Readies for Bob Brown's Machine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Carlton Brown
Keyword(s):  
Text Messaging ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Internet Media ◽  
Facsimile Edition ◽  
Viewing Screen ◽  
Writing Technology

This is the much-anticipated new edition of the important volume of avant-garde writing, Readies for Bob Brown's Machine. The original collection of Readies was published by Brown’s Roving Eye Press in 1931. Despite including works by leading modernist writers including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kay Boyle, F.T. Marinetti, and 35 other writers and artists, this volume has never been re-issued. Like the ‘talkies’ in cinema, Brown’s machine and the ‘readies’ medium he created for it proposed to revolutionise reading with technology by scrolling texts across a viewing screen. Apart from its importance to modernism, Brown’s research on reading seems remarkably prescient in light of text messaging, e-books, and internet media ecologies. Brown’s designs for a modernist style of reading, which emphasised speed, movement, and immediacy, required a complete re-design of reading and writing technology. Complete with a new Preface by Eric White and a new Introduction and a separate chapter on the contributors by Craig Saper, this critical facsimile edition restores to public attention the extraordinary experiments of writing readies for a reading machine.

Ghosts in the Machine Age: Rose and Bob Brown’s Reading Machines and the Socio-Technics of Social Change

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-213
Author(s):  
Eric B. White
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Ivory Tower ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
The Great Depression

Chapter 4 begins at the point at which the Bob and Rose Brown’s ‘readies’ project supposedly failed: after the Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine anthology was published in 1931. Featuring experimental texts by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and many others, the readies project has hitherto been considered one of many modernist casualties of the Great Depression. This chapter finally reveals its full story, and details how Rose Brown led the development of a new working reading machine in the 1930s and beyond. Anthology contributors including James T. Farrell, Norman MacLeod and the Browns had begun to chart a course beyond the binary orbits of dour social realism and ‘ivory-tower’ aestheticism. The chapter combines new readings of these American super-realist writers with extensive archival research using a meta-formational approach, which relies on (rather than is undermined by) different disciplinary approaches to cultural production. Reconstructing the Browns’ journey from the rural labour institute Commonwealth College to the Polytechnic Museums of Russia – from the burgeoning microfilm industry in New York City to their plantation in Brazil – it reveals how the Browns’ proletarian class politics and Veblenist technicities articulate a sustained and dialogic engagement between modernist vanguards and mass culture.

Loy, Mina (1882–1966)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beulah Maud Devaney
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Djuna Barnes ◽  
Henri Bergson ◽  
Left Bank ◽  
Mina Loy ◽  
Graphic Artist

Mina Loy, born Mina Gertrude Lowry, (1882–1966), was a British artist, designer, model, novelist, nurse, playwright and poet, with ties to the Dadaist, Futurist and Surrealist moments. Loy was one of the first generation modernists and was close friends with many leaders of the movement including Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams. Her poetry was published in The Little Review and championed by Left Bank publisher Robert McAlmon. Mina Loy was born in London in 1882, the eldest daughter of Sigmund and Julia Bryant Lowry. In 1899, at the age of seventeen, Loy left school and moved to Munich to study art with the painter and graphic artist Angelo Jank. Jank, a member of the Munich Secession, introduced Loy to the work of newly emerging European thinkers, including Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Introduction: Kathy Acker and the Avant-Garde

Kathy Acker ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgina Colby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Standard Form ◽  
Kathy Acker ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Precise Nature ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy

‘TO SHOW: DIVERGENCE FROM STANDARD FORM OF STRUCTURE; FORM HAS MEANING’1 Kathy Acker writes in bold capitals in an unpublished notebook. The alignment of form and content is the starting point of this book. It brings together two interrelated axes of Acker’s practice: her continuation of radical modernism’s preoccupation with the crisis of language, and the avant-garde concern for producing art orientated towards the transformation of society. For early twentieth-century modernist writers the imbrication of form with content was a hallmark of their literary practice. The commitment to experimentation in form and language, upheld by writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, H.D., and James Joyce, is integral to the challenge modernist writers sought to pose to nineteenth-century realism. It was a key characteristic of their larger concern with the medium of writing. The precise nature of that concern with the medium of writing is crucial. Theorists of the avant-garde have attempted to draw a distinction between modernism and the avant-garde on the issue of aesthetic autonomy. Peter Bürger’s now classic work ...

‘Out Past / Self-Dramatization’: Maurice Scully's Several Dances

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-118
Author(s):  
Romana Huk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
American Poets

What has lyric to do with any radical phenomenology's choreography? Maurice Scully in Several Dances asks that question, as he has for years now, alongside other poets of Ireland's avant-garde whose ‘distinguishing (not inhibiting) feature’, as Sarah Bennett writes (acknowledging the work of Alex Davis and Eric Falci before her) is that in it ‘the lyric subject persists’ – in tandem with, this essay argues, what she names ‘an interest in perception … [which] is perhaps the most compelling commonality in these poets' work’. What distinguishes Scully's from the lyric phenomenology of American poets from William Carlos Williams (invoked throughout the volume) to George Oppen (also invoked) is that he queries existentialism's ‘singular’ approach to phenomena, achieved as Heidegger thought through the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ of individual (and communal) preconceptions from the perception of things. Cosmic – even theological – speculation enters in as Scully's poems move out past both self-centered lyric and twentieth-century cancellations of all preconceptions in the ‘limit-thinking’ and being-toward-death that phenomenology proposed for seeing past the self. Yet Scully works with mortality always in his sights too as he sings ‘the Huuuman / Limit-at-tation Blues’ (p.118) and, more vertiginously, considers both the undelimitability and the fragility of us.

scholarly journals «Roundabout I-VI» de Martín Gubbins o dos lecturas de lo ilegible

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 339-351
Author(s):  
Alethia Alfonso
Keyword(s):  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Alain Badiou ◽  
British Poetry

En este artículo planteo la relación que existe entre algunos postulados de Eric Mottram, uno de los iniciadores de British Poetry Revival, con la poesía de Martín Gubbins. Abogo por abrir las posibilidades de influencia anglosajona más allá de los conocidos Ezra Pound y William Carlos Williams. Además, busco entender qué sucede con el sujeto en poéticas contemporáneas predominantemente visuales y performativas. Por último, esbozo una noción de la relación que poemas como «Roundabout I-VI» de Gubbins tienen con la (in)estética según Alain Badiou.

The World of the Little Review

2019 ◽  
pp. 18-70
Author(s):  
Clare Hutton
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Conservatism ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
First World

This chapter looks at the origins and general intellectual context of the Little Review, the avant-garde New York periodical which serialized Joyce’s Ulysses between 1918 and 1920. The editors were Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, who were joined by Ezra Pound for two years from May 1917. Pound edited the serial Ulysses and was acutely aware of the changing political context in which the journal was being published. In an atmosphere of increasing cultural conservatism brought about by the entry of the US into the First World War, the New York Post Office declared some issues of the Little Review to be non-mailable and suppressed them. The chapter reviews some issues of the Little Review in detail, paying particular attention to the nexus of associations between the serial Ulysses and some of the other texts and preoccupations of the Little Review.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888–1965)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Templeton
Keyword(s):  
Academic Career ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Bachelor's Degree ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Facsimile Edition ◽  
Postgraduate Studies ◽  
Post War

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) was an essayist, editor, playwright, poet, and publisher. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. He is perhaps best known for his long poem The Waste Land. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri and attended Harvard University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Eliot’s postgraduate studies in philosophy took him to the Sorbonne in 1910/11 and to Oxford in 1914. Once he arrived in England, however, he spent much of his time in London. There he met two of the most influential people of his literary life: the American poet Ezra Pound and a young Englishwoman named Vivienne Haigh-Wood, whom Eliot would marry in 1915 after a four-month courtship. Pound encouraged Eliot, who had been planning an academic career, to keep writing poetry and to submit "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to Poetry magazine for publication. In addition to writing poetry, Eliot also took a position with Lloyd’s Bank in 1917, managing foreign accounts. Pound and Eliot frequently collaborated and critiqued each other’s work throughout the 1920s and 1930s and remained friends until Eliot’s death, despite divergent political and religious paths. The most famous of these collaborations, The Waste Land, has been documented in a published facsimile edition of the poem (1972) that reveals Pound’s numerous comments on Eliot’s manuscript. The Waste Land is revolutionary both in its form, free verse, and its subject matter, which links urbanization, technology, sexuality, and post-war alienation to dozens of classical allusions in seven languages. The poem is a pastiche of voices and fragments linked both thematically and tonally.

Fascist Modernism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Maertz
Keyword(s):  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
American English ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Cultural Renewal ◽  
Vichy France

Fascist modernism is an artistic and literary movement emphasizing extreme nationalism, romantic anti-capitalism, and cultural renewal most closely associated with Fascist Italy, Vichy France, and National Socialist Germany (see Nazi modernism) but also describing the fusion of innovative literary technique and reactionary politics found in the writings of leading American, English, and Irish modernist authors such as T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and W. B. Yeats.

There Is Always Others

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Timberman Newcomb
Keyword(s):  
Ezra Pound ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
Industrial Modernity ◽  
The Masses

This chapter examines how the experimental verse of Others, the quintessential aestheticist-modernist little magazine of American poetry, emerges from and responds to the climate of metropolitan activism that links it to The Masses. Others, published between July 1915 and July 1919 by Alfred Kreymborg and various friends, published works by such distinguished poets such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Carl Sandburg. This chapter argues that Others's commitment to stylistic experimentalism possessed a strong social dimension by showing how its verses addressed the conditions of urban-industrial modernity. It also describes the magazine's poetics of modernity as it extends across three interdependent registers: formal, thematic, and metapoetic. Finally, it discusses Others's contribution to the expansion of modern poetic form by cultivating a distinctive innovation, the vers libre variation sequence.

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