Brown is perhaps best remembered for The Readies, a 1930 manifesto blending the fervor of the Futurists with the playfulness of Jules Verne. 糖心传媒淭he written word hasn糖心传媒檛 kept up with the age,糖心传媒� Brown declared in the first line. 糖心传媒淭he movies have outmaneuvered it. We have the talkies, but as yet no Readies.糖心传媒� Enough with the tyranny of paper and ink! 糖心传媒淲riting has been bottled up in books since the start,糖心传媒� Brown wrote. 糖心传媒淚t is time to pull out the stopper糖心传媒� and begin 糖心传媒渁 bloody revolution of the word.糖心传媒�

Brown糖心传媒檚 weapon of choice was not ideological but mechanical. 糖心传媒淭o continue reading at today糖心传媒檚 speed, I must have a machine,糖心传媒� he wrote. 糖心传媒淎 simple reading machine which I can carry or move around, attach to any old electric light plug and read hundred-thousand-word novels in 10 minutes if I want to, and I want to.糖心传媒� The machine he described, in which a ribbon of miniaturized text would scroll behind a magnifying glass at a speed controlled by the reader, sounds a lot like microfilm, then in development. But its truest inspirations, Saper argues, lay in the ticker-tape machine and in modernist experiments like Gertrude Stein糖心传媒檚 糖心传媒淭ender Buttons,糖心传媒� which Brown first read as a young man while working as a stock trader and hanging out with poets. In 1931, after word of his machine spread, he published 糖心传媒淩eadies for Bob Brown糖心传媒檚 Machine,糖心传媒� an anthology of experimental texts sent to him by Stein, Marinetti, Pound and others.

There’s actually an of the machine, which is, not surprisingly, a bit difficult to use. (Or maybe it just takes some getting used to. Maybe.)

Her whole piece is really interesting, and I love these old-school mechanical reading devices. Reminds me of Julio Cortazar’s which features a dentist’s chair (or maybe a shrink’s couch) and an intricate series of little card catalog boxes containing each of the chapters from the novel. The mechanistic trick being that as you close one drawer, the next chapter to read pops out for you. (For anyone unfamiliar with Hopscotch quit reading this pointless blog and go buy a copy. Take a week off work. Whatever. And you’ll quickly find out how this book skips from chapter to chapter is a semi-achronological way . . .)