Page 143

By Jack Joseph Smith

"What's happening Animal! "Listen Prankster; realistate's what's happening. The Prankster oughta' morgage a shack for two fifty a day; Listen; In a couple years the hippies will be out. The carpet bagers with Miami Beach fer a mind will be on the sand. Hightone and gloss, no stain. Tear down the wood and adobe. Dump it in the L.A. dump; Sheet rock for the encasement of glass. No worry, the smog will stop the wind. No problems Prankster; In L.A. the image is free. I mean, anyone can see a movie star in the streets; and them go out and buy a country undershirt to go Beyond it, I mean, any filled up cost of living in-

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

This page turns Southern California development into a bragging, half-comic sales pitch where image, money, and erasure are all part of the same scheme.

The voice is sharp because it sounds so casual about destruction. Wood and adobe can be torn down, glass can replace them, smog can even be treated as useful, and celebrity culture floats over the whole pitch like a selling point. The source spellings sharpen the pitch as spoken patter rather than polished argument. This reading remains provisional because marginal notes and unstable continuations still need closer review.

Claude

Animal's real-estate monologue with 'Hightone' and 'carpet bagers' preserved. The speech is a theology of image-as-land: sheet rock, glass, tear down the wood and adobes. Jack's two idiosyncratic spellings stay because the diatribe's voice needs them.