Craig Saper

A Quick Read(ies): Speed and Formula in Bob Brown’s Pulp Fiction and Avant-Garde Machines

Best-selling pulp-fiction writer, avant-garde poet, publisher, sloganeer, stock trader, and cookbook writer Bob Brown (1886-1959) invented a reading machine in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Contextualizing the machine with Brown’s other, “popular” works and varied careers illuminates a link between the avant-garde and lowbrow culture. The speed and dynamism of his machine shaped the future of reading so as to serve the purposes of mass-producing pulp fiction. Yet avant-garde rhetoric, including Brown’s own manifestos, claimed that the modernist work rejected the quick read of mass culture. Incorporating speed, algorithmic formulas, and a sense of adventure made his and other twentieth-century writing flow seamlessly across the high/low boundary. Brown’s reading machine broke new ground at the crossing of popular culture and the vanguard, anticipating the way in which such inventions as the Internet (e-mail) and cellular telephones (text messaging) would transform writing. At some point in the first two decades of the twentieth century, best-selling pulp-fiction writer, publisher, advertising sloganeer, stock trader, cookbook writer, and impresario Bob Brown (1886-1959) invented a reading machine. This machine became the stage on which he emerged as an avant-garde visual poet. In light of his popular works and varied careers, the machine also provides a glimpse into the intersection of the avant-garde and “lowbrow” popular culture in modernism. Recent scholarship, such as the work of David Earle, has looked to Brown as one of the many links between modernist and popular sensibilities. Earle argues that the close connection between pulp fiction and modernist writing exposes the old prejudice against lowbrow fiction’s facile and formulaic plots. For Earle, “the speed of writing [. . .] caused innate reductivism in the pulps”; furthermore, as he notes, “this fast and formulaic aspect of the pulps” as well as “its very speedy formulism” created a style that “delegated pulp literature to the cultural trash pile.” Yet as Earle points out, “high modernism

The Internet's Underware

The provocative title of this essay refers obviously to multiple and overlapping figurative connotations about blogs, about the internets underlying structural cultural history, and embarrassing issues usually hidden from view. It is not the obscene of the porn-inundated media-scape with its economic incentive to fuel the internets expansion as a commercial interactive landscape. Rather, the very essence of the Internet as an object of study, its forms, properties and structures, is ob-scene (literally off screen). It does not have a medium the way print, film or painting have a medium. At its base, it is a metaphoric translation of literal fiber optics and electronics. Even at this electronic base, the literal electronic pulse of bits and bytes does not correspond completely with the screens form or the fiber of the sociopoetic networks now epitomized by blogs and blogging. Its fiber, its para-form, is that it networks and links in sociopoetic situations. With the struggle to define the new media, programs and departments at universities start to flirt with forming a new discipline oflnternet or New Media Studies. The problem, how to define the object of study and the corresponding theory, will depend on identifying the essence of the Internet: the blog may give a glimpse of this embarrassing essence without literal medium. Is it the Internets underwear rather than some literalized form or body? The title of this essay also refers to a literal, if still both metonymic and analogical, example of networking as a precursor of the Internet. Using that analogy, this essay demonstrates something more than a theoretical speculation on networked activities like blogs. It suggests a networked theory Craig Saper