0.1 Afterword  (Page 4/9)

It was within the context of all this other work that Brown produced his manifesto. Even the dedication of the book to "all eye-writers" and "readers who want an eyeful" alludes to the recurring motif in his other work of the "celerity of the eye" (versus the "clumsy hand" turning pages), especially in visual poetry. In the manifesto’s Chapter I, "An Eyeful," he illuminates that literary context all the way back to his reading Stephen Crane's "Black Riders" as a youth, and the socio-technological changes necessitating a more fitting way to read: "we have the talkies, but as yet no Readies." The chapter, written with a playful but passionate tone, demonstrates and explains the Readies' style, filled with what he calls "smashum" words, including a type of condensed anagram or portmanteau word, and a visual design in which "hermaphroditic hypodermic hyphen" replaces unnecessary words and chops up long words, all in parodies and experimental writing. Toward the end of the chapter, after singing the praises of Joyce and Stein, he hints at the larger goal: "I know words can do anything, become anything, all I hold out for is more and better reading of the words we've got . . . reading will have to be done by machine; microscopic type on a movable tape running beneath a slot equipped with a magnifying glass and brought up to life size before the reader's birdlike eye, saving white space, making words more moving," using Brown's machine and his processed texts.

Chapter II's title, "A Two-Way Fish," alludes to a prop in a carnival game that allows the grifter to surreptitiously change a winner into a loser after the player-as-sucker picks a fish with a winning number (the shills win a few when the operator switches in the losing number for a winning number). The chapter begins with a series of notes before an extended two-columned experimental essay that seeks to challenge the for-or-against binaries usually found in critical essays and manifestos. The numbered entries in the two columns telescope autobiographical details into poetic allusions and dissect neologistic portmanteau words. The dramatization of the struggle to avoid critical judgment (or what we might now call logocentric meaning), with the two columns perhaps serving as visual and sound tracks, or two voices of dialog, ends with the phrase "apple sauce," at the bottom of one column, and "applause" at the bottom of the other. “Applause” is a visual pun, a condensed anagram or smashum of “apple sauce.” The chapter reads like an absurdist play about modern reading.

Chapter III, "My Reading Machine," published in transition in the June 1930 issue as "The Readies," returns to an explanatory mode to suggest that the machine substitutes for the book as a distribution mechanism, and that the machine will shift reading away from cognition toward optics. He also returns to building a context for the machine in modernist culture, where "only the reading half of Literature lags behind, stays old-fashioned . . . cumbersome ... bottled up . . .." The chapter focuses on specific technical details and quantitative comparative analysis of reading and its mechanisms both in Brown’s time and in his imagined future. The SteamPunk aesthetic, which imagines alternate histories of design as if contemporary technologies were invented in an earlier Victorian or Edwardian era, when steam was a dominant or prevalent energy source, would today embrace Brown's clunky futuristic machines, perhaps with the slightly modified name MachinePunk, reveling in cogs, gears, magnifiers, and spools running on a whirring electric motor. An alternate or counter-factual history of the reading machine's significance would describe the machine moving beyond a single primitive prototype with a small audience of modernist poets to have mass appeal and use. That alternate history of the machine highlights the aesthetic dimension and appeals to designers and artists outside of literary history.