Page 8

By Jack Joseph Smith

(There is no humor here; I can not even be Will Rogers as the Great Dictator. I can not shown my talents for a last smile; I can not take my mus- tash off, when there is no hair above my lip. Look at them. They are dead and want to kill; I see that. Nowhere is an end, and this is a place a long way away from "I only know what I read in the newspapers. No Charley, no Will; no humor. A director though. No actors yet. Train them. Put them through the word improv- isation. No way moon. Is that right? Star don't question the lost. Show the way. Make of me a ship. Make of me better, a sea that drowns others. But if these gangsters can float? Then let them. But hey are drunk and have removed the salt from their bodies. The heads move; the rocks stay still; but act like a whip for their sound, while there caress of the wind makes that force a principle of how things turn no longer a secret...

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The page is a furious anti-comic monologue in which deadness, murder, gangster threat, direction, improvisation, and sea violence all become part of one artistic crisis.

It starts by refusing humor and never relaxes from that refusal. What follows feels like a manifesto spoken from inside danger, where performance, shipwreck, and drowning become ways to imagine how art might answer a world already bent toward killing.

Claude

A parenthetical monologue that opens by refusing comedy - 'There is no humor here; I can not even be Will / Rogers as the Great Dictator' - and the joke collapses on itself: there is no mustache to remove because 'there is no hair above my lip.' It hardens into a director's manifesto barked at unmade actors ('Train them. Put them through the word improv- / isation'), shot through with sea imagery where the speaker would be made 'a ship' or 'a sea that drowns others,' while the floating gangsters 'are drunk and have removed / the salt from their bodies.' Performance, command, and drowning fuse into one crisis spoken from inside danger.