The Twilight of the Bums Read Online Free PDF Page B

located exactly in the place uttered by the mud of nothingness.

    Bum Two [alias Laut]:
    You know Um sometimes you really get on my nerves, I am fed up with all your gloom, despair, anguish, rejection, silence, repulse, disgust, hammering anger, wretched shunning, unchecked desperation, aggressive paranoia, psychotic anxiety, reactive depression, and all the rest. Do you ever consider that I too feel exactly the same as you do, and if it were not for our … ah what’s the use of explaining it to you. Forget it. Come on, let’s go get a beer somewhere.

THE LIFE OF THE ARTIST IN MONTPARNASSE
    The Bums have decided to become artiste-peintres , and so they go to Paris, rent an artist studio in Montparnasse, put on artist smocks and bérets, and to get started paint on the walls of their studio everything that is inside the room. It’s a large square room with a high ceiling and one window looking onto the street. Working together in perfect harmony they first reproduce the window on the wall opposite the window, so that now there is a perfect replica of the window, so realistically done that one cannot tell which is the real window. Then they paint the paintings hanging on one wall, all of them self-portraits of the Bums artfully framed, so that now all the paintings of themselves also appear on the opposite wall, but flattened into that wall, and yet just as well done and as convincingly as the originals. In one corner of the room two desks are standing next to each other against the wall. They paint the desks, and the chairs in front of the desks, in the corner of the studio directly opposite the real desks and chairs. The composition and the perspective is so perfectly executed that if someone were to enter the room and decided to sit at one of the desks, that person could not possibly distinguish the real desks from their reproductions. On the ceiling they paint everything that stands on the floor, the working table, the stools, the paper basket, the easels (they each have their own easel), and themselves too, but upside down, of course, and yet so exactly replicated that someone standing on his or her head looking up at the ceiling could not possibly detect any difference between what is on the floor and what is painted on the ceiling. Eventually all the objects in the studio are mirrored on the walls and on the ceiling, including the easels in the center of the room with the large canvas propped on them representing the room and the two Bum-artists standing before their easels in the process of painting a portrait of themselves. They then paint themselves with a smile of satisfaction on their faces standing before the easels in the painting of the easels they have reproduced on the wall. Finally they paint themselves sitting at the imaginary desks, head between their hands, elbows resting on top of the desks. For a while they stare at themselves sitting at the imaginary desks, then walk to the real desks, sit down, place a large sheet of paper on the desks and begin to sketch a picture of themselves sitting at the desks sketching themselves.

TITLES
    Though they will not admit it openly, the two bums often deplore the fact that they have not gained recognition for their achievements, and so they sometimes speculate as to what the title of a book about them would be if such a book were to be written. Over the years the bums have kept adding possible titles to the list they would propose to the potential chronicler of their twin-life if such a person were to offer his or her services.
    Here is that list:

    The Twilight of the Bums
    A la Recherche des Bums Perdus
    Bumlet & Julette
    The Bumwake Celebration
    Also Sprach die Bums
    Among the Bums
    Die Bümmerdämmerung
    The Bum Rap
    Waiting for the Bums
    The Divine Bum Comedy
    Journey to the End of Bumhood
    Loose Shoes & Other Bum Stories
    Long Talking Bad Conditions Bums
    L’Education Sentimentale des Bums
    Sorrisi a Bumsvilla
    Eine Version Unsere