0.1 Afterword  (Page 3/9)

In 1930, Bob Brown sent a manuscript of The Readies manifesto to Gertrude Stein. She loved his invention and laughed out loud at his playful presentation of plans and ideas. Stein soon wrote an essay celebrating "Absolutely Bob Brown, or Bobbed Brown," alluding to Brown's call to process all texts in a telegraphic cut-up style that eliminates all unnecessary words. In Stein's poetic allusion, readies' authors bobbed sentences like a flapper bobbed—cut short—her hair. Stein had cut her hair in a bob a few years before, and saw the bob and Bobbed Brown as quintessentially modern.

Brown composed and published his manifesto—with an extended example of a readie, composed and bobbed especially for his machine—in the spa town Bad-Ems, Bavaria, Germany, during a rest cure. After his stay in Bad-Ems, he settled for about a year in Cagnes-sur-Mer, a Côté du Sur village near where Marcel Duchamp, Kay Boyle, and other artists and writers lived. Although some scholars now frame Brown as a dilettante of the European avant-garde, the modernists saw him as a precursor, and central innovator, to their revolution. Kay Boyle, who co-signed a "revolution of the word" manifesto in transition and twice won the O. Henry prize for best short stories, would describe Brown in a prominently placed 1959 Village Voice obituary as "one of the greatest innovators in writing (and printing)" whose joie de vivre inspired everyone who knew him. The expatriate modernists in Paris—especially those associated with transition —embraced The Readies project, with Number 12 in the magazine’s "revolution of the word" manifesto ("THE PLAIN READER BE DAMNED") seeming to introduce Brown's efforts (Boyle, et. al., 12; all caps in original). In 1929, just before Brown’s rest cure vacation in Bavaria, Harry and Caresse Crosby’s Black Sun Press, in Paris, published his 1450-1950 , a book of hand-drawn visual poetry. One of those poems, "Eyes on the Half-Shell," was initially shown in 1912 (at least a year before Guillaume Apollinaire considered writing visual poems, or "calligrammes") to Marcel Duchamp, who published it in his Blindman in 1917. Brown would see in the "Calligrammes" (published in 1918) a realization of his desire for what literature could become, and he punned on "Apollinaris" mineral water, bottled eighty kilometres upriver from Bad Ems, by claiming to bathe in Apollinaire. Many decades later, Augusto de Campos, a co-founder of the International Concrete Poetry movement, republished Brown's 1450-1950 and introduced Brown's work as a precursor to concrete poetry (de Campos).

While an expatriate, Brown published approximately eight volumes of experimental poetry from 1929 until 1931—five in 1931 alone—including four volumes in which the visual design played crucial roles in the meaning of the texts. He continued to publish avant-garde works, advocated Surrealist writing, and published many volumes in popular genres throughout the 1930s. During those years, he simultaneously published tracts advocating communes and radical education, wrote Hollywood B-movie story treatments, and co-authored numerous cookbooks.