Urmuz, pen name of Demetru Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău, was a Romanian writer of absurdist and avant-garde prose. In his early youth, he dreamed of becoming a composer; he read science fiction and travel literature. During his years at the Gheorghe Lazăr High School, he became friends with George Ciprian (who later wrote an affectionate memoir on Urmuz, in which he recorded some of his writings as he had memorized them) and Vasile Voiculescu. He studied law and after he obtained his degree, he became a judge in the Argeş and Tulcea Counties, as well as in Târgovişte. He took part in the Romanian military intervention in Bulgaria, during the Second Balkan War (1913), and afterwards became a court clerk at the High Court of Cassation and Justice in Bucharest. He began writing only to entertain his brothers and sisters, by mimicking the clichés of contemporary prose. His texts were noticed by Tudor Arghezi, who was also the one to name him Urmuz, and he was published in 1922, in two consecutive issues of the Cugetul românesc magazine - with his Pâlnia şi Stamate ("The Funnel and Stamate"), a short "anti-prose" which has the ironic subtitle "a novel in four-parts". It relied on a series of sophisticated puns using the double meanings of some Romanian language words, such as: men that descend from monkeys as they would do from one floor to the other; a table with no legs - that is supported by computations and probabilities; walls that, "in accordance with Oriental customs", have cosmetics applied to them each morning or, alternatively, are measured with a compass, so they would not shrink randomly (the first of the wordplays here is on the antiquated verb a sulemeni - "to paint" as well as "to apply makeup").