0.1 Afterword  (Page 6/9)

James T. Farrell, publishing one of his first stories in the anthology, later discussed how the Readies' constraints led to his staccato, short-sentence prose style in Studs Lonigan . Rather than employing a non-representational style, Farrell (and others, including Boyle) had found in Brown's constraints a foundation for a politically engaged writing of the street. Likewise, Brown had championed the work of Farrell and other politically engaged writers as part of the revolution of the word. Brown saw his machine as a democratizing tool, with the style of the Readies bringing literature to a wider audience by virtue of its resemblance to styles of popular writing generally regarded as beneath even low-brow genre pulp fiction: linear single-line ticker-tape news reports, secret codes, and telegraphic communications. Brown's appendix for the anthology includes the third chapter from the manifesto, along with other autobiographical materials, explicitly setting the context of the machine in relation to his work in publishing and printing magazines, reading the ticker-tape as a stock trader, writing for pulps, book dealing, and advertising.

Most scholarship until now has taken the Readies anthology as a homogenous group of texts linked only to modernism’s transition fringe, and has framed Brown as a dilettante and hack writer. But neither the perceived homogeneity of the anthology's readies nor the portrayal of Brown as a late-coming advocate of modernist poetry finds support in the historical record. As mentioned previously, the simulation of the reading machine and online publication of the anthology at www.readies.org allows readers to experience the Readies as Brown intended one to read them. It also allows readers to make their own judgments about individual readies and the anthology project as a whole. This author's "user’s manual" on the website covers, in a fashion similar to Brown's manifesto, both the specific technical issues and consideration of the implications of publishing an electronic edition of The Readies for Bob Brown's Machine .

As described by Brown in his Readies , the machine was the size of a typewriter, run by electricity, and unrolled “one moving line of type before the eye, not blurred by the presence of lines above and below.” He planned to print the type “microscopically by the new photographic process on a transparent tough tissue roll” and this roll, “no bigger than a typewriter ribbon” would unroll “beneath a narrow strip of strong magnifying glass.” It resembled a microfiche reader, for which Brown started to apply for a patent, and it was specifically to “rid” the reader “at last of the cumbersome book, the inconvenience of holding its bulk, turning its pages, keeping them clean.”

Eventually, one would be able to “radio” readies as easily “as it is today to [produce] newsies on shipboard and words perhaps eventually will be recorded directly on the palpitating ether.” In this sense, Brown's work is an ancestor of the shorthand languages emerging around new media technologies (i.e., instant messages, emoticons, etc). The material conditions of type were also something he knew well, for he owned presses including “a monotype” from which he “watched molten letters pour through it into an endless stream of words” (Brown, Readies for BB's Machine , 160). Photographic composition and the use of new machines like the “August-Hunter Camera Composing Machine” (180), would allow for “a multitude of words” to be “printed in a minimum of space and yet readable to the naked eye” (180). Is there a cultural poetics of the technical apparatus involved in reading? Brown’s machine as cultural poetics sought to alter the future lineage of the mechanical process of reading.