0.1 Afterword  (Page 2/9)

Brown’s reading machine was designed to “unroll a televistic readie film” in the style of modernist experiments; the design also followed the changes in reading practices during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Gertrude Stein understood that Brown’s machine, as well as his processed texts for it, suggested a shift toward a different way to comprehend texts. That is, the mechanism of this book, a type of book explicitly built to resemble reading mechanisms like ticker-tape machines rather than a codex, produced—at least for Stein—specific changes in reading practices.

In Brown’s Readie, punctuation marks become visual analogies. For movement we see em-dashes (—) that also, by definition, indicate that the sentence was interrupted or cut short. These created a "cinemovietone" shorthand system. The old uses of punctuation, such as employment of periods to mark the end of a sentence, disappear. Reading machine-mediated text becomes more like watching a continuous series of flickering frames become a movie.

Recognizing punctuation marks as analogies for cinematographic zooms, close-ups, and special effects also allows the scenes in the Readies to function as an allegory for the process of reading in the age of machines. Readies sought to illuminate the form of a process rather than the form of a medium. Mechanical poetics (like Marcel Duchamp’s descriptions of an impossible fourth dimension) magnify reading as a cultural technological medium without a single essential form. Using punctuation in this way—as a visual score rather than cues for reading aloud—and creating an endless array of portmanteau words, as Brown so enthusiastically does, makes literary interpretation problematic. Precisely because punctuation marks usually function to guide the voice to read prosody, the use of punctuation as analogies for motion and other optical effects moves reading from interpreting words in connection with an author's voice to emphasizing design, visual aesthetics, and movement. Readies do not efface expressivity, but they put the tone of voice in doubt. That kind of visual pun logic was common at the time in works by such artists as Duchamp and the Surrealists.

Duchamp, a formative influence on Brown's experimental and visual poetry, designed, built, and found readymade machines that illuminated an alternative epistemology. One could argue that the genesis of Brown's machine certainly includes Duchamp's machines and poetics. Artists like Raymond Roussell built their own Surrealist reading machines relatively soon after the Readies appeared. It seems fitting that Brown would call the processed texts the Readies, explicitly alluding to talkies and movies, and implicitly (and unintentionally) to ready mades. In light of his own claims in The Readies to do for reading what Pablo Picasso did for painting, or what James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and e. e. cummings did for writing, one might call Bob Brown the Marcel Duchamp of reading.

The fascination with machine aesthetics was very much of the moment in June 1930. In that issue of the modernist magazine transition , in which Brown announced his machine, the magazine's editor, Eugene Jolas, 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" (Jolas, 379).