0.1 Afterword  (Page 7/9)

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 (Tzara as quoted in Caws 17, n. 17). In Cagnes-sur-Mer, where they both lived, Brown would often talk with George Antheil, talking about Antheil’s wind machine, used in his composition Mechanism (1923). Antheil, self-proclaimed "Futurist-terrible," provoked audiences to riot during the machine concerts; he also composed the music for Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique (1924), a film that celebrated the mechanical comedy and stunts rather than the naturalized dance found in traditional ballet. The shift from considering Readies as another attempt at experimental writing to absolutely “Bobbed Brown” reading changed the equation from an aesthetic experiment to an epistemological alternative. That alternative did not seek to eliminate expressivity. Rather, it sought to expand the possibilities of the lyric to include new forms of media technologies and machines.

The different reading technologies and practices that informed Brown’s shorthand included a wide array of systems usually not considered in terms of poetic materiality: reading and writing technologies ranging from wartime code machines to cookbooks or party guides, from Hollywood movies to a wide spectrum of magazines. These were not simply the commercial foil that professional writers like Brown reacted against in fleeing toward experimentation. Rather, Brown’s work demonstrates a much more nuanced connection between the cultural milieu and a type of reading practice peculiar to the twentieth century. The machine highlighted the peculiar ways of reading abbreviated code systems: you have to change your pace and focus. We find this abbreviated language in stock market tickertape, shorthand, technical manuals, recipes, and specialized actuarial and accounting codes that came into widespread use in the first quarter of the twentieth century, during an era when “streamlined” equaled “modernity.”

Unlike some of the expatriates who worked with him, and who were practically starving while they honed their craft, Brown had already made and spent or lost three fortunes as a popular writer and successful publisher. He moved to New York City in 1908, with an emerging reputation as a writer but nothing in his pocket, and lived in Greenwich Village, at one point sharing a room with Eugene O'Neil. In the aughts of the twentieth-century, he sold at least a thousand stories and story-ideas to the pulps and other pulp writers, including to H. L. Mencken, who, as an editor of popular magazines like Smart-Set, relied heavily on Brown for content. Ezra Pound, in a letter recommending to James Joyce places to publish, mentioned the magazine's call for "top-notch" work and that some issues were filled with "one hell of a lot of muck"; in spite of the "muck," they both published there (Pound, 18). Menken continued to publish Brown later in the more serious Mercury . Brown's house in the Grantwood colony would serve as a rehearsal space for the Provincetown Players as well as a publishing center for the Others Imagist journal. At that point, in the teens, Brown had also parlayed his earnings as a writer into greater fortune as a stock trader. Finally, because of the pro-war hysteria and prohibition, Brown left the United States in 1918 and eventually settled in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he built a very profitable publishing empire that would include business newsletters in four countries. In 1918, Duchamp and Mina Loy visited Brown in Latin America, and during the visit Duchamp cabled directions back to France for the creation of Tu m', a pun-filled painting about mass production and the replacement of the painter with machines. Brown's publishing fortune would later fund his travels around the world, culminating in his arrival in France in 1928.