp. 99–141. Of course, Vygotsky’s theories are somewhat different to how those appear in film theory. In Vygotsky’s work, inner speech is more like a flickering word than the word-image in later film theory. See for comparison Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962 [1934]). Eikhenbaum, ‘Problems of Film Stylistics’, pp. 13–14. J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 62. Bob Brown, ‘Optical Balloon Juice’, Contempo: A Bob Brown Issue, 31 August 1932, p. 1. David Bordwell, ‘Eisenstein’s Epistemology: A Response’, Screen 16.1 (March 1975), pp. 142–3.

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28. See Emily Tall, ‘Eisenstein on Joyce: Sergei Eisenstein’s Lecture on James Joyce at the State Institute of Cinematography, 1 November 1934’, James Joyce Quarterly 24.2 (Winter 1987), pp. 133–42. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. See also Levaco, ‘Eikhenbaum, Inner Speech and Film Stylistics’. 31. Paul Schrader, ‘Game Changers: Editing’, Film Comment, November– December 2014 (New York: Film Society of Lincoln Center), (last accessed 30 April 2019). 32. Gregory L. Ulmer, ‘Textshop Psychoanalysis’, in G. L. Ulmer and V. Vitanza (eds), Electracy: Gregory L. Ulmer’s Textshop Experiments (Aurora: Davies Group Publishers, 2015), pp. 94–5. See also Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond (London: Routledge, 1992). 33. Martin Hilbert and Priscila López, ‘The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information’, Science 332.6025 (2011), pp. 60–5, . 34. Paul Stephens, ‘Pocket Poets’ (an interview with Paul Stephens by David Foote), Guernica: A Magazine of Global Art and Politics, 17 December 2012, (last accessed 30 April 2019). 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Kay Boyle, Whit Burnett, Hart Crane, Caresse Crosby, Harry Crosby, Martha Foly, Stuart Gilbert, A. L. Gillespie, Leigh Hoffman, Eugène Jolas, Elliot Paul, Douglas Rigby, Theo Rurtra, Robert Sage, Harold J. Salemson and Laurence Vail, ‘Proclamation’, in In Transition: A Paris Anthology (Writing and Art from Transition Magazine, 1927–30), introduction by Noel Riley Fitch (New York: Anchor Books Doubleday, 1990); originally published in the June 1929 issue of transition, p. 19. 38. Bob Brown, 1450–1950, ed. and with an introduction by Craig Saper, new facsimile edition (Baltimore: Roving Eye Press, 2015). See also other republications including Brown’s GEMS: An Uncensored Anthology, ed. and with an introduction by Craig Saper, new facsimile edition (Baltimore: Roving Eye Press, 2015); Words, ed. and with an introduction by Craig Saper, new facsimile edition (Baltimore: Roving Eye Press, 2014); The Readies, ed. and with an introduction by Craig Saper, new facsimile edition (Baltimore: Roving Eye Press, 2014). 39. Jerome Rothenberg, Revolution of the Word: A New Gathering of American Avant Garde Poetry, 1914–1945 (New York: Seabury Press, 1974). Selections and explanations on page 9, with a readie by Bob Brown, and page 144 with Abraham Gillespie’s readie.

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40. Douglas Messereli, ‘Language Lessons: The Poetry of Bob Brown’, Hyperallergic, 3 January 2015, (last accessed 30 April 2019). 41. Brown, ‘Optical Balloon Juice’, p. 1. 42. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 3–27. 43. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 154. See also Paul Armstrong, How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). 44. Anna Ioanes, ‘Feeling and Form: New Theories of Affect and Aesthetics on C. Namwali Serpell, Seven Modes of Uncertainty; renée c. hoogland, A Violent Embrace: Art and Aesthetics after Representation; and Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects’, Minnesota Review 89 (2017), p. 58. 45. Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 325. 46. For an overview of the digital humanities, see Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). For an overview of the same potential ‘baggage’ that Michael North finds in Brown’s readies and the modernists in general, see, for example, Miriam Posner, ‘What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of the Digital Humanities’, in Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (eds), Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 32–42. 47. Michael North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. v. 48. Jessica Pressman, Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 56. 49. Ibid. 50. Paul Stephens, The Poetics of Information Overload (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 51. Eric White, The Avant-Gardes and Speculative Technology (AGAST) Project, Oxford Brookes University. The AGAST Project recreates the inventions of experimental twentieth-century writers and artists using Augmented Reality (AR), an emergent media technology that mixes digital data and real-time video. 52. Dworkin, Reading the Illegible. 53. N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (South Bend: Notre Dame Press, 2008). 54. Amaranth Borsuk, The Book (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). Borsuk discusses Brown on pages 164–8 in chapter 3, ‘The Book as Idea’.

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55. Stephen Pasqualina, ‘“That Can Never Be History”: Gertrude Stein and the Speed of the Reading Machine’, Modernism/Modernity 26.1 (January 2019), pp. 19–42 (p. 20). Quoting Gertrude Stein, ‘Composition as Explanation’, in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 518, 516. 56. North, Camera Works. 57. Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery (eds), Imagining Language: An Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 58. Rothenberg, Revolution of the Word, and Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visual Language of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). See especially McGann, Black Riders, p. 85. 59. Dworkin, Reading the Illegible. 60. Hugh Ford, Published in Paris: American and British Writers, Printers, and Publishers in Paris, 1920–1939, foreword by Janet Flanner (Yonkers: Pushcart Press, 1980). 61. Adelaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (eds), New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 14. 62. Pressman, Digital Modernism, p. 70. 63. Ibid. p. 60. 64. Ibid. p. 69. 65. Ibid. p. 191, n. 11. 66. McGann, Black Riders, p. 107. 67. Ibid. p. 108. 68. Ibid. p. 109. 69. For a discussion of Putnam’s flirtation with the Italian fascists, see Mark Cirino, ‘The Nasty Mess: Hemingway, Italian Fascism, and the New Review Controversy of 1932’, The Hemingway Review 33.2 (Spring 2014), pp. 20–47 (pp. 39–43). 70. Ibid. p. 42. 71. Countee Cullen, ‘Incident’, in Color (New York: Harper and Bros, 1925), p. 15. 72. Gwendolyn Brooks, ‘the self-solace’, in Maud Martha (New York: Harper and Row, 1953), collected in Blacks (Chicago: Third World Press, 1953; ninth printing of Blacks in 2001), pp. 276–87. Spike Lee (dir.), Blackkklansman (Universal City: Universal Pictures, 10 August 2018). Both Brooks’s short-story and Lee’s movie deal with hateful language use by demonstrating how the n-word and, in Lee’s movie, many other racial and anti-Semitic slurs oppress and threaten Blacks (and Jews). 73. The distinctions among parody, satire and what we now call hate speech are important to grasp in order to fully appreciate my argument about the Readies contributors’ politics and ethics. Parody, when an author mockingly exaggerates a style, form or genre, steals a wellknown form, like a collection of the ‘gems’ of poems well suited for children and young adults. The parodic form adds an element, like

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heavy-handed censorship, especially to poetry that might influence children and young minds. So, for example, Bob Brown’s GEMS printed literary gems, poems suitable for children and adults, but in his version, there are censored words making it a salacious parody in the minds of the readers, who can’t help but fill in the apparently offensive word. Satire uses similar strategies to mock specific people or the content of specific speeches, texts or media. Irony is the key to satire, which works only when the audience or reader recognises that the speaker or writer means the opposite to what is said. Finally, people who employ hate speech often, especially in the twenty-first century, claim that they are ‘just joking’, and that they are ‘entertainers’, but when provocative language suggests a group or class is unacceptable, unclean and a threat, then the speech is neither satire nor parody but hateful vindictiveness. With parody we laugh at well-known styles and formats; with satire at the absurdity of a message’s content; and with hate speech at the victim of oppression, harassment or violence. Parody and satire stand up to the powerful with humorous deflation; hate speech punches down at the powerless from the inflated egos and self-congratulatory smirks of the powerful. German Lopez, ‘Ta-Nehisi Coates has an incredibly clear explanation for why white people shouldn’t use the n-word’, Vox, 9 November 2017, (last accessed 30 April 2019): ‘When you’re white in this country, you’re taught that everything belongs to you. You think you have a right to everything. . . . You’re conditioned this way. It’s not because your hair is a texture or your skin is light. It’s the fact that the laws and the culture tell you this. You have a right to go where you want to go, do what you want to do, be however – and people just got to accommodate themselves to you.’ Suzanne W. Churchill, ‘“Mammy of the South / Silence Your Mouth”: The Silencing of Race Radicalism in Contempo Magazine’, Modernism/Modernity Print+, volume 1, cycle 1 (2 March 2016), . See for example Donna Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, in Bran Nicol (ed.), Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), pp. 396–420; see also N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See also Andrei Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Daphne Carr, ‘Giving ’em the go-bye’ (in this volume), pp. 130–2 (p. 131).

77.

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78. Bald, On the Left Bank, 1929–1933, p. 67. This discussion is from Bald’s ‘La Vie de Bohème’ column in the Chicago Tribune, 19 May 1931, p. 4. Firbank’s novels were included in Susan Sontag’s ‘canon of camp’ in her ‘Notes on “Camp”’, in Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964), pp. 277–8. 79. Bald, On the Left Bank, 1929–1933, p. 4. 80. Alexander Howard, Charles Henri Ford: Between Modernism and Postmodernism (Historicizing Modernism series), series eds Erik Tonning and Matthew Feldman (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), p. 224. 81. Charles Henri Ford, ‘Letter from the Provinces’, pp. 132–3 in this volume. 82. William Wright, Harvard’s Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), p. 98. 83. Ibid. p. 99. 84. Axton Clark, ‘Rain on the Mesa’, ‘New Mexico Processional’, as part of the two-poem series ‘Plateau Poems’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, December 1933, pp. 125, 126–7. Axton Clark, ‘Autumn Sonnets’, ‘Desert Song for Sleep’, ‘Deep Sea’, as part of a three-poem series on ‘The Meadowed Year’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, October 1935, pp. 16–17, 17, 18. Axton Clark, ‘Tahoe Remembrance’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, September 1937, pp. 308–9. 85. Eric White, Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 187. 86. K. T. Young, [handwritten letter to Richard Johns, editor of Pagany: A Native Quarterly] (undated), (hand-numbered) 2. In the Modern Editions Press pamphlet series one collection, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware. 87. Ann Douglas, ‘Introduction’, in James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy Comprising Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), p. x. 88. Eric White, Avant-Gardes, Technology, and the Everyday (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2020). 89. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (New York: Claire Marie, 1914). See also Joshua Shuster, ‘The Making of “Tender Buttons”: Gertrude Stein’s Subjects, Objects, and the Illegible’, Jacket 2, 21 April 2011, (last accessed 30 April 2019). 90. Walter Lowenfels, eulogy for Bob Brown, collected in To an Imaginary Daughter (New York: Horizon Press, 1964), p. 82. 91. You Gotta Live!, a musical (directed by Maxi Wardcantori; book, lyrics and music by Sam Saper) based on Craig Saper’s biography of Bob Brown’s life and career, premiered in May 2019 just as this new edition of RFBBM was going to press. The music, in over thirty songs, and book of the musical stress the connections among left-wing liberation (with the avant-garde art and writing focused on anti-war and antioppression), the modernists’ experimental lifestyles (especially feminist

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and LGBTQ rights) and the defiant experimental painting, poetry and intermedia art that they produced. This RFBBM volume supports the musical’s appreciation of the jubilant and defiant ‘revolution of the wor(l)d’ of the contributors to this volume. Bald, On the Left Bank 1929–1933, p. 86. Ibid. p. 19. Edgar Marquess Branch, Dorothy Farrell and James T. Farrell, A Paris Year: Dorothy and James T. Farrell, 1931–1932 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998), p. 62. Saper, The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown, p. 306.

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04/10/19 4:45 PM

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04/10/19 4:45 PM

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6128_Saper & White.indd 63

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6128_Saper & White.indd 65

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6128_Saper & White.indd 69

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6128_Saper & White.indd 70

04/10/19 4:45 PM

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6128_Saper & White.indd 71

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6128_Saper & White.indd 72

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6128_Saper & White.indd 74

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6128_Saper & White.indd 75

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6128_Saper & White.indd 78

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6128_Saper & White.indd 79

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04/10/19 4:45 PM

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6128_Saper & White.indd 81

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6128_Saper & White.indd 84

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6128_Saper & White.indd 89

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04/10/19 4:45 PM

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6128_Saper & White.indd 91

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6128_Saper & White.indd 92

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04/10/19 4:45 PM

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Invent(st)ory: The Contributors and Their Readies

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Craig J. Saper

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This alphabetical list of the original contributors to this volume supplements the introduction to this new edition, and reading both will give a fuller illustration of the individual contributors and their possible contexts of discovery. Some of the contributors are well known, especially among modernist scholars; some are until now completely unknown. In some cases, there are multiple biographical, or autobiographical, essays or books on individual contributors as well as subfields devoted to studies of their art and writing. In those cases, the endnotes suggest a few of those sources and resources. In every case, one can imagine future biographies of each and every contributor as well as many types of studies of, or inspiration from, their art and writing. These thumbnail sketches signpost a few salient notes, textual tags or intriguing details about the contributors, especially in relation to their readies, in order to allow for entrances, portals, connections and contexts to reading readies.

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‘Flow Gently’, pp. 60–1 Wambly Bald’s ‘La Vie de Bohème’ column for the Chicago Tribune, which ran from 1929 to 1933, reported on the Left Bank bohemian scene among the expatriates in Paris and the south of France. The series included two columns dedicated to Bob Brown’s machine and one more on Brown’s other experimental poetry as discussed in the introduction to this volume. Bald, one of the first to write about Samuel Beckett, was friends with many modernist writers like Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway. He would report on the expatriates’ parties and the modernist scene with sly and

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sarcastic humour while, nevertheless, joining in with the experiments in writing and living – and by ‘living’ Bald meant drinking and laughing. Like many of those reporting on the cultural scene in Paris, Bald mixed his smirking ironic reports of the scene with, nevertheless, enthusiastically participating in the parties and projects like the Readies. Like the Browns, Bald arrived late in the decade, around 1929. He later published some of his articles, often in truncated form, in On the Left Bank 1929–1933, which demonstrates a similar satirical wit with a deflating of anyone there who took themselves too seriously. His columns also play along with the expatriates, all to put you in the middle of the conversation at, for example, an art exhibit, movie screening, performance, studio visit, or at a writers’ and artists’ salon gathering. As a teenager, Bald had suffered through homelessness and poverty; he rode the trains, and escaped life on the run through his writing. As with other contributions to this volume, instead of reading Wambly Bald’s readie as merely sexual and sexist, one could read it as a criticism of sexism and sexual assault. Bald tells the story of a sexual assault on a teenage girl, travelling as if a boy. The initial main character, Lefty, grabbed ‘Blind baggage’, to ride for free on the boxcar baggage carrier of a train, in Baton Rouge. After confronting a kid who refuses to talk or acknowledge Lefty, while on the ‘one-foot porch’ between the baggage car and the engine car, Lefty grabs the kid, only to discover he’s a she. Lefty assaults her while ‘the water under bridge dark quiet flowwed gently under bridge flowed nice and gently under trail of flying bang a de bang very fast and Lefty smooched a gently crème de flow getly of my dreams sugarsqueeze tensedeath girl’; the ‘other hero’, now named Joan or Miss Trilby by Lefty, fights back: ‘–Joan Kicktoehigh on Leftys. Doubleup))) Arms high and Joan quick to shove poor Lefty backwards horror and back drop down :: :: :: Joan shoves male clear he drops to hell—Joan grips iron rail and looks down death below is water flowing gently’ [sic]. The point of view, and identification, has shifted from Lefty to Joan somewhere during the attack. The title, ‘Flow Gently’, has an ironic twist; the train is loud, bumpy and ‘de bang a de band the train like hell’, and later a literal payoff of Lefty meeting his ‘death below is water flowing gently’.1 The bohemian scene began to collapse soon after Brown published this volume of readies. Like many others leaving France in the early 1930s, Bald left in 1933. The party over, the tone of writing shifted from wry humour to tragic seriousness.

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John Banting

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‘Bouquets’, pp. 113–14 John Banting is best known as a painter and artist associated with the Vorticists and the Bloomsbury Group and later with the Surrealists. Banting, also active as a writer and editor, contributed to Nancy Cunard’s Negro: An Anthology with ‘The Dancing of Harlem’, and stayed with Cunard in Harlem while dancing and thinking about dance. His essay in Cunard’s volume reflected on gentrification and representations of Harlem. ‘So much has been written about Harlem that it might seem superfluous to write more. It has been exploited brazenly enough and, of course, with much inaccuracy, representing it as entirely “night-life” quarter––every other house being a “speak,” a “cabaret,” or a “buffet flat,” and entirely missing the normal business and family life, and the different struggles of both “bourgeoisie” and workers.’2 He vehemently opposed racism, and did not avoid considering it, as many high modernists supposedly did; he advocated queer sexuality, and he was an art editor of the communist Our Time monthly in the early 1940s. In the same year that Banting contributed to the readies project, he also produced an edition of forty-five abstract linocut prints, Explosion (1931). The print has a deep red to burnt yellow palate and cubes and circles filled with colours; the negative non-inked space consists of snowflake-like lozenge shapes falling between geometric angular lines and hatch marks. Banting, Nancy Cunard and the poet Brian Howard were inseparable in the late 1920s. With Howard he helped invent the ‘Bruno Hat’ hoax around the same time he first learned of Brown’s readies project. Banting played on his art world connections, had Howard paint some pictures, and they got patrons to help stage a London art exhibition by a supposedly newly discovered, but currently unknown, German painter named Bruno Hat (they had a friend impersonate the artist at the opening). To these artists and writers, the hoax and satirical spoof as a strategy of cultural criticism played a role in much of their cavalier attitude and work.

Charles Beadle ‘Hashish’, pp. 105–7; ‘Voyage’, pp. 107–8; ‘Small Body’, pp. 108–10 Charles Beadle, whom Bob Brown had known as a pulp fiction adventure writer, had moved to Paris long before the other expatriates,

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famously experimented with hashish, and wrote satirical novels about the expatriate tourists visiting bohemia, orgies and opium dens, such as his The Esquimau of Montparnasse (1928).3 He also placed stories in pulp magazines, like Adventure,4 and his increasingly risqué novels, filled with sex and drugs, supported him at least into the 1940s, when he disappeared into a cloud of obscurity. Beadle achieves the hallucinogenic effect in ‘Hashish’ by creating a sense of one image of, say, an elephant morphing into the next, a Buddha.

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‘June-Twelve-Dirge’, pp. 80–2 The American Paul Bowles, although now most famous as a ‘gay writer’, a label he did not like (and he had an unconventional marriage to a lesbian writer, Jane Bowles), was also known in the 1920s as a composer and as Aaron Copland’s protégé, lover, and later life-long friend. He also collaborated with Kurt Schwitters, Tristan Tzara and, later, with Merce Cunningham, Orson Welles and Tennessee Williams. He composed scores for Lillian Hellman and Elia Kazan. In all, Bowles created 150 original musical compositions for Broadway, Hollywood and for avant-garde productions. He translated a play by Jean-Paul Sartre. He was also a journalist for the Paris Herald Tribune. As a seventeen-year-old, already part of the expatriate scene, he published in transition in 1927. Still a young man in his early twenties, he published a chapbook of poetry in Kathleen Tankersley Young’s Modern Editions series. After Bowles moved to Tangiers, Morocco, in the late 1940s, he wrote his novel The Sheltering Sky (1949), set in Tangiers, which Bernardo Bertolucci adapted as a movie. He inspired and influenced the Beat generation writers, especially Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and taught writing workshops in Tangiers.

Kay Boyle ‘Change of Life’, pp. 37–8; ‘Landscape for Wyn Henderson’, pp. 39–41 Kay Boyle contributed the readies ‘Change of Life’ and ‘Landscape for Wyn Henderson’. She later wrote ‘A Comeallye for Robert Carlton Brown’ (1938), in the style of a folk song, with refrains; it resembled a a traditional Irish comeallye.5 Married at the time to

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Laurence Vail, and handling, between them, many children, Brown described children everywhere in the midst of prolific writing and regular parties. According to Bob Brown in his unpublished notes, Boyle wrote around 150 letters to him and, likewise, he wrote to her regularly; Sandra Whipple Spanier, in her collected Boyle letters, includes a handful of these letters to Bob around the time he began compiling this collection of readies. The letters to Bob, set within the context of Boyle’s prolific letter writing to, or about, just about everyone involved in those modernist circles, chart the importance of Boyle’s and Brown’s mutual respect and influence on each other. Letter writing was a major part of Boyle’s life, and through her letters to Bob one can see how they advised each other on their fiction writing projects more than about their more experimental writing. They traded drafts of stories, and shared advice about which magazines might buy those stories. They trusted each other for honest advice. Boyle, for example, wrote a note to Bob about a story she was working on: ‘Bob, don’t show this story to anyone. It’s rotten. I thought you would tell me how bad it is and then I won’t write any more like it.’6 Boyle also advised Brown on his popular writing projects and wrote to him, ‘From the point of view of great popularity, you might have to change the personal side of the story.’7 In another letter about a story Bob had shared, she found it ‘so good and [it] has such suspense, plot, interest, and . . . we [her and Laurence Vail] both enjoyed it breathlessly as to how it would turn out’.8 Boyle, working on a novel with a gay protagonist, later published as I Address You Privately,9 wrote to Bob about her frustration with writing. She complained that although she thought Bob would ‘like the next novel . . . I know this homo book is too over-written . . . and probably no-one will want it anyway’.10 Mostly, Boyle worked all of the time, whether drunk, sober or in the middle of a party, in order to make money. Boyle wrote to Bob, ‘I’m working harder than ever––trying to make some money on a bestseller which will appear under someone else’s name. No faith in it, really, but MUST make desperate attempts in every direction . . .’11 During the time Brown began considering the plans for the reading machine and the readies project, Boyle lived in the Côte d’Azur village of Villefranche-sur-Mer. She lived close to Marcel Duchamp, and the Browns, as an interlude from their home in Cagnessur-Mer, occasionally decamped to Villefranche-sur-Mer, to spend time with Bob’s old friend Duchamp, and his new advisor, Boyle. It was in Villefranche that the Browns met with Charlie Chaplin, Jack

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Dempsey, Emma Goldman, whom Rose Brown had worked with in the 1910s, and other visiting, or exiled, celebrities. Bob would take their visits as an opportunity to exchange stories or parts of novels with Boyle.12 A few years later, in 1936, Boyle included work by both Rose and Bob Brown in her anthology 365 Days, with a 300-word, one-page story for each day of a year.13 When Boyle eventually returned to the United States, she became increasingly political. In the 1950s, The New Yorker forced her to resign, after she had worked there for nearly six years, because of her radical positions, and she was also blacklisted from writing for other magazines. She continued to write anti-war, anti-imperialist articles in the 1960s and found a new following. She was in the year of the readies project Bob Brown’s best friend, and like the others in this volume she combined Surrealist strategies, radical politics, satirical wit, a campiness and a joie de vivre.

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‘Two men 7 Duck no Luck’, p. 130 Bob’s cousin, Clare Lahman Brackett, was the president of the National Machine Products Company of Detroit. Between 1930 and 1932 Brackett and an engineer from his company, Albert Stoll, tried to develop plans for Bob Brown’s machine. Although the cousins were close as children, they seemed to go in different directions. It is difficult for readers to imagine a Detroit-based company president earnestly participating in an avant-garde experiment among a group of bohemian expatriates living in the south of France. Their relationship was analogous to a bohemian artist collaborating with a tech mogul in the twenty-first century on a seemingly wild and impractical idea for an app. Brackett’s readie narrates a scene of middle-aged fishermen in the muck with decoy ducks near Detroit, in sight of the Ambassador Bridge and the city lights. The bridge was completed in 1929, between the time when the Browns proposed the idea and the time when they published the collection and built the prototype in 1931. The bridge, greeted as a modernist masterpiece combining Art Deco style with the Gothic, had twists that thrilled the modernists. The bridge was the largest international suspension bridge in the world at the time and suggested wild new engineering possibilities. The fishers, in Brackett’s readie, end up perhaps robbed, with ‘no luck’ with either the ducks or the women they meet, and with only faded glory from their days as Civil War generals, now ‘private

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at home’. It is a domestic scene, neither phallogocentric nor racist, and humorously critical of these bald-headed ball-bellied fishers who come home empty-handed. Brackett’s awareness of the mechanics of the readies leads to some interesting hyphenations, word choices and motifs, like in this streaming chunk of text: ‘Wild-rice cat-tails celery reeds’ with the hyphenated cattails to match the wild-rice. The realist details of cattails, wild rice and water celery reeds growing along the Canadian side of the Detroit River’s banks and lake ecosystems also function in the modernist experiment. The word ‘reeds’ puns with ‘reads’, and alludes to the ‘thought webs’ and ‘cob-web thoughts’ that Brackett mentions in the description of the cob-web construction of the bridge in the background of the story’s scene. Perhaps it is overstating its importance to claim that Clare Brackett’s readie, along with Stein’s and Williams’s, is among the most interesting precisely because of Brackett’s familiarity with the engineering of the proposed machine.

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Bob Brown

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‘Appendix’, pp. 153–208 See this edition’s foreword and introduction for a detailed discussion of Brown’s life, plans for the machine, and the invention of the readies.

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‘First Love’, pp. 126–7 Bob’s son, Carlton Brown (Robert Carlton Brown III), eighteen years old at the time, later became a pulp magazine editor and music critic. He once interviewed Elvis Presley, among many other musicians. He wrote an important novel, Brainstorm (1944), a fictionalised account of his time in a mental institution in which he describes his childhood and travels with Bob, and his visit to the south of France among the decadent scene in which his father and Rose lived. He blamed that part of his unsupervised teen years, with the excess of drugs, alcohol, parties and orgies, for his later problems with mental instability and alcoholism. He does not mention the reading machine, or his readie, in his thinly veiled fictionalised account and confessions about his stay in the mental institution. Carlton Brown’s readie describes a sexual encounter that Carlton, decades later, refers to in his thinly veiled autobiographical novel about

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psychological traumas and conflicts. In Brainstorm, Carlton describes the scene in remarkably similar terms as his readie: ‘That summer in Rio, when Mike [the name Carlton gave himself] was fifteen, he went to bed with a woman for the first time. . . . It didn’t go well . . . He was scared, and the room was full of mirrors.’14 Again, as with some of the other readies, reading the story individually portrays something very different from hetero-braggadocio.

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Rose Brown

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‘Dis’, pp. 49–52 Rose Brown, Bob’s wife since 1917, but not Carlton’s mother, contributed a readie as well. Rose was an accomplished writer, and not only co-wrote thirty cookbooks with Cora and Bob – some of which were bestsellers for decades – but also wrote a series of young adult novels and history books about her many years living in Brazil and Latin America. Rose had been active in the political culture in the 1910s in Greenwich Village, including the suffrage, anti-war, and women’s reproductive control and health movements. With Bob and others, including Mina Loy, she fled the United States after the sedition acts threatened their freedom, as President Wilson closed the borders and criminalised anti-war protests. The crucial events involving Rose Brown in the history of art and modernist aesthetics, specifically for Man Ray’s development as a modernist artist, would occur not too long after she had moved to the Village. Alanson Hartpence suggested a group go on a ‘camping tour for a few days into the wild country up the Hudson’ to paint landscapes and commune with nature. ‘Rose and her [first] husband liked the outdoors and asked to go along.’15 At the campsite, Man Ray vividly remembered the scene. ‘Rose [Watson; who would become Rose Brown] and Helen [Hartpence] went down to the brook and bathed. . . . We watched the nude figures moving about through the branches. I thought of Cézanne’s paintings, and made a mental note of the treatment of figures in a natural setting, for future works.’16 He saw Rose running and swimming naked; the image stuck in his head, and he began to think about painting immediate impressions and snapshot images. The scene led Man Ray to embrace a kind of Imagist painting technique in which one paints from memory. This was a radical break from the painting style at the time, which tried to paint from life, not memory. It increasingly led Man Ray to art that involved internal

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memories and motivations. The epiphany that provoked Man Ray to change his process of art making, and the first step to embracing an internally motivated Surrealism, involved this scene with Rose. Rose was aware of the gazing artist, and encouraged the development of the drawn-from-memory technique. Rose’s readie in this volume, ‘Dis’, may find itself dis-covered as a modernist masterpiece that has echoes of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. It’s a stream of consciousness of a woman waiting, in vain, for her philandering husband to return to the boarding house she runs in order to make ends meet and ‘yes–that–was–it–handtomouth–since–elainewasborn – – – fifteen–dollars–aweek–godsaveme–from–loving–HIM’. The woman runs through the day, and realises that her husband has left her; she accounts for everything from the food on the table for ‘HIM’, which they cannot afford, to the clothes she has, the same dress that she wore when her daughter was born, and the clothes she had wished her husband had got her, ‘Paris–dresses–formless–as–yet’. The story ends with her daughter waking up, ‘Mama–why–are– – – – you–crying–does–your–shoulder– hurt= tears–were– – – – – –dropping–where––his–handkerchiefs– had–always–been’. The quality of this readie suggests that Rose’s work deserves much more attention as an important literary achievement.

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‘Giving ’em the go-bye’, pp. 130–2 The Imagist poet Daphne Carr, from Columbia, Missouri, had published, when still a teenager, in Alfred Kreymborg’s Others: A Magazine of New Verse and Harriet Monroe’s The Poetry Journal. Carr also published in the May 1916 issue of Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review, which also included an essay introducing Imagist poetry; Carr not only wrote the two lead poems, but also co-wrote a response to a book review. Daphne, and her husband Michael, explained why they were ‘greatly enraged’ by the dismissive review of Vachel Lindsay’s The Art of the Moving Picture. For the Carrs, motion pictures were not just worthy of being called art, but also had ‘in [them] possibilities of a great art’. Like others in this readies volume, the Carrs saw the truly democratic potential of the movies, and likewise the readies, as ‘it is for all America, for every farm boy, for every little dish-washer as for every millionaire’. So, rather than

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reject movies, they looked forward to poetic, sculptural, hieroglyphic filmmakers to ‘make this art as perfect, as inspiring, as possible, since it has a wider influence, be it good, bad, or indifferent, than any other art in the history of humanity’.17

Axton Clark

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‘No Board: No Train: No Plane’, pp. 128–9 Axton Clark was a doctoral candidate and Assistant Professor at Harvard University (known at that time as Donald Clark), before being fired and expelled in the 1920s when the administration determined he was a homosexual; the introduction to this volume connects this scene to establish a fuller context of the readies project. As a published poet and scholar, Clark taught at the oldest women’s college in the United States, Mills College, located in Oakland, California. At Mills, Clark taught one of the first courses in Cultural Studies; Mills, perhaps coincidentally, has gone on to be a progressive leader in LGBQT rights to this day. Clark later moved to Denver and was librarian at the National Jewish Hospital. After contributing his readie to this volume, he later published a collection of his own poetry in 1933.18 The introduction to this new edition discusses Clark in the context of the intended strategies of the contributors to this volume.

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Nancy Cunard

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‘Dlink’, p. 124 Well known for her Negro: An Anthology,19 published in 1934, a few years after the readies appeared, Nancy Cunard had initially moved to France in the 1920s, where she took over a small press, eventually moved it to Paris, and renamed it Hours Press in honour of her mentor, Virginia Woolf, who was working on Mrs Dalloway (which had the working title The Hours). Cunard eventually established herself as part of the expatriate avant-garde group of publishers that flourished in France in the late 1920s and very early 1930s. She is supposedly fictionalised in a handful of novels, and posed for important Surrealist photographs, paintings and sculptures. She was famous for her iconic glamorous

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fashion with African bangles and bobbed hairstyle, which some say she invented or at least popularised as the height of fashion. John Banting was a close friend, and Cunard was the centre of multiple overlapping circles of friends that blurred the distinctions between races, genders and sexualities.

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Jay Du Von

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‘Practically Idyllic’, pp. 77–9 Jay Du Von was an editor of the Contempo special ‘Bob Brown’ issue. He was also an editor of The New Quarterly, with its first issue (Spring 1934) including contributions by Brown, Ezra Pound, James T. Farrell, Norman Macleod and the theatre theorist Bertolt Brecht. Suzanne Churchill discusses the anti-racist work in some issues of Contempo, and how the editors eventually moved the focus away from the more explicitly political contributions toward including the European modernists. Churchill does not discuss Du Von’s role specifically.20 Du Von also edited Surrealist collections and newsletters. In the mid-1930s, he went on to run, and participate in, a few WPA Writers’ Projects in Iowa, Illinois, and in the midwestern region of the United States.

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‘Sylvester Mc Gullick’, pp. 16–25; ‘Jeff’, pp. 25–30

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‘One of the Many’, pp. 30–6 James T. Farrell, who published one of his first short stories in the anthology, later mentioned to Bob Brown how the readies’ constraints had helped lead to the staccato, short-sentence prose style in the Studs Lonigan trilogy. The very basis of the politically engaged realism grew from experiments usually associated with nonrepresentation writing like Gertrude Stein’s sentences or in much of the readies. Ann Douglas argues that Farrell’s prose and stream-ofconsciousness style suggests an immersive experience in which the

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‘words, while powerful in their own right, also serve as evocations, markers of realities stronger, sharper, than language can convey’.21

Charles Henri Ford

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‘Letter from the Provinces’, pp. 132–3 Charles Henri Ford wrote the first graphically explicit ‘gay novel’, for which he is now best known to the reading public today. At the age of sixteen, still living in his parents’ Mississippi home, he started publishing poetry, and in 1929 he co-edited, with Parker Tyler and Kathleen Tankersley Young, a short-lived but influential poetry magazine, Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms, which Ford had initially subtitled ‘A Bisexual Bi-Monthly’. In its one year of publication, the magazine published Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and James T. Farrell, who all contributed to this readies volume. Blues also published e e cummings, Louis Zukofsky, Witter ‘Hal’ Bynner, Kenneth Rexroth, Horace Gregory, Harry Crosby, Edward Roditi, Erskine Caldwell, H.D. and Joseph Mitchell. Although the poets included represented poetic movements from the loosely defined Objectivists, super-realists, new localists and the transition expatriate group, which contributed to this readies volume, Ford liked the journal’s title as it suggested analogies between the music of the Harlem Renaissance and these new streamlined poetic experiments. After participating in the readies project, Ford would soon leave France for Morocco with Paul Bowles, who had also contributed a readie, and the next year Ford published his novel The Young and Evil (1933) with Obelisk Press. William Carlos Williams wrote the introduction to Ford’s collection of poems The Garden of Disorder and Other Poems (1938) with Europa Press, run by the radical Irish Surrealist George Reavey. Ford and his partner Pavel Tchelitchew sought to find new audiences for Surrealism in their art journal, View; they also published premier monographs on Marcel Duchamp’s works and André Breton’s poems.22

A. Lincoln Gillespie Jr ‘Readie-Soundpiece’, pp. 83–90; ‘Readievices’, pp. 91–2 American Abraham Lincoln Gillespie Jr, nicknamed ‘Linky’ or ‘Link’ from his middle name, moved to Paris from his home in

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Philadelphia in the summer of 1924; he stayed in George Antheil’s apartment. He had been a married schoolteacher until a serious car accident damaged his vision and, to those who knew him, changed his personality. Living with, and absorbing, Antheil’s antics and musical experiments, Gillespie soon began writing, and sometimes speaking, in a super-condensed style that already resembled readies; later, after returning to France and living in Cagnes-sur-Mer, he saw Bob Brown’s machine and readies as the perfect vehicle for his own visio-musical writing experiments and linguistic acrobatics. Whether the Surrealists romanticised his behaviour as intentional automatism, or whether he was interested in condensed associative patterns of writing and speech in spite of his injuries, one can only guess.

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‘Read-o’, p. 76; ‘Eidolon’, pp. 76–7; ‘Of Old’, p. 77 The Holt, Minnesota-based Ben C. Hagglund was best known as a publisher of communist tracts in the 1930s and for writing pro-labour and communist essays and poetry. He was the co-editor, with Jack Conroy, of The Rebel Poet, the Internationale of Song from January 1931 to October 1932, which influenced folk singers like Woodie Guthrie. Hagglund was the publisher of The New Anvil, which appeared in 1939, a few years after The Anvil magazine merged with the Partisan Review. Jack Conroy, the editor, published Langston Hughes, James T. Farrell, William Carlos Williams and others. Hagglund saw in the readies, and Brown’s plans for the machine, a potentially democratising force.

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‘Preface’, pp. 5–8; ‘Hang-Over’, pp. 42–3 The preface writer of the original edition of Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine, Hilaire Hiler, also wrote a readie, ‘Hang-Over’, a flickering Cubist vision of waking up in that unpleasant state. His preface in the facsimile section of this volume describes the contributors as ‘experimental modern writers’, who processed their texts ‘to be read on the reading machine’ (p. 7). Hiler was, like Bob Brown and A. Lincoln Gillespie Jr, another contributor sometimes cited as a co-editor of the original volume, and most of the other

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contributors to this volume, an American expatriate and outsider. Living in Paris since 1919, Hilaire Hiler bought the Jockey nightclub in Montparnasse in 1923 and soon attracted many among the expatriate avant-garde and the tourists looking for a taste of the bohemian scene. He famously painted cartoonish Western scenes and cowboy figures on the walls, and another club owner later hired him to paint two other nightclubs. Although best known now as an important Precisionist painter and muralist, Hilaire Hiler was then known as the owner of the club, where he played jazz piano and saxophone with his pet monkey on his shoulder. After an introduction from Anaïs Nin, he took classes with Otto Rank on psychoanalysis, and also studied colour theory with Wilhelm Ostwald.23 Like Bob Brown, Hiler had also built an important book collection, especially on costumes, which he later listed and described in his co-edited Bibliography of Costume in 1939.24 His editorial decisions in the Readies, rather than his direct commentary, spoke to his interest in the avant-garde art movements of the time, and also suggest his later work in the loose configuration of the Precisionist painters and his participation with the equally loosely configured Objectivist poets.25 The Precisionists often incorporated abstracted machinic shapes in their paintings of urban spaces, especially those involving modern engineering feats. The machine and the readies were, for Hiler, moving toward a geometric visualisation of previously semantic-only words as an analogy for what would become the streamlined abstractions of his later paintings and murals, especially in the spectacular San Francisco Bath House interior walls and colour-wheel ‘Prismatorium’ ceiling. Like Brown, Hiler seemed to do everything everywhere.

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‘A Readie’, pp. 137–8 Meyer Hiler, referred to in the volume as ‘Hiler, pere’ (with ‘père’ appearing without the grave accent over the first e, and also in italics in the list of contributors), had produced a vaudeville show from the proceeds of a jewellery business he had sold, and his readie’s joke-like structure reflects his sensibility. Meyer and Hilaire were not the only parent-child pair included in the volume, and overall the volume has an intimate family-project feel, for better or worse, with family members as well as those who thought of the avant-garde cadre as the family (of outcasts) they chose in exile.

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Sidney Hunt

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‘Morninight Car’, pp. 146–51 Sidney Hunt was the gay British draughtsman, painter, poet and editor of the British art magazine Ray, which was publishing works of the international avant-garde such as Kurt Schwitters and El Lissitzky. His homoerotic illustrations often featured slightly abstracted male nude figures. Hunt also published in many experimental and radical journals, including Jolas’s transition and Ford, Tyler and Young’s Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms. He later built models for the experimental animator Len Lye.

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Richard Johns

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‘Summer Sun’, pp. 93–8 Richard Johns (born Richard Johnson) had begun publishing as a teenager in the mid-1920s in magazines like Bozart, Casanova Jr.’s Tales and Greenwich Village. He soon started his own literary journal, Pagany: A Native Quarterly, begun in 1930, named in honour of William Carlos Williams’s ‘semiautobiographical travel novel A Voyage to Pagany’.26 Johns sought to promote an American modernism, and sought inspiration from Blues, but to the ‘localists and expatriates, the proto-objectivists and most of Blues contributors’ Johns added ‘a spectrum of social realist writers’.27 The experimental modernism mixed with the place-based, and regionalist, socially engaged realism echoed similar seeming contradictions of the readies project between an almost musical staccato telegraphic style, a literal revolutionary movement of the word, and the real pragmatic concerns of making all knowledge easily accessible, and democratic, meeting the readers, eventually, in their homes.

Eugène Jolas ‘Faula and Flona’, pp. 136–7 Eugène Jolas, the experimental writer and, famously, the cofounder and editor of the influential avant-garde transition literary journal in Paris, encouraged and championed the fascination with machine aesthetics that this volume sought to apply to reading and

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writing. Jolas, born in New Jersey to French immigrant parents, later dropped his more American-sounding first names, John George, and kept Eugène, as that sounded more French. The introduction to this new edition of the Readies collection explains Jolas’s importance in announcing and explaining the modernist project, especially in Joyce’s monumental project. Jolas served as an impresario for those expatriate avant-gardists’ experiments, and, for this volume, his manifestoes and writings seem to set the parameters for the readies project. In the same June issue of the modernist magazine transition in which Brown first announced his reading machine, Eugène Jolas declared:

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The mechanical surrounds us like a flood. The machine and its relations to man is doubtless one of the major problems of the age. Ever more accelerated becomes the tempo, ever more whirling are the pistons, ever more violent is the influence of this titanic instrument upon the thoughts and acts of man.28

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Jolas participated in this volume with a readie that echoes James Joyce’s writing style, which Jolas famously vigorously defended and championed. Jolas’s ‘The Revolution of Language and James Joyce’ from 1929, the same year Brown published his first plans for the readies project, advocates for writers ‘to give language a more modern elasticity, to give words a more compressed meaning’. That description could be a precise recipe for writing readies.29 Jolas’s readie demonstrated the ‘revolution of the word’ that his transition manifesto proclaimed. For example, Jolas writes in what one might describe as an ‘echoic’ style that ‘–lilygushes–ring–and– ting–a–bibel–’, and his readie stands on its own as an experiment of literary value that deserves attention independent of this volume of readies.

J. Jones

‘Wot N Erth A Erthworl Stori’, pp. 116–21; ‘Biografrica’, pp. 121–4 [TOC missing ‘r’] One somewhat mysterious contributor, James P. Jones, a staff librarian in the Patent Room of the New York Public Library, may have learned of the volume through correspondence with Bob Brown during a patent search for similar reading machines. Jones had an

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interest in Putnam’s Objectivist poetry, and later edited an oddly named magazine, Creage, A Review of Revolutionary Idealism in Art, from his Patent Room space during the 1930s, but it is unclear if he ever published even a first issue, or, if he did, whether any copies still exist. Little else is known of James P. Jones, nor why he was listed as J. Jones in the readies volumes instead of by his full name. He is not included in many discussions of contemporary poetry during the 1930s, but his contributions to the readies adhere closely to Brown’s constraints, probably because he was familiar with the machine’s prerequisite need for specific textual processing. His hint at thinking of the readies as addressing the biographical as overlapping with African issues is particularly interesting, and those connections would require more research on the ‘Biografrica’ of the mysterious J. Jones.

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‘4 Poems for the Readies’, pp. 73–4; ‘Peach Pie’, pp. 74–5; ‘Re . . . Readies . . . I think . . .’, p. 75 George Kent was Brown’s friend who worked with the Browns running the Brazilian American business newsletter that eventually had offices in a number of cities, including Mexico City, serving expatriate English-speaking businesses. Kent’s inclusion suggests Brown’s pragmatic interest in constructing an easily networked tele-text media ecology through the ether. Kent was a journalist and publisher, not a modernist writer or artist, but he saw the project through the lens of the future of mainstream or business publishing. Kent continued to run the English-language business newsletter in Brazil even after Brown sold the network of newsletters. Kent contributed three pieces (one of which has four parts) to the Readies anthology. He had begun his writing career as a United Press stringer, worked with the Browns starting in 1919, and later became an editor of Reader’s Digest. His pragmatic interest in the machine and the readies style, as potential tools for journalists, had absolutely nothing to do with the modernists’ interest in the art-stunt disruptive power of the readies. Kent believed that the machine was the future of a super-efficient type of journalism, in that he was more in line with Farrell’s understanding of the project as pragmatic and efficient. The machine, for Kent at least, was not a Surrealist disruption, but a realistic boon to broadcast media.

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Manuel Komroff

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‘The Writies’, pp. 110–13 Manuel Komroff, an American who lived for many years in Buenos Aires, well known for his editing of his new edition of The Travels of Marco Polo (1926), was, like others among the readies contributors, multitalented. Komroff was also an accomplished playwright, novelist, translator, book reviewer, musician and painter. He published many novels and non-fiction books including a few around the time he contributed a readie: Coronet (1930), Two Thieves (1931) and the non-fiction Contemporaries of Marco Polo (1928). He was divorced from the British portraitist (especially of children) Elinor M. Barnard. Komroff exhibited his paintings at the same gallery as Man Ray, and it was then that Bob Brown met Komroff. Soon after, in 1916, more than a decade before the Readies volume, Brown hired Komroff to paint murals on the walls of the Browns’ house in exchange for money and access to Bob’s car (until Komroff burned out the engine racing it around).30 No illustrations or photographic images exist of the murals, and the vague descriptions give no sense of the palette, aesthetic style, or whether the images were figurative or non-representational designs. According to one source, the murals were intense and ‘nightmarish’.31 Komroff played the piano and tended to give his paintings names alluding to music, like Study in the Key of C. In those years around 1916, Komroff and Brown talked about ‘art transfusion’, a theory of how ‘sculpture, painting, and literature were becoming more and more like music’.32 Komroff also worked in the Soviet Union, as did others in the readies volume such as Rue Menken, and in the 1920s he worked on a series of publications about the travellers – including, but not limited to, Marco Polo – who travelled from Europe to China and brought back insights in the thirteenth century; he later wrote about civil-war photographer Matthew Brady.

Alfred Kreymborg ‘Regrets’, p. 114 Alfred Kreymborg, sometimes spelled Kreymbourg, is well known as the editor of Others: A Magazine of the New Verse from 1915 and intermittently until 1919, the poetry journal that was strongly influenced by the emerging Imagist poetry in the 1910s.33 For a short time, he co-edited Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts

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(for two issues in 1921–2). His importance as a promoter of Imagist poetry in America began when he and Man Ray published The Glebe (1913–14).34 When Ezra Pound sent Kreymborg the manuscript of ‘Des Imagistes’, the manifesto for an Imagist poetry, in the summer of 1913, Kreymborg published it as the fifth issue of The Glebe.35 Kreymborg was also an experimental playwright with the Provincetown Players in the second decade of the twentieth century, a key member of the Grantwood Village artists’ colony from 1915 to 1917, an expert chess player, and an accomplished poet. In his book of poems, Mushrooms: A Book of Free Forms (1916),36 Kreymborg described tone-poems as ‘mushrooms’. After William Carlos Williams gave the collection a rave review, Kreymborg spent a year touring around the United States as a troubadour, playing his mandolin as he read his poems. He continued to be extremely productive in the 1920s, with editorial work and many publications, including a new poetry collection, Blood of Things: A Second Book of Free Forms.37 In 1925 he published a memoir, Troubadour, and he then toured America performing his marionette plays, Manikin Minikin and Lima Beans, with his wife, Dorothy (‘Dot’) Bloom. All that activity was just the tip of the iceberg. Through Others, Kreymborg helped introduce Imagist poetry to a wider audience of artists and poets in the United States. Kreymborg was a key figure in bringing together experimenters in theatre, painting and writing under the larger banner of Imagism.

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‘Passage from Book II’, pp. 65–72 Walter Lowenfels, considered an important American Imagist poet throughout the early decades of the twentieth century and into the early 1930s, was also a journalist, and a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s. His collection of poems Steel (1937) commemorated steelworkers killed during an infamous strike. In 1953 the United States government charged him with sedition to overthrow the government, and he was convicted, but the conviction was overturned by a higher court because of a lack of evidence. He had known Bob Brown for decades, and in his eulogy for Brown, Lowenfels famously described him as having ‘been not just one person, but Bob1, Bob2, Bob3, etc.’.38 Lowenfels was also a translator, and decades later, in 1959, he worked with Brown to publish a translation of Paul Eluard’s ‘Song of Peace’ with Brown’s Roving Eye Press.39 The rise

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of ‘Anonymous’ as a resistance to the capitalist use of an author’s name as part of marketing and branding seems very much part of the ethos of the early twenty-first century, but it appears long before, in 1930, with Brown’s long-time friend and colleague Lowenfels. The year before the Readies volume appeared, Lowenfels had cofounded a small press, Carrefour Press, that famously published a pamphlet titled Anonymous: The Need for Anonymity – and published it anonymously, which created a minor scandal. At first the publication seems startlingly prescient for the twenty-first-century ethos of protecting one’s anonymity. However, Lowenfels did not argue that users or readers need to protect their own data, as in arguments today. Instead he claimed that artists and writers needed anonymity to avoid turning one’s art and literature into a marketable commodity, alienated from the person who made it, competing against other works as if all of them were merchandise, with a brand name, instead of publishing work because it is meaningful, enlightening, and connected to the maker, not the market that often uses a ‘big name’ to sell books. Before Carrefour Press sued George Gershwin for plagiarising Lowenfels’s anonymously published play USA with Music, the press had published everything anonymously.

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‘Triplexicated Illustratification of Go-Getters’, pp. 145–6 The American Robert McAlmon rose to prominence as a poet after winning a prize in Poetry magazine, and later became a prolific novelist. In the 1920s he helped create the expatriate scene when he founded a journal and a small press. With his Contact Editions, he published Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925) as well as collections of poetry by William Carlos Williams and many others who knew Brown and Hiler but did not contribute to the Readies volume, like Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes, and other modernists such as Ford Maddox Ford and his friend Ernest Hemingway.40 McAlmon had helped fund his friend James Joyce during the writing of Ulysses, and had even helped type and edit parts of the handwritten manuscript. McAlmon was also one of the best chroniclers of the expatriate avant-garde scene in his illuminating memoir Being Geniuses Together (1938) and his posthumously edited and published The Nightinghouls of Paris (2007); and, using the pen-name Robert Scully, he also wrote A Scarlet Pansy (1933).41 He is also featured in John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse and Paula McLain’s The

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Paris Wife.42 McAlmon, now mostly forgotten, was a central player and linchpin among the expatriate avant-garde because of Contact Editions as well as his friendships, much like Hiler because of his nightclub, or Stein because of her salon.43

Donal MacKenzie

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‘Madmorning in Russia’, pp. 62–5 Donal McKenzie (misspelled MacKenzie only in the Readies collection), another poet associated with Objectivism, co-edited, with Norman Macleod, one issue of The Morada (1929–30), the New Mexico-based little magazine. McKenzie, based in Italy and connected to Ezra Pound, worked on that final issue that was much more connected to the expatriate audience. That fifth and final issue of The Morada, published in December 1930, was now the trilingual morada: criticism, poetry, prose, art, with work in English, German and French. The editors solicited future submissions to be sent to Donal’s ‘european & expatriate’ editorial address in Italy. Norman Macleod was still the American editor, but a longer string of contributing editors was listed that included a couple of readies contributors, Eugène Jolas and Richard Johns; there was also a short story by Robert McAlmon, an essay by Ezra Pound, and poems by Kay Boyle, Samuel Putnam and Norman Macleod (in both English and German). Like many others in this volume, McKenzie and Pound wanted to establish a network of poets and poetry publications, and The Morada was part of the network of poetry magazines such as Hound & Horn, Symposium, Blues, Pagany, Front, The New Review and Criterion that, although short-lived, sought a type of syndication. A few years later Rose and Bob Brown started the Associated Little Magazines at Commonwealth College, ‘a coordinating agency and clearinghouse for more than one hundred small labor and radical newsletters and magazines throughout the country’ that accomplished precisely these goals.44

Norman Macleod ‘Ready: Revelation’, pp. 53–4 Norman Macleod, best known as the editor of The Morada (with its precise title changing over the course of its five issues in 1929 and 1930), was an important poet throughout the twentieth century.

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Poems by Macleod and Brown appeared together in experimental and radical journals in the 1930s. Besides The Morada, he also founded and edited Jackass (two issues in 1928 when he was still an undergraduate) and soon changed the name to Palo Verde (later in 1928 after he graduated), Brogan (advertised but never appeared), and the multilingual and politically radical literary magazine Front (four issues from 1930 to 1931 funded by a Soviet writers’ group). From his home base in New Mexico, he became a prominent voice of the Southwestern New Regionalism, and in his advertisements in Blues he called his Palo Verde a ‘radical Southwestern poetry magazine’ that sought to ‘foster all revolutionary esthetic tecnics’. The Morada (which appeared instead of Brogan) listed for the first four issues a long list of contributing editors including Charles Henri Ford, who would in turn publish Macleod in Blues. When he moved to New York City in 1931 to become an editorial assistant for the New Masses, Macleod started the Briarcliff Quarterly magazine and founded the influential Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y. He published two novels, The Bitter Roots (1941) and You Get What You Ask For (1939). William Carlos Williams dedicated a poem to him, titled ‘A Poem for Norman Macleod’.

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‘Words in Freedom’, pp. 46–8 Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti, the famous Futurist poet and impresario, was an obvious choice to be included in the Readies collection. Marinetti championed adding speed, and war-like intensity, to poetry in explosions across the page; he speculated on a type of writing in, and through, machines; and he experimented with processing texts for machines. That said, Marinetti did not actively participate in the readies project. Instead, one of his translators, Samuel Putnam, a readies contributor, sent his translation of a Marinetti poem. That poem was not made for the Readies collection, and it was coincidentally commissioned to appear simultaneously in The European Caravan. Putnam negotiated the details among the publishers of Caravan, Brown’s Roving Eye Press, and Marinetti himself.45 Although Putnam thought Marinetti’s piece seemed perfect for the volume, and needed no ‘doctoring’, it does not seem to use the constraints of the readies form. Without the context presented here about how it came to be included in the volume, Marinetti seems to wilfully ignore the constraints.46 Putnam translated other

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Marinetti poems and essays including an article on ‘aeropainting’ that appeared simultaneously to the readies volume.47 Marinetti, perhaps best known now among a public audience for his co-authored Futurist Cookbook,48 was, in the 1920s until his death in the mid1940s, an infamous champion of Italian fascism. Marinetti’s relevance today depends on his consideration of how art and literature might respond, or react, to the massive impact of technologies on everyday life. The Futurists demonstrated one way to write the future of traditional Italian cuisine and lyric poetry.49

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‘Cracked’, pp. 104–5; ‘Arles Paintings Van Gogh’, p. 138; ‘Portrait Matisse’, pp. 138–9; ‘Asia (art readie)’, p. 139 Reuben ‘Rue’ Menken, an art and culture critic and essayist from Chicago, who wrote for the Chicago Tribune, World Telegram and the Manchester Guardian, as well as serving as a voluntary editor for Poetry, had moved to Paris in the 1920s, where he continued to write about art. In Chicago, he was part of the bohemian Dill Pickle Club. He visited, and perhaps worked with, Maxim Gorky in Sorrento, Italy, before Gorky returned to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. His daughter, Robin Menken, was a fixture of the rock scene in the 1960s, married to Joe McDonald of the American psychedelic band Country Joe and the Fish, based in northern California, and part of the FTA (also known as Fuck The Army, started by Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland) and Second City improv groups. She became an actress in Hollywood movies (This Is Spinal Tap) and a writer (Teen Witch). Similar to other families mentioned here, there is often a surprising direct familial continuity with the historical avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century and the counter-cultural arts and culture starting in the 1960s. As with many in this volume, Rue Menken’s wild adventures do not even begin to fit within the scope of this work, and very little of his almost unbelievable story is known beyond his immediate family and close confidants. Menken wrote about African art in Parisian galleries, and in that essay, published in the Harlem-based Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life magazine, he criticises the romantic primitivism and racism of earlier critics in a description that seems contemporary in its insights about treating these works as artworks of great achievement rather than as anthropological documents of an unsophisticated primitivism from Africans.50

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Peter Neagoe

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‘It Dawned’, pp. 44–5 Peter Neagoe, who edited American Abroad: An Anthology (1932), which included a chapter by Bob Brown, was at the time of the readies experiment already established as an important editor and writer among the expatriate Surrealists. Born in Romania, he later moved to the United States and became a citizen there. Neagoe’s novel Storm (1932) was banned for its ‘obscene’ content, and in that way Neagoe was part of the same mixing of libertine sexual politics, Surrealist aesthetics, and a type of literary documentary realism that played a larger role in the sur-realism that connected many of the readies for Bob Brown’s machine.

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‘Highbrow’s Translation from Horace’, p. 114 At the time of the readies project (and continuing today), Ezra Pound was widely considered a major influence on literary modernism, a founder of Imagist poetry, and a sympathetic ear for, and enthusiastic supporter of, many modernist poets and writers. He had championed modern poetry since the early decades of the twentieth century, and corresponded with Brown and Kreymborg at Others: A Magazine of New Verse in the 1910s, and with many of the younger poets included in the Readies collection. He was considered generous with his time with younger poets, and a guiding figure in experimental and visual poetry practices. Because of his successful claim of insanity at his trial, in 1945, for treasonous support of the fascists after the war, he was comfortably institutionalised, instead of facing the death penalty, for twelve years from 1946 to 1958. Years before the Readies volume, Ezra Pound had corresponded with Brown and the writers associated with Others. In one dismissive letter, Pound critically told Brown, ‘Any bloke can experiment!’ Brown wrote a parodic canto glued into a copy of A Draft of XXX Cantos, published by Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press in 1930. Brown’s comedic poem is typed on two sheets of paper with the hand-written note ‘For Nancy / carefully typed / Bob Brown / Cagnes - summer / March 17, 1931’. The sheets were then carefully pasted on to the back free endpapers of the book. The poem is titled ‘NOTE TO EZ’.51 In this readie, Pound satirises Horace’s prejudices and fears about Persians as well as poking parodic fun at contemporary ‘Highbrow’ translations by using American slang.

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Theodore Pratt

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‘Charade’, pp. 124–5 Theodore Pratt wrote about the expatriate arts and cultural scene for both the New York Sun and The New Yorker in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Besides his experimental works, Pratt published more than thirty novels, including four mysteries under the pseudonym of Timothy Brace, two collections of short stories, two plays (adapted from his novels), and a few non-fiction books and pamphlets. He also published numerous short stories and articles in mainstream magazines like Esquire, Coronet and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as in pulp fiction magazines like Guilty Detective Story Magazine and Space Science Fiction. A few years after contributing to the readies project, Pratt moved back to the United States, settling in Florida, and began writing his popular novels. Two decades after the readies project, his novel about nymphomania, The Tormented (1950),52 became a scandalous bestseller. It was banned in 1951, but not before it had sold a million copies. At least five of Pratt’s novels were made into Hollywood movies. His 1945 surrealist novel Mr. Limpet53 became The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964).54 Marketed to children with its mix of live action and animation, and starring Don Knotts, the film adaptation nevertheless contains much of the underappreciated Surrealist weirdness of the novel. The nonalphabetic markings also pointed toward the readies as a multimodal performance transcript. Theodore Pratt’s readie uses an ‘index manicule’, also known as a printer’s fist, bishop’s fist, digit, mutton-fist, hand, hand director, pointer, pointing hand or the pointing finger dingbat, instead of the em or en dash. His readie is about a suicide party where the guests think the announced suicide is an art stunt or joke but which in the end turns out to be real; it reads like a subtle, if pointed, satire of the stunts of the age taken up a few notches, with the visual index manicule becoming an accusatory pointing at the guilt of the audience. He shifts a description of a performance art event to a murder mystery, perhaps with an allusion to Harry Crosby’s art-like suicide at the end of 1929.

Samuel Putnam ‘Dirty Nigger’, pp. 55–9 Samuel Putnam, editor of The New Review, previously an assistant editor with Edward Titus on This Quarter, was part of an established network of poets, especially around Ezra Pound and the

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Objectivist poets. As part of the expatriate group in Paris in the 1920s and early 1930s, he wrote about the scene in his memoir Paris Was Our Mistress.55 Although he at first supported the rise of the Italian fascists, as an ‘understandable’ reaction against bourgeois liberalism, he soon recanted and shifted to supporting the communists.56 Putnam’s views on aesthetics also shifted intensely from supporting the goals of the transition group’s call for formal experimentation to supporting a social realism that rejected the experimental and nonrepresentational of the supposed ‘revolution of the wor(l)d’.57 The introduction to this new edition of the Readies collection discusses Putnam’s readie in terms of his politics.

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‘We Came’, pp. 99–104 Gertrude Stein’s importance to modernist art is well known, but her influence on writing, and writing experiments, is somewhat less mythic, perhaps because her own writing is so unique that it is difficult to see the expanse of her influence on writing during the entire twentieth century and into the new century. A couple of years before this collection of readies originally appeared, Bob Brown had sent a copy of an earlier manifesto, The Readies, to Stein, and she loved his invention and giggled aloud at his playful presentation of plans and ideas. She answered his plans with an as-of-yet unpublished essay celebrating ‘Absolutely As Bob Brown or Bobbed Brown’.58 Stephen Pasqualina explains how Brown’s desire to add speed to reading ‘echoed her [Stein’s] own interest in speed technologies’.59 Twenty

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years later, Bob Brown would publish his letters from Stein in Bern Porter’s Berkeley: A Journal of Modern Culture, and introduce a new generation of poets to Stein.60 Stein’s readie in this volume is an extended rumination of history and history-making in the context of a non-realist description of showing ‘two visitors’ the historical sites (‘homes and places and lakes and churches’) (p. 99).

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‘Percentage’, pp. 139–44 Although listed as a contributor with his name on a readie, Lloyd Stern left the adaptation of ‘Percentage’ to James Farrell. It is unclear how aware Stern was of the project or its goals except that Farrell and Stern had been friends ‘since boyhood’,61 and Farrell had edited his first novel, Star’s Road, in 1932 with the left-wing Vanguard Press.62 Later Stern would advise and offer editorial suggestions to Farrell on the Studs Lonigan trilogy. As a Chicago-based novelist, in the same year as the readies appeared Stern had published with the famous Dill Pickle Club of Chicago in at least one volume that also included essays by Farrell advocating for a new social realism.63

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‘Always Gentleman’, pp. 9–12; ‘To God’, pp. 12–13; ‘?’, pp. 13–14; ‘Aria Di Maria’, p. 14; ‘Boom the Doom’, p. 15; ‘Envoi’, p. 15 Laurence Vail published in expatriate literary journals and collections, co-edited 365 Days with his wife Kay Boyle, produced some paintings and mixed-media sculptures of encrusted shells on bottles, and published a novel, Murder! Murder! (a satire about his marriage to Peggy Guggenheim). He is now best known as the ‘king of the bohemians’, who drove sports cars, drank heavily, and lived a decadent lifestyle associated with the expatriates in France during the 1920s and very early 1930s. That reputation, perhaps exaggerated, fed the myth of the avant-garde’s apolitical frivolity, but in fact Vail helped Boyle with arrangements to get Joseph Franckenstein, who would become her third husband, out of fascist Europe. All of his children became painters and radical interventionist artists. Vail, married in April 1932 to Boyle, and previously to Peggy Guggenheim, was a reputed lush and dilettante who liked to drive fast cars, especially Peugeots. Counter to that reputation as shiftless, he was a productive artist and writer, and

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engaged with childrearing. Vail and Boyle had many children from two marriages, and some of their children, although with troubled and troubling relationships with their parents, went on to be part of later radical art groups like the Situationists, or the hippie art-groupcum-cult Fort Hill Community, or the women artists at the AIR gallery and founders of the Guerrilla Girls. The children credited their upbringing with Vail and Boyle, vexed as it was, with their later radical interventionist art-politics; as with others in this volume, there is a familial continuity between the historical avant-garde and a later generation. Vail not only helped raise his many children into radical artists, some of whom claimed to have been abandoned by their mothers, he also made sculptures by collaging toys into artworks, and helped edit the Boyle project 365 Days in 1936.

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‘Readie Pome’, p. 114 William Carlos Williams, one of the key leaders of modernist poetry from the Imagists through the Objectivists to the super-realists, had an outsized influence on Brown and on many of the contributors to this volume, with whom Brown had worked in the Grantwood Village art colony in 1916–17. Williams’s accomplishments in his novels deserve more attention. White Mule, first serialised in Pagany, led to two more books in the trilogy, In the Money and The Build-Up. White Mule, the title describing the kick of the baby in the womb, begins with the baby’s birth, the child entering ‘dripping . . . In prehistoric ooze it lay . . .’. It is one of the great opening chapters of any novel, but the novels were eclipsed by Williams’s importance and influence as a poet. Williams continued to correspond with Bob for nearly a decade between those years and the late 1920s, when the Browns arrived to live among the expatriate avant-garde in Europe, and continued to support Brown’s endeavours for the rest of their lives. In one set of letters, Williams offers medical advice, as he was a paediatrician as well as a poet.

Kathleen Tankersley Young ‘Love Story’, pp. 133–5 Young, usually described as an African-American poet associated with the Harlem Renaissance, contributed a readie, and later published Brown’s Houdini in her important Modern Editions Press

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pamphlet series that published many of the expatriate poets and artists. Young had connections to the loose affiliation of Objectivist and Imagist poets, and co-published Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms as a venue for that poetry, which also suggested, mostly through its title, its affinities with the Harlem Renaissance poets and musicians. Young had an intimate, if non-sexual, relationship with Charles Henri Ford, and would often compare him favourably to her abusive husband, in a short-lived marriage, and other sexual partners. As explained in the introduction, much more remains to be written about Young and her unique importance in modernist poetry. The official death report lists ‘Lysol poisoning’, during a stay in Torreon, Mexico, as the cause of her death.64 Young had travelled to Mexico to write poems and work on publishing her book series. Perhaps she had an illicit and illegal sexual affair (as she was still married), and needed to use some form of birth control. Lysol douches were a very widely used, if extremely dangerous and ineffective, birth control method in the early 1930s. It was marketed to women as a form of feminine hygiene; the advertisements insinuated that it could be used for birth control, at a time when real, safe and effective birth control was illegal in the United States.65 If not for her tragic death due to oppressive government policies in the United States, Young would already be recognised as one of the most important American modernists. Instead, her death, and death certificate’s cause of death, should haunt both a complacent apolitical modernism and those who dismiss modernism, and the readies experiment, as presenting naïvely irresponsible prejudice and mere frivolity in the face of fatal oppression.66

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1. Wambly Bald, ‘Flow Gently’, pp. 60–1. 2. John Banting, ‘The Dance of Harlem’, in Nancy Cunard (ed.), Negro: An Anthology (London: Wishart & Co., 1934), pp. 322–4 (p. 322). 3. Charles Beadle, The Esquimau of Montparnasse (London: John Hamilton, 1928); later published with a new title, Expatriates at Large (New York: Macauley Company, 1930). 4. For Beadle’s pulp stories, see for example ‘Witch-Doctors’, a four-part serial in Adventure that ran in the issues of 15 March to 1 May 1919, and was later published as a book: Witch-Doctors (London: Jonathan Cape, 1922; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922). 5. Kay Boyle has ‘A Comeallye for Robert Carlton Brown’ (1938) in Hayden Carruth and J. Laughlin (eds), A New Directions Reader (Norfolk, CT: New Directions Books, 1964), pp. 12–16.

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6. Kay Boyle quoted in Sandra Whipple Spanier, Kay Boyle, Artist and Activist (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 94. 7. Kay Boyle quoted in Spanier, Kay Boyle, p. 61. 8. Kay Boyle, letter to Bob Brown, 16 January 1932, in Sandra Spanier (ed.), Kay Boyle: A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), pp. 190–1. 9. I Address You Privately (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Hass, 1933). 10. Kay Boyle, letter to Bob Brown, August 1931, in Spanier (ed.), Kay Boyle: A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters, pp. 185–6. 11. Kay Boyle quoted in Spanier, Kay Boyle, p. 100. 12. Hugh D. Ford, Four Lives in Paris (Berkeley: North Point Press, 1987), p. 209. 13. Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail and Nina Conarain (eds), 365 Days (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936). In the preface the editors explain that each story had the following constraints: limited to one page; instead of a title, each story has a date in the top left corner and a place name for the story’s setting in the right corner; each story, the editors explained, ‘must not belong to an undefined period of time [not a universal story, but one firmly anchored in a specific place and time], but peculiarly to the moment the writer had selected, the specified day and month of this particular year’; and every story is told from the perspective of an ‘ordinary individual’s life as it was being lived’ (p. xi). Writers like Langston Hughes, Raymond Queneau and Henry Miller appear with the handful of entries by Bob and Rose Brown and the many one-day/one-page stories by Kay Boyle. Bob’s contributions were listed in the index, without page numbers, as the following: Apr. 10 Louisiana (p. 112), May 7 U.S.A. (p. 143), Aug. 4 Brazil (p. 242), Dec. 1 Arkansas (p. 381); Rose Brown’s contribution appears under Nov. 6 U.S.A. (p. 350). 14. Carlton Brown, Brainstorm (New York: Farrar, Rhinehart, Inc., 1944), p. 12. 15. Man Ray, Man Ray: Self Portrait (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), p. 53. 16. Ibid. 17. Daphne and Michael Carr, ‘The Prophet in His Own Country’, The Reader Critic section of The Little Review 3.3 (May 1916), pp. 41–2 (p. 42). 18. Axton Clark, The Single Glow (Santa Fe: Villagra Press, 1933). 19. Cunard (ed.), Negro: An Anthology. 20. Suzanne W. Churchill, ‘“Mammy of the South / Silence Your Mouth”: The Silencing of Race Radicalism in Contempo Magazine’, Modernism/Modernity Print+, volume 1, cycle 1 (2 March 2016), .

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21. Ann Douglas, ‘Introduction’, in James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy Comprising Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), p. x. 22. For a dedicated monograph on Ford, see Alexander Howard, Charles Henri Ford: Between Modernism and Postmodernism (Historicizing Modernism series), series eds Erik Tonning and Matthew Feldman (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). 23. George Waldemar, ‘Introduction’, in Hilaire Hiler, Hilaire Hiler and Structuralism: New Conception of Form-Color (New York: G. Wittenborn, 1950), p. 1. 24. Hilaire and Meyer Hiler, Helen G. Cushing and Adah V. Morris, Bibliography of Costume (New York: B. Blom, 1967). 25. Hilaire Hiler, The Painter’s Pocket-Book of Methods and Materials (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938). 26. Eric White, Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 194–202 (p. 194). 27. Ibid. p. 197. 28. Eugène Jolas, ‘The Machine and “Mystic America”’, transition: an international quarterly for creative experiment, Spring/Summer (June 1930), p. 379. 29. Eugène Jolas, ‘The Revolution of Language and James Joyce’, in Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination Round His Factifications for Incamination of Work in Progress, with letters of protest by G. V. L. Slingsby and Vladimir Dixon (Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1929; London: Faber and Faber, 1929; London: Bradford and Dickens, 1961), pp. 40–5 (p. 41). See also Marjorie Perloff, ‘“Logocinéma of the Frontiersman”: Eugene Jolas’s Multilingual Poetics and Its Legacies’, in Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), pp. 82–101. 30. Bob Brown, ‘Autobiographical Notes’ (1949), Bob Brown Papers 1844–1960, Charles E. Young Research Library, Special Collections, UCLA. See also Gail Stavitsky, ‘Artists and Art Colonies of Ridgefield, New Jersey’, in Francis M. Naumann, Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. 222. 31. Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of New Jersey, Bergen County Panorama, American Guide series (Hackensack, NJ: Federal Works Agency Works Projects Administration, 1941), p. 260. 32. Naumann, Conversion to Modernism, p. 24. 33. Others: A Magazine of the New Verse (1915–19). See also Suzanne W. Churchill, The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006).

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34. Jay Bochner, ‘The Glebe’, in Edward E. Chielens (ed.), American Literary Magazines: The Twentieth Century (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992), pp. 135–9. 35. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (New York: Faber and Faber, 1972). 36. Alfred Kreymborg, Mushrooms: A Book of Free Forms (New York: John Marshall Co., 1916). 37. Alfred Kreymborg, Blood of Things: A Second Book of Free Forms (New York: N. L. Brown, 1920). 38. Walter Lowenfels, To an Imaginary Daughter (New York: Horizon Press, 1964), p. 82. 39. Paul Eluard, ‘Song of Peace’, trans. Walter Lowenfels (New York: Roving Eye Press, 1959). 40. Eric B. White, ‘Continental Conjecture: Ephemera, Imitation and America’s (Late) Modernist Canons in the Three Mountains Press and Robert McAlmon’s Contact Editions’, European Journal of American Culture 32.3 (Autumn 2013), pp. 285–306. 41. Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938) and The Nightinghouls of Paris, ed. Sanford J. Smoller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Robert Scully [Robert McAlmon], A Scarlet Pansy (New York: William Faro, 1933). 42. John Glassco, Memoirs of Montparnasse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); Paula McLain, The Paris Wife (New York: Random House, 2012). See also Wambly Bald, On the Left Bank 1929–1933 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987). 43. See White, ‘Continental Conjecture’. It is one of only a few recent works on McAlmon, and the only one to address his poetry. See also Robert McAlmon, North America: Continent of Conjecture (Paris: Contact Editions, 1929); relevant to this volume are the illustrations by Hiler. See also White, Transatlantic Avant-Gardes, which recognises the importance of Contact magazine, which William Carlos Williams and McAlmon co-edited (1920–3), and which includes on its front cover an image of the magazine. 44. Craig Saper, The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown: A Real-Life Zelig Who Wrote His Way Through the 20th Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), p. 328. 45. A note following Marinetti’s readie in this volume explains that it was translated from the Italian by Samuel Putnam, and that it appears in the ‘EUROPEAN CARAVAN’, which refers to The European Caravan: An Anthology of the New Spirit in European Literature, compiled and ed. Samuel Putnam et al. (New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1931). It appeared in this original volume with permission from Marinetti and ‘Messrs. Brewer and Warren of New York’. 46. Samuel Putnam, letter to Bob Brown, 1 November 1930, UCLA Bob Brown Collection, Box 34: ‘Here is the Marinetti. It seems to be the

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Invent(st)ory: The Contributors and Their Readies

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only thing actually made for the readies, so to speak, the only stuff that could do without doctoring[.]’ F. T. Marinetti, ‘The Aeropainting of the Italian Futurists’, trans. Samuel Putnam, New Review 1.4 (Winter 1931–32), pp. 295–7. F. T. Marinetti and Fillìa [Luigi Colombo], La Cucina Futurista (Milan: Longanesi, 1986); Filippo Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook, trans. Suzanne Brill, ed. Lesley Chamberlain (London: Penguin Classics, 2014). See also Cecilia Novero, Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Rue Menken, ‘Jungle Prophets’, Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life 9.10 (October 1931), p. 315. Bob Brown, ‘NOTE TO EZ’, pasted into one copy of A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), [unpublished poem, 17 March 1931]. Nancy Cunard Collection, 1895–1965, Series IV. Works by other Authors, 1920–64 (15 boxes) M–R, container 33.8, at Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas. Theodore Pratt, The Tormented (New York: Fawcett, 1950). Theodore Pratt, Mr. Limpet (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945). Arthur Lubin (dir.), The Incredible Mr. Limpet (Hollywood: Warner Bros, 1964). Samuel Putnam, Paris Was Our Mistress: Memoirs of a Lost & Found Generation (New York: The Viking Press, 1947). See Edgar Marquess Branch, Dorothy Farrell and James T. Farrell, A Paris Year: Dorothy and James T. Farrell, 1931–1932 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998), pp. 15–16. For more on Putnam’s shifting politics, see Mark Cirino, ‘The Nasty Mess: Hemingway, Italian Fascism, and the New Review Controversy of 1932’, The Hemingway Review 33.2 (Spring 2014), pp. 30–47. Gertrude Stein, ‘Absolutely As Bob Brown or Bobbed Brown’ (1931), collected in Painted Lace and Other Pieces, vol. 5 of Gertrude Stein’s Unpublished Writing, with an introduction by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 311; Saper, The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown, pp. 252–3. Stephen Pasqualina, ‘“That Can Never Be History”: Gertrude Stein and the Speed of the Reading Machine’, Modernism/Modernity 26.1 (January 2019), pp. 19–42 (p. 20). Bob Brown, ‘Letters of Gertrude Stein’, Berkeley: A Journal of Modern Culture 8 (1951), pp. 1–2. Branch, Farrell and Farrell, A Paris Year, p. 63. Lloyd Stern, Star’s Road (New York: Vanguard Press, 1932). See also John P. Kondelik, ‘Butler University and the Dream of Distinction’ (dissertation), University of Michigan, 1993.

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63. Kondelik, ‘Butler University and the Dream of Distinction’. 64. American Consulate, ‘Report on the Death of an American Citizen’, prepared by Nelson R. Park for Kathleen Tankersley Young Ellinger (Form No. 192, Torreon, Mexico, 17 April 1933). 65. Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), pp. 170–2. 66. For a discussion of death certificates in relation to Marx’s philosophy, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, intro. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 59–60.

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