Click through to read a book of poems titled 1450 - 1950 which was originally published in 1929 by Harry Crosby’s Black Sun Press, only 150 copies were printed. In 1959 Jargon Books republished the book in its original state.  Robert Curtis Brown is an almost forgotten about American writer of the modernist era, even with these internets we have today, it is hard to find information about him. I’ve nabbed this little bio from The Pip: Bob Brown [USA]1886-1959Born in 1886 in Chicago, Illinois, Robert Carlton Brown attended the University of Wisconsin and at age 22 began writing for magazines and newspapers in New York City. He began writing his highly personal and idiomatic poetry around 1914, focusing on an unpretentious, playful manner that related to and was published in the Dadaist magazines such as Marcel Duchamp’s The Blind Man, which presented two of Brown’s poems in its second issue of 1917. Brown’s early books include Tahiti; 10 Rhythms (1915), published by the legendary Guido Bruno, and My Marjonary (1916). Brown also wrote fiction, publishing more than a thousand short stories. He was a best-selling novelist, the most famous book of which was What Happened to Mary, published in 1913. That publication and the movie made from it, allowed him to retire in 1928. Brown lived for long periods in many locations throughout the world, at one time editing a journal in Brazil and publishing books at Cagnes-sur-Mer by D. H. Lawrence and Archibald MacLeish on his Roving Eye Press imprint.Later work of Brown’s was published in Harry Crosby’s Black Sun Press and reprinted in 1959 by Jonathan Williams’ Jargon Press. In 1931 Brown edited a volume of experiments by Gertrude Stein, Ezra Bound, Eugene Jolas, Kay Boyle, Robert McAlmon, Williams Carlos Williams and Charles Henri Ford, Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine, which used a tachistoscope-like reading machine which presented “a moving spectacle,” that ran “on forever before the eye without having to be chopped up into columns, pars, etc.” Globe-Gliding was published in 1930. Brown was also the author, with his mother Cora and wife Rose, of several cookbooks. Among his noted writings on food are Let There Be Beer, a celebration of the end of Prohibition, The Wine Cook Book, America Cooks, The South American Cook Book, The Vegetable Cook Book, The European Cookbook and The Complete Book of Cheese.He died on August 7, 1959 in New York City.BOOKS OF POETRYTahiti: 10 Rhythms (New York: Guido Bruno, 1915); My Marjonary (Boston: John W. Luce, 1916); Globe-Gliding (1930); Nomandness (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1931); Demonics (Cagnes-sur-Mer: Roving Eye Press, 1931); 1450-1950 (New York: Jargon Books, 1959) The source for 1450 - 1950 is ubuweb, which is fantastic a site.

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This mini-archive was set up by apo-mechanes, which (from what I’ve gathered from their site) is a sort of conference held in Greece that focuses on non-linear design, specifically with the help of algorithms. Beyond my reach. Anyway, they have a nice page with links to PDFs for their reading list. There’s some interesting stuff on there, a few stories by Jorge Louis Borges, The Birds by Aristophanes, and whole wealth of theoretical work with titles like 1000 Years of Non-Linear History, and such (from what I’ve seen, most of the longer works of theory consist of mostly the introduction).  

(Click through to read on Google Books, if you hover your mouse over the red “READ EBOOK” icon on the left hand side of the screen, a menu box will open and you can download the PDF version.) I was introduced to Stephen Crane’s poetry through Jerome McGann’s Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (a book history/poststructural textual studies look at the effect of small press publishers on modernist aesthetics); before reading McGann I was only familiar with Crane’s Maggie Girl of the Streets and a illustrated, children’s edition of The Red Badge of Courage that I read when I was eleven or twelve (I can only remember the cover illustration, not the story, etc). The poems of Crane’s Black Rider come with an almost mechanical efficiency that is heightened by their propensity towards a deterministic view of the human condition; one where the individual is lost, and Truth is “A BREATH, A WIND / A SHADOW,  A PHANTOM.” There are many poems that deal directly with religion and God in an impious and sometimes humorous way. The naturalism that Crane employs in his novels (so I’ve been told, and have only experience firsthand in Maggie), is apparent in his blaspheme, but here it seems to be much more direct and much more satisfying. Critics, though I do not know which ones [and only include this statement so I can round off this paragraph (knowing full and well that the use of “critics” only acts as a sort of cultural capital that will somehow vilify the statement at hand)], have stated that Stephen Crane is a precursor to the poetry of the high modernist tradition as exemplified by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Hart Crane. I have only general knowledge of these poets, and may be able to give examples that will relate them to Black Riders, but by doing so I will only be engaging in an act of simplification through association to mask my ignorance. Therefore, I won’t. NOTES ON THE TEXT: Stephen Crane’s Black Riders and Other Lines was first published in 1895 by Copeland and Day. The edition linked to this post is the third edition of the Copeland and Day printing, and upholds the original bibliographic elements, i.e. all caps, poems separated by Roman numerals and page breaks… Other online editions I found were terribly transcribed; the one on PinkMonkey being the worst (even ignoring line breaks); an electronic edition prepared by MobileReference (a Boston based ebook publisher) was second in line, the first line of each poem was turned into the title (a similar fate seen by Emily Dickinson’s poetry), and the all caps was dropped; the best of the transcriptions was from Poets’ Corner, which failed to include all caps, and, of course, the original placement of the poems on the page (the site includes all the poems in a continuous stream broken by a line divider). I’ve been made a firm believer (by McGann and others) that the bibliographic elements—which includes everything from cover art to type of paper—has the ability to affect one’s reading. It is interesting to see how the presentation of a book changes from print edition to print edition, and especially from print edition to electronic edition. Take a look at any Project Gutenberg transcription and compare it to a print edition, even dismissing the errors in spelling, punctuation, and mistyped words that are inevitable to come from transcription (even though to dismiss these “mistakes” does ignore a very large section of material that can influence a reading), one can see a mass corruption of the work’s original “form,” etc. I will try to find some articles to post that speak to this subject.   Enjoy.

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Click here for mediafire link to a zip folder containing Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” (1967), Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” (1964), and John Barth’s “How to Make a Universe” (~1960 as a speech; 1984 in The Friday Book).

Roland Barthes’ essay calls into question the essential, positivist nature of the Author - how the author of a text, as an entity (psychological or otherwise), is not only unimportant, but incomprehensible. The language of the writing is what speaks, not the author. Susan Sontag, who is a disciple (so to say) of Barhtes, takes the problem of the dead author to the extent of the reader. The act of interpretation, Sontag says, places limits on the art object and is part of the longstanding philosophical tradition of the search for the Ultimate Truth; interpretation constricts the art object to manageable complicity. John Barth writes from the perspective of a creative writer. Through a succession of name drops (from Kafka to Shakespeare) and inquisitive gems, Barth speaks about how the act of writing is an act of structuring a universe.

“Death of the Author” and “Against Interpretation” were found on the internet somewhere already in the form I present them to you. “How to Make a Universe” was in text format and I made the PDF.

Enjoy.