170 Slapstick Modernism: Charley Bowers and Industrial Modernity William Solomon Humor saves a few steps, it saves years. Marianne Moore 1 I In a posthumously published essay entitled Machine Art, drafted between 1927 and 1930, Ezra Pound makes a strong case for the aesthetic value of contemporary machinery. Initially directing his comments to those interested in the plastic arts (architecture especially), he praises the attractive formal elements of assorted mechanical objects, emphasizing in particular the admirable shape of their component parts. Supporting his claim with photographs, he declares that the basic idea he has drawn from his researches into the philosophy of art is that we find a thing beautiful in proportion to its aptitude to a function. I suspect that the better a machine becomes AS A MACHINE, the better it will be to look at. 2 From a visual standpoint, machines are most pleasing to the eye when they are purposefully constructed to perform specific tasks. Addressing musicians as well, the second chapter turns to the acoustic properties of machinery, and at this stage of the argument Pound also begins to deal with economics. Endorsing in general efforts to organize production, he proposes that work could be made more enjoyable were the sounds in a factory better composed. More harmonious and rhythmically sophisticated arrangements might eliminate the aural disagreeability of the labor process (72-75); and there is no reason why the shop noise shouldnt be used as stimulus and to give swing and ease to modern work (81). Lastly, due to their energetic commitment to invention and design, engineers are intellectually exemplary: The engineering mind is about the most satisfactory mind of our time (77). Artists thus have much to learn from those currently involved in rationalizing the industrial workplace, and Pound himself sees no reason to disguise his interest in either Fords theories or his practice. He has already experimented in tempo (81, original emphasis). Pounds appeal to standardized methods of mass production as a viable model for artistic creation offers us access to the basic principles informing the idea of a machine aesthetic, an idea that has long served as a way of commenting upon the nature of artistic modernisms engagement with science and technology between the two world wars. To take a canonical account of the American writers reaction to these forces of modernity in the 1920s, Cecilia Tichi, in Shifting Gears, praises John Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams, and Ernest Hemingway for their imaginative embrace of values specific to the machine age. According to the literary historian, Dos Passoss significance rests on his pioneering reliance on structural and machine technology . . . as the model for the composition of the modern novel. Correlatively, the virtue of Williamss achievement in these years was to devise a kinetic poetics of efficiency (230), to invent a mode of writing that enacted formally the accelerated movements endemic to the rise of urban modernity. It was by way of his lyrical work, alongside the stylistic economies of Hemingway, that the engineering values of precision and speed (256) were incorporated into modernist literature. 3 More recently, Joel Dinerstein has employed this interpretive paradigm in an expansive treatment of modernist practice during the period under discussion. African American artists, he asserts, integrated the speed, drive, precision, and rhythmic flow of factory work and modern cities into a nationally (and internationally) unifying cultural form: big-band swing. 4 In conjunction with emergent dance styles, jazz musicians of the era turned to the previously