THE TENTH MUSE

She is invoked by business and by all Americans. She is petitioned on every street, in every magazine or newspaper and wherever people gather. She has been called Advertisa. But her so celebrated, go constant presence surely deserves a better name from stunned or dinary mortals. In a thousand ways the tenth muse's charms have outshone all the charms of her sisters. Only her priests are surviving her blinding polecy. They glory in a terrific combination of red and yellow geometric splashes with shouting black letters of "fire and rummage sale." They glory in page after page of pirate ship packages of candy next to linoleum and bathroom tiles of telephone romances next to ice-box detective stories--until infidels become dizzy. The hierarchy particularly glories in converts to the cohorts of the faithful who worship Advertisa, through the medium of cigarettes. Here Bill Tilden. Charlie Paddock, Amelia Earhart proclaim their remunerative devotion to the goddess (though Amelia did send her $10,000 reward to Byrd for his Antartic expedition). Soon Elnatein will be sold for "Not a cough in a carload"; and James Joyce's books, because "They are mild--yet they satisfy." Morning, evening, all day long chant the priests "Advertisa is great. Advertisa is great. Blessed be Advertisa, mother of Mammon. Bigger and better advertising."

The faithless must beware the consuming fury of Advertisa. Pagans of the world must unite, for single-handed they cannot resist the proselytizing forces of the priests. Unless they get Advertisa Advertisa will get them. With her terrifying and deadly juxtaposition of jarring colors and incongruous commodities, in a stupefying rush of unrelated station signs, bill boards, highway signs, and white ways, she will wreak fatigue, death, destruction upon their heathen intellects. They will be dizzy forever. The infiedels must seize arms and battle for their last strongholds, the mountains, the forests, the wilds, against Moloch, the chimera, the eighth plague, the tenth muse, Advertisa.