Machine Poetics and Reading Machines: William Poundstone’s Electronic Literature and Bob Brown’s Readies

A recent essay in the New York Times Book Review titled “The Godfather of the E-Reader” suggests, “if you’re searching for a godfather of the reading machine, you might look past Jeff Bezo and Steve Jobs to a nearly forgotten early-twentieth-century writer and impresario named Bob Brown” (Schuessler 27). Robert Carlton (Bob) Brown, an American experimental writer of the modernist period, shared a social network with the likes of Williams Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein, and planned to build a reading machine that would speed up the pace of reading literature and thereby change the kind of literature we read. He called his machine “The Readies.” “Revolutionize reading and a Revolution of the Word will be inkless achieved,” he writes (Readies 35).¹ The Readies was never built and has been nearly forgotten by literary history; so too has Brown remained on the margins of literary history.² But recent events in the evolution of digital reading machines prompt excavation of the Readies and reconsideration of it as a vital part of the genealogy of contemporary technopoetics and literary practices.³ The essay pursues such excavation by reading the Readies in relation to recent machine-informed poetics of electronic literature. I present Brown as godfather of a contemporary generation of writers experimenting with the newest reading machine, the digital computer. I claim that technologies of reading, not just writing, are an integral part of American literary history. This essay examines the influence of mechanical reading machines—the Readies and the computer—on literary poetics and close reading practices.

By “reading machine” I mean a mechanized device that stores and presents literature, not just a readerly prosthesis for accessing text.⁴ These reading machines participate in producing the literary experience by, in some sense, reading or processing the text before (and in able for) the human reader to do the same. The literary texts I examine in this essay were written expressively for their reading machines. The poetics they pursue are thus dependent on the reading machine and, indeed, inseparable from it. It is this situation, in which the reading machine is intentionally employed in the service of a medium-specific technopoetic, that I call “machine poetics.” Machine poetics expose the reading machine to be part of the literary process and thus subject to literary analysis.⁵ Of course, in comparing the Readies and born-digital literature I am eliding the differences between analog and digital reading machines. These differences are inarguably crucial, but explicating them is not the focus of this essay.⁶ My effort here is to show how reading machines and machine poetics have a foundation in literary history that precedes the digital computer and goes back, at least, to modernism. In no way do I mean to equate digital and analog technologies but rather to claim that the various and diverse technologies subsumed under the descriptions of “digital” and “analog” should be included in our understanding of, and critical approaches to, literature. I begin with a work of digital literature that remediates an earlier and now obsolete reading machine in ways that simultaneously illuminate and obfuscate the layers of technologies involved in delivering the literary text. I argue that this techno-reflexivity is not only central to the literary works examined in this essay but also to understanding how literary study is always already a media-informed practice.

1. Reading the Remediation

William Poundstone’s web-based Flash animation “Project for the Tachistoscope [Bottomless Pit]” (2005) demands unpacking or, rather, excavation.⁷ This is evident in the work’s title, which uses brackets to bury the subject of the narrative, a story about a bottomless pit, and make this content subsidiary to its larger formal project: the act of technological remediation at its center. “Project for a Tachistoscope [Bottomless Pit]” resurrects an older, now-obsolete reading machine, the tachistoscope, through a newer one, the digital computer. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin define “remediation” as “the representation of one medium in another” and claim that remediation “ensures that the...