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Contemporary publishing, e-media, and writing owe much to an unsung hero who worked in the trenches of the culture industry (for pulp magazines, Hollywood films, and advertising) and caroused and collaborated with the avant-garde throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Robert Carlton Brown (1886-1959) turned up in the midst of virtually every significant American literary, artistic, political, and popular or countercultural movement of his time--from Chicago's Cliff Dweller's Club to Greenwich Village's bohemians and the Imagist poets; from the American vanguard expatriate groups in Europe to the Beats. Bob Brown churned out pulp fiction and populist cookbooks, created the first movie tie-ins, and invented a surreal reading machine more than seventy-five years ahead of e-books. He was a real-life Zelig of modern culture. With The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown, Craig Saper disentangles, for the first time, the many lives and careers of the intriguing figure behind so much of twentieth-century culture. Saper's lively and engaging yet erudite and subtly experimental style offers a bold new approach to biography that perfectly complements his multidimensional subject. Readers are brought along on a spirited journey with Bob and the Brown clan--Cora (his mother), Rose (his wife), and Bob, a creative team who sometimes went by the name of CoRoBo--through globetrotting, fortune-making and fortune-spending, culture-creating and culture-exploring adventures. Along the way, readers meet many of the most important cultural figures and movements of the era and are witness to the astonishingly prescient vision Brown held of the future of American cultural life in the digital age. Although Brown traveled and lived all around the world, he took Manhattan with him, and his New York City had boroughs around the world.

In this exhilarating guide, Craig J. Saper takes us on an eye-opening tour of the process of cultural invention-willfully entertaining foolish, absurd, even fake, solutions as a way of reaching new perspectives on cultural problems. Saper deploys this method to reveal unsuspected connections among major cultural issues, such as urban decay, the dangers of television’s power, family values, and conservative criticism of higher education.

The experimental art and poetry of the last half of the twentieth century offers a glimpse of the emerging networked culture that electronic devices will make omnipresent. Craig J. Saper demarcates this new genre of networked art, which uses the trappings of bureaucratic systems—money, logos, corporate names, stamps—to create intimate situations among the participants. Saper explains how this genre developed from post-World War II conceptual art, including periodicals as artworks in themselves; lettrist, concrete, and process poetry; Bauhaus versus COBRA; Fluxus publications, kits, and machines; mail art and on-sendings. The encyclopedic scope of the book includes discussions of artists from J. Beuys to J. S. G. Boggs, and Bauhaus’s Max Bill to Anna Freud Banana.

In the last decade, much digital humanities research involved databases. Digital technology allowed not only for expansion of concordances, but also, and more importantly, for new types of tagged, hyperlinked, and radiant texts. Databases changed the experience of reading. My research also involves a database, but I now realize that the consequence of building this peculiar database has led to what I believe is the next major aspect of research on the experience of reading: simulation. The reading machines on my website (www.readies.org) allude to Bob Carlton Brown’s machine proposed, in one iteration, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He called the texts prepared for the machine “readies.” This project led to a realization that one could simulate reading situations and experiences usually only described. So, the Brown machine simulation becomes a prototype for a series of simulations on other reading situations both in the past and potential futures.

The research experiment described in this article, Readies Online, started as a database to make accessible a rare manuscript of important modernist poets and writers including Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, F. W. Marinetti, Kay Boyle, Nancy Cunard, Eugene Jolas, and many others. Each of these contributors had sent works prepared for Bob Brown's machine, and he called the prepared texts readies. In the midst of building the collection of texts, the researcher realized that moving the texts through an electronic version of Brown's machine, or through the interface constructed on the website to simulate Brown's machine, changed how one read — even changed the essence of what one read. Speed, pace, direction, and visual cues took on new importance already apparent in reading printed texts, but not stressed. Punctuation now represented an illegible and non-representational, visual cue rather than a direct link to the phono-centric pauses and stops that are more commonly represented by punctuation. The futures of reading, and the use of new devices like e-readers, will have consequences for the definition and practice of what we call reading.

Cloud Machine In his exploration of the \"influencing machine\" experienced by schizophrenics, Victor Tausk describes something that very closely resembles the cinematic apparatus and also suggests virtual reality. [...] most psychologists know little about this previous leader of American psychology.8 Anyone who might guess that extracurricular activities do not play a role in the evolution of thought may find this story instructive. In that dream \"you descended to the bottom of the ocean and there found yourself in the midst of a large, unfamiliar city . . . finding yourself standing in front of a pile of layered earth, you lift up each layer, and after taking off two or three, you became concerned about having to take responsibility for what you were doing\" (177).

In 1942, with Carmen Miranda’sThe Gang’s All Herein production and promising to be a big hit, Hollywood producers were eager to make more movies with Brazilian characters or settings. They were talking with Orson Welles about his never-completed film about a Rio carnival celebration and they decided to send Bob and Rose Brown down the Amazon to generate ideas for movies. About a decade before, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Browns were expatriate surrealists living in France. Bob had created a sensation among the avant-garde with his “reading machine,” including praise from Gertrude Stein, Marcel

While comparing the Web to a medium like film or video makes it difficult to examine this type of social-aesthetic interplay, comparing the Web to assemblings and mail-art networks helps to highlight this interplay. Because the alternative artists' networks examine the same fears and hopes found in many descriptions of the information super-highway, we can learn about the electronic web's potential from studying the assemblings' codes. 4. Chuck Welch estimates the number of mail-art participants at around six thousand in 1993; that number does not include the many more who buy 'zines at newsstands. Because these magazines inherently offer a forum for discussions about this type of work, much of the secondary literature resides within the community of these artists.