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Experiment 4

Sing this Version If You Dare, If You Dare

page 2

Sing this Version If You Dare, If You Dare.

Dear Sir,

A Piece of Mud

"Experiment" is a gigantic doodle, grown so fast that no one dare debunk it. In my opinion the contributions to your magazine dangerously border on the cynical. After reading the past issues I now have a clue into what Goering meant by "reaching for his revolver when he heard the word "culture."

What latent meaning in "a pakeha tramper drying his gear by the fire." What mystery in stubbing one's toe on a clay path (why, I could write about it for pages); in a drunk outside a country pub! How Mature (with a capital M) we must be, to analyse emotions so minutely, picking at our fellow-humans with the tweezers of words, much as an amateur zoologist would dissect a Weta. The intention may have been a fine description of the act, the sensation, the experience, but the result smells of morbid egocentricity, and "Experiment" becomes the identity-card of self-styled gods. Each pathetic line speaks "I am bored, intellectually and sensationally" - (can there be no rescue of appetite from satiety).

Your contributors and readers are obviously trying to build an esoteric group obsessed with the trivia of life, pretending that it is not, cannot be true, that they are static, sterile; that futility is the air they breath; and that the fluid in their vessels, instead of oxygenating human blood is - formaldehyde. (Apologies to Merrill Moore).

"Experiment" lacks conmonsense, good-humour, and restraint. I say: scrap the present style and leave gloomy introspection to neurotics.

Sincerely,

Philistine Hubert Heine.

(Author of "How to Lose Friends and Antagonise People.")