Page 22
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The page follows a walker through used cars, bars, night flatness, a Corn Beef sign, Shakespeare in Chicago, and a car speaker's muffled promise of women and food.
Its city is a marketplace of appetite and self-recognition. The corrected transcript sharpens the page's motion from imagined spending and assembly into the final image of a stranger who remembers himself.
A walker's monologue that makes the city a marketplace of appetite. To 'save the fix he had for / the used cars' is 'like settl- / ing down,' and if there were 'only bars and car lots (he / hoped for a new one)' then 'to be among / was to assemble oneself in the / mist of the flat spaced along / night time.' He turns a corner past a 'Corn Beef' sign - 'Reality is Shakespeare in Chicago' - while 'a good car' speaker pushes 'a muffled tone of women's' voices, answered flatly: '(Food and women; no change.)' He walks on 'as a / stranger who remembers himself.' This reading is provisional because the page transcript sits in the 'mixed' OCR quality band.