0.1 After "words"  (Page 4/8)

In Stein's aforementioned allusion, "authors bobbed sentences like a flapper's popular hairstyle: cut short" (Saper, The Adventures of Bob Brown , 66). Cunard refers to her own readies contribution as "condensed" ( Hours , 181), and Brown certainly thought much about mass-produced condensed products since he would, in the 1930s and 1940s, co-author many cookbooks with his wife and mother. In Words , the type is “cut short” in an entirely different way: instead of with dashes as in The Readies , it is reduced with microscopic scale. In reference to this cutting-short process, Brown writes in the opening poem, "Operating on words -gilding and gelding them / In a rather special laboratory equipped with / Micro and with scope." Both sets of poems,16-point and micro, perform a semi-autobiographical illumination of the literary and cultural meanings of printing in both form and content. For Cunard, thepoems express the "Bob Brown spirit" and dynamism: "Everything about him had zest" ( Hours , 184, 180). The content of the poems often employs an Imagist style to telescope concrete luminous details,like the image of hollow dice, into abstractions about (in the case of the dice) the lessons of Pandora's box and, in general, about art, printing, reading, andlife.

The experience of reading Words suggests, in parodic fashion, the miniaturizing of secret messages by spies. (A century after Words , the U.S. government fends off counterfeiters' efforts by using “micro-printing” techniques to produce micrographic lettering;it’s the same strategy Brown used for poetic ends.) Common in actual espionage and military intelligence, the trope of secret messages was a staple of pulpstories. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Brown wrote for the pulps using many pseudonyms—his own version of a secret identity. His most famous andpopular story, made into the first serial movie, included episodes with secret messages, intercepted letters, and interpretations of message fragments.

During the early months of World War I, Allen Norton, a friend of Brown’s, was arrested in Liverpool with a bundle ofexperimental poems and writings because the authorities thought he was “carrying dangerous messages that were clearly written in code” (Brown, Letters of Gertrude Stein , 1). Brown’s first conception of a reading machine, also in that same year, took the code machinesof the time as a type of readymade and as a way to avoid censorship even as the microscopic or processed readies would inevitably attract the censors’ bemused attention. In that sense, the machinehighlighted the emerging peculiar ways of reading abbreviated code systems: you have to change your pace and focus. We find this abbreviated language in stockmarket tickertape, shorthand, technical manuals, recipes, and specialized actuarial and accounting codes that came into widespread use in the firstquarter of the twentieth century.

The microscopic poems in Words , initially planned as smaller versions of the otherwise identical larger poems, became separate works for technical reasons(the publisher could not fit the longer poems in the miniature space). So instead of the reader choosing whether to read the same poem in different sizes,and making the actual reading of the miniature poems a merely imaginative activity, the technical problems led to a different experience in which thepoems seem to comment on each other.