0.1 Afterword  (Page 5/9)

Chapter IV, "Eye-Lingo," which goes on to describe his "inkless" revolution, seems prescient now, in the age of the Kindle, online texts, and ubiquitous handheld texting devices. Brown's reading machine will make "a need for new words" to work with the speed of the machine in portmanteau or "smashum" style, words like nowtime and machinewise, at the same time that conjunctions, articles, prefixes, quotation marks, grammatical marks, and other "bulky residue" will find little use. Although Brown insists that he is not inventing a new style of writing, but simply wants to prepare for the modernization of reading "at the speed of the day," the context of his own tastes and writings makes it easy for even the best critics, and sometimes Brown himself, to think of the project only in terms of the modernist revolution of the word and a "stab in the dark at writing modernly." Instead, the Readies function as a printed analogy for what reading will feel and look like "spinning past the eye out of a word-machine." He admits in this chapter that it is a "crude" attempt to simulate motion. (To resolve that shortcoming, this author has published online a simulation of Brown's machine, at www.readies.org, with the mechanisms built in an electronic simulation.)

The final chapter, "A Story to be Read on the Reading Machine," offers an extended example of a readie, which converts an otherwise unremarkable story into a cinematic imagist scene. Again, Brown’s explicit goal is not to offer a new literary style but rather to suggest "the abbreviated dispatches sent by foreign newspaper correspondents to cut down cable expenses," as if one applied the technologies of the day to reading all texts, literary and practical.

One year after publishing his manifesto, Brown published an anthology of texts especially prepared for the machine. The later anthology included forty of his friends and fellow avant-gardists, with works by Stein, Boyle, and F. W. Marinetti. The anthology also included such Imagist poets as William Carlos Williams, with whom Brown had worked in the Grantwood Village art colony in 1916-17, and a sane Ezra Pound, who corresponded with Brown and the writers associated with Others: A Magazine of New Vers e in those earlier years. The anthology’s contributions, of uneven quality, have a giddy clubhouse feel and lack the coherent focus and serious intent of Brown's manifesto. Without any explicit editorial interference, and Brown only contributing an appendix (a condensed selection from The Readies manifesto), some texts seem more explicitly for the machine while others, like Marinetti's, seem to ignore or loosely interpret Brown's constraints. Some of the contributors, especially those not associated with modernist poetry, wallow in adolescent humor, as if baiting a fantasized censor with sexually explicit and racist language (One, in fact, was literally adolescent in perspective; written by Brown’s teenage son, it describes his unpleasant first sexual encounter a year or two before, while they were living in Brazil.)