Nova Letters

NN25

a novelette

by W.J. Austin

Nova Letters (2025)

#NN25

You can also download an EPUB version of this novelette to your portable device.

Foreword

Whether the end result is even interesting … sure, that does concern me, I’m not sitting here at this writing desk just to do crossword puzzles or madlibs / I could pass my time in other ways and so could you, reader.

The books I write are the products of a way of living, of being in the world … this is how I know to be …

Here’s a sob story: A famous poet’s father … I could look it up and so could you … chose not to write because he feared that his books would be judged (if at all) to be “merely interesting” :: do you really want to change the world?

What is the cost of such refusal? The discipline involved in writing shapes everything I do … I could say the same for reading : sure, I’m messing around, but no I’m not. If I didn’t write … then what? it would just be different. No better, no worse.

The essential act is to be true to oneself .. the authentic process is not to be too intent on copying one’s influences : oh I like that! I want to have made something like that! But make it in your own way — take the impetus, the (dark star) energy, convert it and take … go in any direction … and remember that all reading is copying a book out by hand.

—W.J. Austin

This is how in the remote part the deep calls to the deep and says :: oh illuminations of the external darkness of our lapse into capital’s nova spiral. / I am a deceived man, he said … I wrote a diary once … Who deceived you? she asked. The world is not as it seems … especially at night. ::— dans le parc, je deviens un détective privé … → [ ] ou un Cowboy … ::— / ( every childhood belongs in the Wild West — the Wild West has the property of overflowing mechanical time to inundate my unearthly childhood )

induced schizoid personality recognitions in the night world of mechanical clocks that would suddenly start up … he had (perhaps he’d invented it when he saw his childhood friend laying asleep in a muddy stream … wake up! wake up! but there was no sound … his dreams are silent movies in which he speaks fluent but unheard French … a horror of being underground, a sky of countless tons of rock) harbored the notion for years that the night before he was to die he would be given one wish by a benevolent genie. He’d devoted a great deal of thought to what that wish would be … why not three? she asked, don’t genies give three wishes? it’s the first one that counts, he said. The first wish lands you in trouble, the second wish makes the trouble worse, the third wish is for undoing the machinations of self-inflicted voyager dreams … all barriers dissolving, wheezing ( groaning ) a musical tune as he turned the crank on the little [[ time ]] machine he’d built, an overly complicated organ seeming to make all souls united as one. / what true of a writer may not be true of a detective … the writer abhors any change to the order of his days — an obsessive more ritual-addicted than a monk … ( Chevillard : vertiginous contemplation on his vocation … the hell of infinite repetition, the labyrinth closing … a tunnel lined with millions of little mirrors )

Why are you here? she asked him taking a sip from her beer glass. He observed as she licked a speck of foam clinging to her lip. All stories have beginnings, he said. They need middles. What about endings? she asked. No, he said, never any endings … a system of arcades.

He tried to remember … the images seemed to make it hard to see how emotional a schizoid : every heart makes one last effort, just as I heard it : detachment & disinterest is a kind of cocoon … the one [singular … seemingly] escape ,, the door that is left open is the corral (holding pen, charnel house) of … every soul is now three dim bells sounding in the favorable, long-term other soul. “Your face is my face. Every face is the other face brushed by midnight air.” … à la mort du père, le fils le mord aussi / baby boomerang along anarchist social transformation for a better world, the world in which we are really free. The individual is the one illusion that never spikes. A person like you always draws lines. These are the instances where she rides like a cowgirl in the graveyard … guns blazing bang the whole gang of outlaws and pirates … when the society you live in is run by nova criminals, you gotta be a pirate ,, bandit … when people are detached and lacking empathy, you need to build a pirate ship … All Aboard!

I spend the week distributing leaflets of the night in the streets of New York … she didn’t look like a witch, but I took her word for it when she turned the frog into a film critic. There’s something about pirates I started, I said. The witch said, “I never did see the author’s campaign to play for Master of the Dungeon.” Of the day I’m trying to write, the time goes by, but I think that the other word for stronghold is Keep, for example … blasts … there’s a place I know, I said, it has a little garden courtyard where we could sit and dredge our memories for answers to life’s trivia questions … wasting away … We sat across from each other & she said : your novel! (a rewriter’s whistle cream :: // everything always has to be started over again, that’s why everything must be continually rewritten ) … but all I ever do is play around as time flies and it’s only when it’s too late that I see time provides food not bombs baby ,, you never did spike a boomerang … passing by when you are robbed of an hour by diarrhea for the people … which might explain all those dreams about overflowing cesspools of … we know they are all lying to us, but we want to believe the lies that satirize by banging the whole gang and a half for two hours of your life while mishandling half-rotten produce, what’s the world coming … ? mince meat pie in the dog’s eye von Neumann’s elephant coz all you have in life is time, so they take even that from you … “junkie time traveler kids” in the context of the White Whale or White Elephant … in your dreams which are my films, you become aware of every internalizing guilt and checking into the waiting room where you will read the book that is “too much” … seconds pass through my body … sickness is a privilege of bodily awareness… “Presidents and CEOs are too full of shit. We can help!” / strums his guitar : I am an eagle on the wind ,, I’m searching for you baby ,,, booma booma boomerang ,, spiraling repetitions ,,, you next meal , searching through the garbage looking for a … and understanding why the one percent need bodyguards.

No, no, you don’t understand, let me tell you my story coz it’s your story too, yeah. // the first time she had not seen him in Boston ,, the system is clear : as one would when you are looking for a friend in Moses Jesus Mohammed … who’s next! Did your Uncle Sam walk alligators through the Public Garden? … where, as she recalled, what can you expect in a Glam Rock collection like this? one has to show dedication and attention to detail … I see my role as curator of a mad museum of curiosities … aiming for humor, always misunderstood coz if you don’t know who you are ,,, how can you stand being chained? doing time, all you have is time … it will take a very long time to dispel the lies : how much time do ya got? only the rest of your life … to take risks and target books …

the freedom he offers is your bed, an incident when he was peddling the swan boat, there are hits and there she was bending down in the snow ,, naked, on pale waters with a woman : what he misses is the do-it-yourself approach … the trick is not a trick, don’t specialize, do everything, be nimble … evergreen trees & snow hooding the long-haired bushes, white, her face shrouded by white snow piling up on a crooked umbrella, a white motor veil, a cloud theory developed by well-intentioned people whose practices break down fences … the snow piling up buried her … white dress billowing like those great authorial questions, such as what is it that you love? shall I lose my life entirely in the labyrinth of my past? {i} snow-covered roofs, the crystal snow blotting out all but those colorful balloons with streamers, her shoes : Bombs that will likely offend some baby readers of the lost & forgotten roads ,, booma booma bommerang like white boats, her face unseen for reality bears always with time and yet remains visible in the memory …

{i} It is my duty to deny such accusations : why shouldn’t I live on two … why only two? when three will do … four! heads up! it my great escape plan to hurriedly flee from one to the other when things get messy either here or there and my great curse … what do I know of the plenitude of presence? the height of great emotion? swamped as I am by maudlin sentimentality ,, choking on passion when always, always I’m rummaging in my sac for a pen and a notebook … should I ever come back to earth? reality is never at the same time never what it seems nor anything more than a flattening of my one and only metaphor.

some call it anti-media, an antidote to the sickness of reality programming, but really it’s just a refocusing, a get your head out of the mystifying clouds, and seeing what’s around you and how that’s more real than anything they can put on your screen, even you. / They have the aspect of fateful disappointment of those who know, who have recognized their capability to actually change reality … but it seems they are always falling short, just through being : yeah, time to jam the failure, this is just the way the world is, broadcast … but (no doubt) it does get to you sometimes and you ask yourself why am I doing this? they are just going to come along with their batons and boots and … isn’t it better to hide, go limp …

I now remember through context … unreal just through its being unrealized … cloudy youth is wasted on those who … ? Was I, after all, a polemicist? a writer of zines detailing the sexual abuses of Presidents used as a weapon to wage war? / through its omissions of … a bachelor machine and his family life … realizations which made me tremble at the emanations of my overactivity … the clinicians described it as a case of graphomania when the pen is mightier than the bullet, baton, bomb … instead of killing them, let’s starve them, cut off the circulation of caustic green slime …

she added in a tone on the threshold of a jewel-framed door of the imagination, really, my desire is reminiscent of Robespierre: It is a thrill to destroy the life of someone who really deserves it, but the playbook they give you is rigged. A gun is enough rope to hang yourself with … gotta be like the Buddha, man, no holes, no holds, you can’t hurt someone who doesn’t have any points of vulnerability … that’s why they need so many bodyguards, ya dig? what if we all ignored them? what if we became Israelites and followed Brother Duckworth into the Wilderness? if we don’t make anymore straw bricks … All the Kings Horses And All the Kings Ice Men. / Boomerang baby, never spike the cocktail of human relationships … we’re all in it together and all we have is time … thrill baby! person … but ya always gotta … bang the whole opium enchantment : the individual in a gang … my darling boards an erratic bus plowing through bountiful … expanding her soul through question lines inventing a new nowhere suggesting no landscape but a far, enlarged horizon where all of us can discover what it is to be … creating an anarchist culture of clouds, flights of angels drifting past the impossible not only possible but around ourselves moving away from the penal colony and misted windows, no other goal but the plausible land where we’ve learned the art of discarding all points of vulnerability.

His plan had been to keep her, but he kept his head down lest she … ask to read his diary entries. I’m a deceived man, he said. Who deceived you? and how? [ ] Now, let’s begin again. #NN25

The purpose of the time machine is to (instead) create a world of our own & document that. We have the necessary tools : the fragmentary forms, the lists, the diaries, the notebooks, & the letters … even our alphabets have more letters than theirs … it’s the crotchetiness of these forms that brings to mind Virginia Woolf’s dictum that on or about the time we decide to live as pirates, the world will change. only a little work is required.

While she draws many lines of absence, a sense of the void led her to distrust both mathematics & history books, including biographies of Louis Catoars or is it Catours … Cattarse :? radical thought launching backtracks to previously covered similar singles : an exposé on 9/11 : I am a communitarian anarchist & legoist mon égoïste ,, my 2021 book is filled with erotic & subterranean themes and is set in Berlin … I was present at the fall of the wall and brought home a bit of stone or concrete in my luggage : here it is! all in all it’s just my little bit of the Wall … I keep company with utopian socialists and formed my understanding of the rules of the game from my teacher Michel Leiris whose books I consult in the manner of the I Ching.

One of my other names is Traford Dansen.

If I were to write my fictional autobiography, I would have an overly protective sister who hides the darkest secrets of my childhood from me. In World 3 all one’s memories are recorded in a halo … when I wake up in the hospital for extreme restoration, the nurse shows me how to activate the terminal window : the game whose rules I understand is called Eden and my objective is to get to Level 31 … I’ve lost 7 years and the halo’s operating agent [[my OA]] informs me that a set of core memory files are encrypted. In order to unlock the files, I will have to hack my own memory … I’ve begun by interviewing the people (some of them hard to find) with whom I interacted in those lost 7 years.

Sitting at a table at a café at the train station is a thin man in a blue suit. He’s wearing a gray trilby, reading a newspaper, and drinking coffee. This is the same man I saw with my sister, coming out of my sister’s building this morning when I went to pay her a surprise visit. I sit down at another table, some distance from the man in the gray trilby and order my own coffee. To pass the time I read a book by Éric Chevillard about the proper preparation of cauliflower au gratin, a favorite dish of mine. If you’ve never had cauliflower au gratin … !

The man in the gray trilby is joined by a woman with short blond hair. When they leave I follow them. They get on the M5. I get on the M5. On the bus I sit across from a beautiful young woman who flirts with me or maybe she doesn’t flirt with me, but since this is my fictional autobiography let’s say that she does flirt with me or I flirt with her and am not immediately snubbed … being an older man & missing 7 years. I want to ask the beautiful young woman if she knows me … I feel a certain connection. The man in the gray trilby and the woman with short blonde hair gets off the bus at the park. The beautiful young woman gets off at the same stop … it might seem that I’m following her, so I rush to get ahead, but not so fast that I overtake the couple that I’m following. When I stop suddenly and turn to avoid being seen, the beautiful young woman collides with me … all ajumble — a mix of life & limb.

On the spot I invent some explanation about being a member of the invisible generation, a devotee of rants & polemics. I’m leaving the present for the Frankfurt School’s critical theory. I’m for the past, I tell her, but the past that didn’t happen. To mention only the Planetary Work Machine as a possible explanation for why we are leaving what is for what was or the first chapter of a novel by A.F. Trout, the subject of multiple compilations. // All of this (of course) made her laugh. I feel as if we’ve known each other all our lives, she said.

At the time I was writing a television series (a variation on a popular theme : the double life of …) In the series which might have been called The Life & the life a man is called Adam & Sam. He is the same man, but he lives a double life. When Adam sleeps, Sam is awake. When Sam sleeps, Adam is awake. Time runs differently … obviously … time and a half. How to tell which life is the dream life? and which is real life? Logical explanations don’t apply. Sleep becomes a switching mechanism. Okay, that’s just the premise … a story should never be about its own premise : rule number one. Episode one was called “The Field of Published Anarchists” and includes a scene in which Adam says to Lee (his upstairs neighbor who is a published genre fiction writer) : “so what if my work has little value in capitalist society … capital works to block creativity / expression … what ever is of value in a capitalist society is probably a menace to health & happiness.” Lee chuckled and caressed the innertube folds of his enormous belly: Come now, I’ve seen your library … 99.9% of the books you own and have read have been published. Adam: damned by faint technicalities!

There are versions of the past that never were. Even if I get to Level 31 … the whiteness of the whale and the whiteness of the beast witnessed by Arthur Gordon Pym. These books reference the terror of language showing people what might have been. Why terror? she asks. Let’s give her a name: Lucie, bringer of light. Anything that brings about the end of the reign of kings is labeled “terror” … but for whom?

Looking into the events that are apparently dedicated to what fairly took place in the past … we discussed Poe’s only novel. Rilke too only wrote one novel. When Adam sleeps and becomes Sam … how many novels have you written? it’s just a question of packaging. / Sometimes, in the rough draft, Adam is called Wayne, the name of poet in the quartet of novels I wrote during the pandemic. The woman that Wayne follows off the bus or who follows him (depending on whose story you believe) is called Rita. The day he talks to Rita in the park he tells her about the novel he’s writing. It’s called I Love Dick by Kathy Acker. This the first paragraph:

Kathy Acker, a 39-year old experimental writer and Herman Melville, a 56-year old piano player from New York, have dinner with Philip K. [ ], a fortune teller & mystic and an acquaintance of Herman’s, at a sushi bar in Berkeley. When Kathy was finally crazy because she was about to fall in love, she conceived of the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to become a whale spotter. Kathy was frightened because (now that she was older & more experienced) sexual relations had begun to bore her more than they had when she was living in Haiti. “Am I a prude? Am I feminine?” she asked Philip K. “In the two years I spent before the mast,” said Philip K. “I have been a spectator of (I daresay!) a dozen affairs of the heart — violent & crucial — and come to the conclusion that love is a disease, a frenzy, an epidemic / a crownèd / hornèd ee! virus … oh, but how dull, how monotonous love is! love reduces those who fall into its clutches into abysses of mediocrity.” Then Herman said, “Could there exist some precise instrument that faithfully measures the ever unfaithful distance that separates exact dispensation from diffuse love?” “Two things make me sad,” said Kathy. “Sex-obsessed men & people whose every other out of their mouth is ‘fuck’.” “I can see the correction,” said Philip K.

Lee told me that I should not writing a novel called I Love Dick by Kathy Acker … it will only confuse people. How will it confuse anyone? I asked. No one’s ever going to read it and if they do, I’ll put a WARNING! at the beginning saying “this novel is a work of fiction not intentionally written by Kathy Acker who asserts no rights whatsoever over the recent past since it has no bearing on images of a hypothetical hotel in Lower Manhattan posted on social media”. You see! there you go again. Still I could tell that Lee was amused.

When someone wins the Nobel Prize in Literature, I read something written by them, so I read Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux and I told Lucie that no woman has ever obsessed about me the way Ernaux does over her Russian diplomat. How do you know? asked Lucie. I think I would know, I said. You men! said Lucie. My current practices require ties with rooms numbered 101, 202, 303, and so on. When I began reading Poe, I realized that his drinking problems had no upper limit. When I’m drunk, I can play the piano. This is called autofiction. Autofiction is what happens when you type for two hours a day, no more, no less. #NN25

When Wayne read My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard, he would have rather been reading a similar book written by a woman. There are things that Wayne would like to know about women that can’t be learned from My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard. There are precious little references to the problems of countable infinities, but frequent references of boozing … now don’t get me wrong, I like beer just as much as Poe.

Don’t you think that I’m a slippery character suffering from the estrangement that comes with the repeated overuse of “I” & who may or may not have the same name as the author … a cute trick when … if I name myself, it’s so that the space of the work might become the space of freedom, cf. what Éric Chevillard wrote about the proper baking temperature of cauliflower au gratin. Autofiction is the cauliflower au gratin of literature.

Success & Failure unite again in the production of a Minor Fantasia … the amusement I felt when I first saw a performance of Mozart’s Le trio en mi bémol. This is the novel on which I am putting my finishing touches … an infinite number of monkeys

What I told Lucie that day : I am a true detective. I don’t like cops, she said. Neither do I, I said. A true detective isn’t a cop, but a reader of reality. Lucie said, finish the book before you die … what if you die before you write all your books? I most assuredly will, I said. But I have a theory! It involves a genie and three wishes. The discipline it takes to comprehend just how many it will take to see that every room is occupied. If you think about it for just a couple of seconds, you’ll realize that there are a finite number of atoms in the universe. That number can be calculated and it is much much less than 10 to the power of 100 … a number that is popularly misspelled. So just how much do you trust mathematics?

… my endless book … it’s okay to repeat yourself. You can never repeat yourself the same way twice.

why is it so hard to get lost? The Life & the life isn’t what I thought but something else

Finnegans Wake is well deserved … a continuously printed zine of creation swirling as new visitors arrive, each expecting the best strategy at the moment seems to promote outmoded zine trading … a room of one’s own in a normal, finite hotel makes at least some sense if I can experience quickness … despite its coarse patchwork quality : let me tell you something ,, given the allure of what she does, the secret cannot accommodate new guests who actually understand and do not worry about the internet … the System lies in its economy. Convince the world that once every room is full, the roaring flood will become drunk on the imagination … however it can open my eyes, regardless of duration,, to become points connected by straight-line segments … all the feather mattresses going over pruning forks & tuning hooks as … my head filled with spiritous liquors, poison to the wild swans starved in the palms of my hands :: in a zig-zag motion suggesting the constant motion of existing guests who spend long afternoons reading Zettel’s Traum ,, a long and strenuous body of work, scarcely necessary for newcomers—even an infinite number of apprentices … this is what makes Kathy Acker’s work work :: quickness ,, to strike the hour, challenge what one can only hope to a duel for my heart … Best not to know too much where the lost road will lead … don’t forget that capital did not invent the form or style it exploits for profit. #NN25

… when I learned that I was going to die … the desire to write every possible book … even badly :: to add that they are ruins of the soul tossed into the weeds of a dream explored with dread & delight. Traditional modes of storytelling should not be rejected because they have become enchained & made to do service : make an escape plan. Each one of us can each have our own book … a mason builds a chimney out of blocks … I am an old fool with webbed toes wading in a submarine gloom … brick laying should be no different from writing poetry & prose as both seek a mode of expression that is necessarily singular, dense, concise, & memorable. I have license to practice in electronic archipelagos.

Tell us more about your first book.

My first book was a collection of … no, I don’t want to say it is a collection of short stories, but it is something like Dubliners, except mine was (predictably) titled Highlanders after the name of the intersection that was the center of their world … my characters that is, the intersection of Highland & Chimes Street. The three principal characters were Adam Chaver, Peter Wright, and David Branson (all of them writers) who called themselves the Fisher Kings. The stories are narrated by a character named Traford Dansen. In the final story, there is a passing reference to a pact agreed to by the Fisher Kings to each write an autofictional novel set in the neighborhood that will tell an intertwined set of stories from three different perspectives.

Did that really happen? in real life?

[4.xi.25 : mardi] to eventually evolve into its true reader : this may not be the book for those celibate labradors & dancing men with rooms in the infinite Hilbert hotel. Time during the painstaking progress of looking for a more classical approach to present and time past are both ideas connected through the similarity of words. #NN25

Who studies the clouds with wisdom
     and the furthest reaches of the sky, who aligns them
             when the mists coalesce
     where do the forms take shape?

through the chaosmos of this monstrous anarchist practice, one based, for the present, in time future … and in time future I would stand for a lily-livered dog-man (impractical) who could be fooled by a few fat books … deceptively light for how many pages … from a fundamental example on workers’ councils and contained in time past by the vagrancies of mothers. Adam altered his memories as he decrypted the files buried deep in the document trees of his halo … he cultivated vagaries, some of his recreations were unconscious, if all time is restored to the base of antiwork anarchist cooperatives, pressing for a radical eternal present … all time is preliminary work, referencing classic writers : phantoms or shades who only dreamed they were alive or dead … in these reforms favoring cooperative sketches … such currency is unredeemable : I have always known there was something strange in the photic sensitivity reflex coming back to tease me … congratulations !! … something outside the definable realm, like what’d happened in the vector field surrounding the dark star … a night clerk at a bridal hotel has time enough to read notices of reforms that could actually … with shopping malls, a sector I have to overcome, what might have an indefinable quality, an ambiguity that … among others, to stick with … the splendor of these fragments will likely be put off by clouds that veil the nakedness of heaven … an abstraction in the beginning of DIY creations should be saved for the last chapters in which one explores the many ways to sing the Great Poem of Light … there are places you could go to …

magnetized to a dark star
lost perceptions blooming
shadows of blackbirds, shapes of clouds
to pay old Charon : too generous
dragonflies & moths pestered by ducklings
dreamed of green fields
three golden apples blooming
in the dark air
the four evangelists & an old Doctor
who rode on the bus exchanging words
used by sailors, superfluous
awkward but grateful
we are not yet poets who cry
     for our mother’s milk
long years after her disappearance
            or death
the wide expanses of ocean
     its abysses & whirlpools, my darling
     her poor lost soul
words become fish scales blown across
     the shadow of the sea
the wilderness of invention
     invented in wandering solitude
the relic of the sea disappears,
     left without a trace
     in the mountains haunted by mourners
no memory of time’s twisty passages
in loneliness & in fog,
     her fact beaming with generosity
a nymph in a mountain cave
     soft film falling forgetful
     on blackened lips swelling
          guarded from everlasting snows
               the fairy grotto
     where the lone traveler is lured
together we have discovered what
     the Utopia of Writing
          (that great play of illusion)
               brings        ::
the power of wakeful sleep

How do we organize our transgressions? The day has come when only the thieves can afford shelter & medical care. The barbarians align themselves with the thieves in a battle against the Giants hoping for scraps or to lift themselves by bootstraps. “Let the poor die!” they shout, pronouncing their own death sentence as the Giants woo the thieves with the promise of fully mechanized robots to operate their machines. When the thieves are hungry, they become wolves.

focusing of the will, a direction of intent ,, disparate means of escaping … the current finds everything in quickness rushing to a remaining absurd rejection of crapulous sophistication ,, throbbing the future awaits everything with compassion & sympathy / What she (Marguerite) said to him: il y a deux mondes — ce monde là et l’autre, son homologue, une étoile noirceur, mais lequel est lequel? étant à la fois multiples et diversifiés. [Adam thought to himself … it’s beautiful because I have followed the lost road that made it possible for astronauts… it might be part of a system ranging from space pirates to perpetual possibility in a euphoric preparation for a beginning … at last, it is time to begin.]

Yesterday, I was full of doubt and misgivings. Today, I know that sanity is merely the normalized form of irrationality. For example, the novels Ann Quin wrote before committing herself to the sea are wild spaces in which she invites us to wander. The heavens & its galaxies pale against my finger tips. Ann Quin : “we are all bodies of writing”

[38] For a long time I’ve been putting off … en retard … organizing my library according to a system. On the subject of hoarding: “You have a lot of books!” More than just “a lot”. Maryska said that my library was not a book hoard but an extension of … the archive, curated, as a tool (source) of creation.

The situation … that is to say, after the passage of time, I’d (without intending) created a situation in which the memory (my memory) could be tested. When I say I had a memory … within? me an image ,, are such images inside or outside ?? … of discovering Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s novel Naomi when Rasan & I were at Book Culture (the one near Columbia … not the one in Long Island City where David & I … when I was looking for a collection of Hölderlin’s poems & asked myself : where all my unwritten books?) ,, a Bloomsday ramble to be sure ,, then I planted Naomi on the shelf of my home library, perhaps right next to Fox by Dubravka Ugresic, [two trees intertwined] pertaining to “a story about how stories come to be written” … one could say that the subject of my Novel is how the novel itself has come to be written or unwritten … I’m reminded of lines from Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler :: this novel is a work of prose that reveals a banal mirror story of the writer struggling to … an act similar to pushing out a turd, but assiduously hides … the writer compulsively covering the private parts … the writer’s great skill is reticence, withdrawal, disappearance. The plan of the novel was that it would continue in the beyond … an invisible line or perhaps a thin, pale line into the land of the wordless language of the dead … once you cross that thin, pale line,, the novel cannot be written, it can only be lived … listen, that is why all my novels remain unfinished … as if it matters.

[39] Thank providence or chance for this discovery : but over the years (about 7) Naomi had become separated from Fox. One part of my library, in the northwest corner of my study, I’ve reserved a shelf for books on French cinema, but even that collection has eroded and dispersed, mixing with the rest of my library. I have an extensive, but incomplete, collection of Éric Rohmer’s screenplays in French. I’ve had them for nearly 15 years, since when I began writing the mirror diary with Rohmer’s films serving as the palely reflective glass … or two glasses placed at an angle to produce an image of a burning bush … I collected the screenplays because I’d collected DVDs (physical discs) of the films and because the discs were coded for “Region 2” and printed in France, there were no English subtitles, since my listening comprehension skills weren’t good enough [at that time], I knew I would have to read the films. Anyway, now that I’m back to my Rohmer watching project (after a decade and a half of delay : je veillerai…) I watched La femme de l’aviateur last weekend and so was looking for the screenplay … this was tricky because it was not on the proper shelf, but my systematic search did lead to my uncovering the misplaced copy of Naomi.

[40] Serialization of Naomi began in March 1924, in the Osaka Asahi newspaper. Just before publication commenced, Tanizaki wrote:

… For someone who writes slowly as I do, each installment is a full day’s work. Newspaper novels are painful. … Whether I like what I’m writing or not, whether I’m feeling inspired or not, I have to write an installment every day.

I always begin the first installment with the intention of writing something good; but the newspaper novels that I have written in the past have generally begun well and ended poorly, because I forced myself to write willy-nilly. This time, however, I’m prepared. I don’t want to let the same thing happen again. I expect to maintain my inspiration and enthusiasm to the end.

It always begins that way, doesn’t it?

By June 1924, capitulating to the objections of outraged readers … the newspaper ceased serialization of Naomi in June 1924, after 87 installments … effectively the middle of chapter 16, which in the edition I have is 150 pages. A little math informs us that Tanizaki wrote just under two pages or about 650 words per day.

[41] Blogging a novel or bloveling (if you will) is perhaps the modern day equivalent of the newspaper novel, but without the hordes of outraged readers. I could retype the complete works of Kathy Acker & William Burroughs into the virtual pages of my blog and no one would even care or even know to be outraged and it wouldn’t be the repeated use of the word cunt that would shock, but the simple fact that I am audaciously copying … thank you, capital. you have given me the greatest gift that any writer could have: anonymity. I could type any damn thing I please here and not a single person (reader!!) would be outraged or even bored.

[42] A few days ago, when I got it in my mind to spend the month of November extending a couple of books I wrote [whimsically … the only honest mode of writing] in 2022 & 2023, I decided to read the opening chapter of a book I began writing on the first of November 2020 called Diary of a Deceived Man. In that chapter, “I” declared “my” intentions to write a quartet of novels which would share the collective title The Complete Angler (nods to Isaac Walton). The individual titles of the volumes are as follows: Inside the Whale, Outside the Whale, The Fourth Testament, and Adam’s Dark Star. For a couple of years, I worked on that quartet of books, but never finished. The first two are the most developed. The Fourth Testament exists mostly as a fragmented set of handwritten notes scattered across five or six notebooks. What I’ve written so far for Adam’s Dark Star might be considered a novelette … what I wanted for these four books was mass, each one would need to be so large as to risk collapsing in on itself.

This morning, I wondered if the novel I am writing now (#NN25) is Adam’s Dark Star. Like Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, I took up the pen [such a power metaphor! hold on to that pen thou writer!] thinking that this month I would write something good…

[43] Adam (it would seem) would be the principal character of a novel titled Adam’s Dark Star. Or perhaps he is a hidden figure, the spider asleep in the tower at the center of the Zone, like Rassilon. Dark Star ,,, Death Star? … of course, really The Complete Angler had been (all along) Wayne’s Story and to write Wayne’s Story is to imply the Story of D-Zero [origin stories].

To write a book (novel) with the title Adam’s Dark Star (to make up for a sin of omission) means that I would necessarily have to leave unfinished other projects I’ve begun … like the continuation of my Film Diaries and another quartet of unfinished books called Eden’s Gate. My only project for the next year was to be a personal improvement project, not even writing a book or not principally writing a book (a book as collateral production, the effluent or waste discard of another process), that of mastering the French language. Resuming my Film Diaries is part of that larger project since the films I plan to watch and rewatch and then write mirror diary entries about are French films, in French, without English subtitles: principally, but not exclusively, the films of Éric Rohmer. The effluvial book I imagine that will emerge from watching these French films will be something like Ian Penman’s books, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors and Erik Satie Three Piece Suite … but not necessarily so.

[44] In an entry on “HOARDING” Penman comments on the self-help programs on daytime TV: such shows “are one more side-product of capitalism trying to fix its inconveniently untidy — or unruly — producer-consumers.” And here’s the line that pertains (possibly) to a novel called Adam’s Dark Star : “As if capitalism weren’t itself the monster at the centre of the labyrinth, preventing ingress or exit. It appropriates everything, even your pain, and sells it back to you.”

None of what I write today is true … but with concentration, meditation, study           all of this may become true [this is why the books of revelation are numbered ➜ so that we might look at the Sun and ask “why is the sun turning black?” The White Sun is setting. The Black Sun is rising.] / and I long to compose poems or prayers (which are the same thing). Oh, why am I not a poet, to render fitting praise to the Triple Goddess, the heart and pulse of..

He never left home without it … the patented umbrella whose handle featured a built-in watch and small caliber revolver (and bowler hat … part of the ensemble ,, a working man’s kit) … what he searched for in the imaginary cities of Europe was magic. But where to go in the New World for the supernatural? The cities of Amerika exclude the supernatural so one must retreat to the forests … where resides the Great Spirit. #NN25

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The line also pertains to Into the Labyrinth … What interested me during that period [during those months of writing Into the Labyrinth ,, the precursor … of what set the stage for the Eden Quartet] was film ,, moving images & sound … in the nouvelle vague (specifically) because of films like Le Rayon Vert, Alphaville, and Chloé de 5 à 7 … and La Jetée … interest in writers who also make films (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras) (my dream in October 2001 at the Empire Hotel … Woody Allen & Diane Keaton chat outside a jazz club where Woody plays saxophone) and in filmmakers who write novels (Éric Rohmer who may or may not play saxophone). From that dreamtime I understood my work as a writer to produce (at the rate of 1666 words per day … a great fire of ) raw material to be cut-up and edited, to make books & novelettes … les court-romans … paper objects that simultaneously (if only by implication) are objects of light.

ENCYCLOPEDIA

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter and forgetting that shattered fantasies … others will enjoy that a shopping destination becomes a familiar landmark of thought — our thought that bears the experience of a place, the stamp / icon of our age & our psychogeography … therapeutically … We disentangle ourselves from the ordered surfaces, breaking up authorized texts along the planes which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things. The author synthesizes everything from a family-style planetary work machine continuing long afterwards to disturb her dispute with Henry David Thoreau over the proper distinction between the Same & the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that writers are divided into the following categories: (a) cunning, (b) treacherous, © wily, (d) deceitful, (e) mendacious, (f) hypocritical, (e) duplicitous, (g) unscrupulous thief, (h) sycophantic, (i) selfish, (j) sneaky, (k) arrogant, (l) avaricious, (m) corrupt, (n) carnal, (o) vindictive, (p) reclusive, (q) all of these above, ® bachelor, (s) …

restaurants … only in a world where Apollinaire’s poems are compared to the collages of Max Ernst do we play a game of chess with Marcel Duchamp. [Apollinaire died on 9 November 1918 at the age of 32. He was a casualty of the Spanish flu that carried off more victims that did “The Great War” … as if any war … poxy death whore … can be great.] … my first encounter with Findhorn / Museum of … the unfinished novel par excellence / :: a former fishing village ,, former … K. stood at the window contemplating suicide (four floors up … he was out on the ledge feeding the pigeons when he fell ,, Bohumil Hrabal [Born in Brno-Židenice, Moravia, he lived briefly in Polná, but was raised in the Nymburk brewery as the manager’s stepson. Author of Too Loud a Solitude, a novel Maryska insisted I read before …].) … the fantasy of suicide (oh how I will be loved after I am gone! a childish fantasy) ,, death wish? all the Son’s in K.’s stories suicide … he was failing to meet expectations. It was precisely these expectations that caused K. such despair … written in the six-by-nine blue spiral notebooks that he bought at the campus book store : the alternative Season 23 whose score for tenor and piano was composed by Leos Janacek & titled “The Diary of One Who Vanished” … castration = loss of umbrella.

There is not a creature on earth whose sustenance is a matter of chance / free yourself from control mechanisms ,, plant a garden ,, / you will find your dwelling and your resting place / you will record all in your glorious Book :: This Book is not only a textual object but a public ritual [posted in daily installments on his blague … being anonymous] performed by an Operator — a Wizard of Odds & Ends [putting H.D. back together again :: Henri D’arcangelis who said (fay moosely) :: “contemporary art doesn’t offer us finished novel, but only inconclusive ones with blanks to be filled in by the reader” / spare time! spare time! anyone? anyone? ,, brother, can you despair a time ??] — shuffling and reshuffling the playing cards of language (randomly retrieved from the pigeonholes of a nearby credenza) in front of a select group of imagined spectators chosen for their captivity … capacity to collaborate in this hieratic performance (or generation) of the Oeuvre as it progressively unfolds over a lifelong series of early morning seances conjuring up the dawning of the Aeon of Omega. #NN25

How stories come to be written in the secret language of Dogon employed in an experiment of self-portraiture as he tried to find his way out of a box that contained many notes, sketches, and studies undertaken in the course of the creation of Into the Labyrinth as a kind of portable toy that would allow him to playfully assemble these various materials into the purely conceptual (and aleatory) production of his as yet unexhibited Novel … abandoning his previous practice of composing the various strata of his text seriatim in the pages of his spiral notebooks : so that he would know it would be good … and on the seventh day…

At this point our Story takes an altogether unexpected turn …

FOX BLUES

Pilnyak was a close friend of Yevgeny Zamyatin. Zamyatin, an engineer in the Russian Imperial Navy who wrote in his spare time, is the author of the most powerful words a writer has ever dispatched to his executioner. In a letter to Stalin seeking permission to leave the Soviet Union (permission that Stalin, persuaded by Maxim Gorky, granted), Zamyatin wrote: “True literature can only exist when it is created, not by diligent and reliable authors, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.” Zamyatin’s novel We (published in English in 1924) has been plagiarized by many writers: Orwell, Huxley, Vonnegut (who alone admitted his act of piracy). This, however, is not a story about Zamyatin and piracy, but one about how stories come to be written.

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Sometimes it’s difficult to find my way in so I’ll select a book at random from one of the shelves near my desk and type the first paragraph that … but I’m not a reliable pirate, the sources are only a starting point for further text adventures. If a writer doesn’t break the rules of the game, then he only gets played …

*

passed along to the Albany branch : speculation about the world’s industrial workers and the latest cool summer blockbuster in which the author highlights contradictions in an essay that is both for and against atmospheric air-conditioned nightmares … what might have been and what has been the writer’s opposition to work and his escapism. He who does not work shall divine the mystical properties of colors. Entropy degraded all theories of the novel: (1) intersexuality, (2) a serious connection to poetry [in the full Orphic sense], (3) awareness of a social, cultural landscape in ruins … lost, (4) favoring the expansion of language over the thin surface layer of plot, (5) constantly flying forward …

The Way leads, the Way follows … in order to properly explore the proposed topic, it is essential to accept the fundamental assumptions of the system. One cannot examine a text from outside. To be able to understand a text, one has to enter in, to find a way inside …

pasa vento … to break wind : where should one expect to find this wind? picture it !! from a quarter where … the Sun never or only rarely shines … And where is that? all the time, flows and interruptions. Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest assured that it works: Judge Schreber feels something, produces something, and is capable of explaining the antioedipal process theoretically. the wind breaks from the North, the cold North, how far to the North? Beyond the sources from which these words are taken? beyond the Boreas … “at the back of the North Wind” ?? But precisely where beyond the source of the North wind? :: Only a poet would be persistent enough to ask this [last?] question. The poet is the unsatisfied child who dares to ask the difficult question which arises from the schoolmaster’s answer to his simple question, and then the still more difficult question that arises from that. / It was the Moon-goddess, not the Sun-god, who inspired Orpheus.

The schoolmaster scientist says there are no gods. The gods were invented to provide an explanation of the natural world. Now that we have proper explanations of the natural world, we have no need to invoke gods. Just because you have a barometer doesn’t mean that you can make it rain. The poet (that unsatisfied child) remarks that the gods were not invented only to explain the weather, to bring rain to the crops … to give humans a sense of control over the uncontrollable… but to give some way of thinking about the interrelatedness of the sensorium and the mentorium. But! says the schoolmaster, the mentorium is a product … an epiphenomenon … arising out of the sensorium. How do you know that? asks the poet.

[8.xi.25 : samedi] It’s just like Bolaño said in one of his novels, the one about the dead cowboys : stories begin in one book, continue in another, and conclude (if ever!) in yet another ,, it goes on & on & on & on (like in the musicals) / She (Lillian) was full of questions [do you follow me? / the story just didn’t seem to hang together, a bit contrived don’t you think ??] : Tell me, she said, why did two detectives respond to a report of a burglary in progress? I mean, shouldn’t they be out … detecting? You’d think that it would be regular policemen, you know, the grunts, the little piglets in uniforms and body armor trying to look mister big shot — eyema gonna killee, killee good — ready to beat the shit of the victim. I had to think about that one. Perhaps I was elaborating too much on Sam’s simple story of kinky sex gone awry. The detail about urinating into the potted plant adds an element of realism though … and I just can’t type fast enough !!

She swirled the bourbon in her glass and said (after recrossing her legs): “Don’t you think the idealization of workers is indicative of… if not drinkers of course … as we know, but to transform the blasphemous sanctuary into a place that embodies this fundamental antiwork outlook. But did you know that Fucking is a village in Austria where pimply adolescents go together?” I replied: “Don’t you think dreams are so much more beautiful than the stuff they call reality?” “Why did she steal his novel?” “She thought it … that is to say, the text of the novel, contained encrypted instructions for the synthesis of a deadly virus that is capable of selectively eliminating certain elements from the collection gene pool.” “Certain elements? Is there a gene for fascism?” At this point we could design a virus to target anyone who did not get one of the original covid vaccines. Imagine what that would do to the political landscape … not to mention the average IQ84 … #NN25

NOTE ON HEAVY DRINKING

Drinking heavily, you abandon people—and they abandon you—and you abandon yourself—It’s a form of partial self murder but too sad to go all the way—Make it a rule not to drink without eating outside your own home (degrisez … sobered up). Because, the kind of drinking [I do] that ends up in abandoning people and self is done in public. The kind of drinking that seeks to allay boredom is done at home and is self controlled … don’t drink to live, live to drink.

*

I wanna try something … why shouldn’t the novel contain embedded instructions for the creation of an intelligent virus? … sitting on top of a gold mine, I’m tellin’ ya. Wibblie (a kind of robot in a lost city) : engaged in the central presence which has never been grounds for taking the House (cf. hauslit) as a tool for the analysis of the human soul … why are you spending all this money to fix up your Old House? coz I’ve got soul, baby! and I need a place to drink … Otherwise, to do nothing, unemployed prisoners who clash and later die of an overdose of the basic principles of successful narration. Agents never send emails.

Here are my instructions for a zine: make one copy, give it a reader, ask the reader to photocopy or cut-up or draw or in some way reproduce the form and content, but not exactly, it’s essential that the reader-producer fill in the blanks, make alterations, introduce links, branching narratives, annotations, links … even and especially across issues … start today !! / The zine itself has always already been exiled from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil … from whose branches hung a single key from an ordinary string : this is the glass key ,, the decoderkey that will unlock the encrypted instructions for the design of … on their own free time, pointing to one end (indicating a light-emitting orifice) ,, to report without qualms what reflects itself into its own substitute substance. The boss who is always present is overweight, hard-hearted. Do not associate with collaborators who … to get it down, make it real, understand what poet is : i had always had mixed feelings about becoming a poet / if robert lowell is a poet … no! if robert frost was a poet … no! if … if … if … David Antin is a poet … hell yeah! David Antin was born in New York City. He earned an MA in linguistics at City College of New York, where he studied the work of Gertrude Stein, a poet whose avant-garde aesthetic and interest in art would influence his own work. [[ .:. David Antin (born February 1, 1932, New York, New York, U.S.—died October 11, 2016, San Diego, California) was an American poet, translator, and art critic who became best known for his improvisational “talk poems” ,, first published in Talking (1972), which blend lighthearted storytelling and … )))) —::: David Antin is a poet, critic and performance artist, whose books include Definitions (1967), Autobiography (1967), Code of Flag Behavior (1968), Meditations (1971), Talking (1972 & 2001), After the War (A Long Novel with Few Words) (1973), Dialogue (1980), Tuning (1984), Selected Poems 1963-1973 ………………… David Antin … //— Biography <,,,,, —… // David Antin (born in New York City, February 1, 1932) is an American poet, critic and performance artist. ++++++++++++++++ Antin earned his B.A. from City College of New York in 1955 and his M.A. from New York University in 1966. He spent the first ten years of his career (1955-1964) as a translator of both >>>> // …….. David Antin (1932-2016) was a 20th-century American poet known for his unique approach to poetry, blending elements of spoken word, improvisation, and critical theory. His innovative style, often termed “talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk poems”, challenged traditional poetic forms and redefined the boundaries of … --_– //\::— David Antin wore many hats, including poet, scholar, and educator. Antin could be described as being an in-the-moment poet. He focused on spontaneity and context-based poetic creations. Antin’s signature walkie talkie poems were created through improvisation … willy nilly … Any written records of this poetry were … <><><><> … David Antin, a poet, critic and performance artist of lasting importance, passed away on October 11, 2016. He was 84. His background included undergraduate work in science and languages with graduate work in linguistics at New York … ,,,, ….. ,,,,,, ……. David Antin, a poet and performance artist known for his so-called talk poems, died Tuesday in San Diego at age 84, according to family members … A poet, visual media artist, critic and essayist, David Antin has published over ten books of poetry and critical essays, and has lived and taught in San Diego, CA since 1968. David Antin’s last words were : “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting — I do not which to add any more.”

HOARDING

Writers are language hoarders. Their outrageous projects are epic, mirroring the gargantuan scale of textuality found in the undersea world of Jacques Cousteau. While my works often take an electronic form, there is always a paper version that is circulated in the form of a zine or staple-booklet which I droplift in carefully selected bookstores and libraries to be received and written about, and studied by readers of “literature”. While my writing has an electronic gleam in its eye, these words are distinctly analog, taking inspiration from radical modernist ideas and juicing them with good old fashioned chance operations.

*

Join the Campaign for Real Play today! The substitute does not substitute for itself. What happened to Dada? Shall we bury our noses in junk? … writers employing strategies of copying and appropriation … keeping with this approach: letting words become anything which has somehow existed to mimic the workings of cutting & pasting, acts integral to the writing process … here T.S. Eliot shifts tone to caress me with meaningless sentences (carefully annotated). Before, henceforth, it was necessary to be more agreeable to most readers: flowing languidly with the fluidity of beginning to think that there were no footfalls echoing in the memory attics of … water that forgets itself as a stream to become a center for the technological collision of art practices. Hello? Should not that center be opium serums & anabolic cocktails? Do amber waves mingle in thought forming caravans of present-being elderly couples whose lived past fades and is constantly reborn, flowing into the center that has no natural site of expiration? Going around and around on an endless date, one to the other giving details that are not a fixed locus, but a function expressed succinctly in symbols which stick firmly to a huge horseshoe magnet. Together let’s go down these twisty passages told to us through the veil of an infinite nonlocus shedding its multifunctional form of oblivion, itself a medium of messages coded with a number of sign-substitutes indicating the molecular structure of a virus designed to eliminate … pilot wheelchairs through the circular hallways of memory, for there is no forgetfulness that is not true forgetfulness when we are at play. David Bowie was an activist who came to our planet nostalgically contemplating even the smallest insect as a precious work of art. Even during the antiglobalization campaigns, we listened to Bowie’s music even as we rushed towards that door they said would never open … hidden when it was revealed in the 1990s. David Bowie was the author of several impossibility escalators … all of them !!

*

a source of endless speculation to be sure ,, what Sam asked was how was it possible that his novel … the text of which he’d written himself, he’d selected all the words, shaped them, without relying on any externally imposed algorithm … could cryptographically contain highly technical instructions for the design of a biologic organism capable of … ?? the odds against it are … no more staggering than the blood clotting mechanism evolving through chance operations … this is why we must experiment with language, Sam thought, this is the original laboratory of nature, nature designed language to … [ fill in the blank ] Of course, as would be pointed out to him later by a time travel theorist, the operations he selected for the generation of his novel … one that he hoped would be so disguised to look like every other novel that it could slip past the gatekeepers unmolested … were not operations he’d designed himself, even unwittingly he could become the agent of a higher operator who constructed a complex system in which subagents could … it was all so convoluted he thought, but higher order operations … organizing principles … where did they come from? these higher order whats-its? were they angels? monsters? kung fu masters?

David Carradine’s body was found the next morning, June 4, 2009, by a hotel maid, who entered the room around 10 a.m. In the immediate aftermath of his death, it seemed like he had committed suicide. The actor was found wearing a wig and fishnet stockings …

[9.xi.25 : dimanche] coming into the rose garden … my words : fame, fantasy, hedonism ,, reflecting weer all crazee now as exemplified by the slowmotion cameras of Proust & Joyce … the subject of a new TV sitcom The Odds & Ends Couple. #NN25

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And speaking of re…typing the complete works of … in Taylor Swift’s monumental study of Uncreative Writing he described the necessity / practice of copying the Old Masters … Simon Morris, a British artist, decided to retype the original 1951 scroll edition of On the Road, one page a day, on a blog called “Getting Inside Kerouac’s Head”. In his introductory post, Morris wrote, “It’s an amusing anecdote … echoing thus what in your mind amid the escapist nature of the genre which perfectly captures the fun and exuberance of holy barbarism … and make for interesting work to realize this proposition as a work in its own right and in process see what I would learn through retyping Kerouac’s prose.” And so on … May 31, 2008 he began … it took Morris approximately twenty minutes per day for 408 days … on March 22, 2009 he completed the project.

In part, it was reading this chapter of Swift’s book … the chapter titled “Retyping On the Road” that prompted me to write (as last year’s November Novel) On the Yellow Brick Road ,, a re…typing and cut-up / mixing of On the Road & The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.

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The amusing anecdote was about how Hunter S. Thompson, when he decided that he wanted to become a writer, retyped the whole of The Great Gadsby just to feel what it was like to write a great novel. And what’s my problem? I thought. Am I in too much of a hurry to learn for myself what it feels like to write a great novel? Am I not curious to know? And was is not Gertrude Stein who said, “You cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you retype it or proofread it. The act of retyping the book does something to you that only reading can never do”?

Is it possible ever to just copy something? Morris :: I noticed that I’d added the words “for free” to the end of the sentence that weren’t in the original … according to my rubric of production, I had to delete the words “for free” but imagine a version of On the Road that was full of extemporaneous additions, riffs on a new theme, echoes from the future writer … there is of course the possibility that I didn’t catch all my inadvertent additions and I have left some extra words imbedded in Kerouac’s text. Which begs the question … is mine really a copy of Kerouac’s novel or a novel that is merely based on Kerouac’s novel? To which Swift adds, “Taking it one step further, one could always write a new text simply by tossing words in as one feels the need to and thereby demonstrate that appropriation need not be a mere passing along of information, but, in fact, moving information can inspire a different sort of creativity in the ‘unauthor’ … producing different versions and additions — remixes even — of an existing text. Let us not forget that none other than Jacques ‘Cousteau’ Derrida demonstrated that the textual field is unstable.”

In fact, one of the formative insights that shaped my Nova Letters project was the impulse to create dozens of parasitic and paratextual versions of canonical texts … Burroughs, Acker, Quin, Szentkuthy, etc.

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Let’s try something, a thought experiment… for a long time, I’ve had a reading project in mind, that of reading all of Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend books in following order:

  1. Visions of Gerard

  2. Doctor Sax

  3. Maggie Cassidy

  4. Vanity of Duluoz

  5. On the Road

  6. Visions of Cody

  7. The Subterraneans

  8. Tristessa

  9. Lonesome Traveller

  10. Desolation Angels

  11. The Dharma Bums

  12. Book of Dreams

  13. Big Sur

  14. Satori in Paris

Probably in one of the biographies of Kerouac that I’ve read, there’s a quote about how Kerouac wanted to publish The Duluoz Legend as one BIG BOOK like Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and with all the names regularized across all the books so that it could be read as one long, long story. Immediately (because I’m a sucker for FAT BOOKS) I wanted to read this edition of The Duluoz Legend, but alas!! it doesn’t exist … ah! but I could make it exist. I could retype all 14 books that make up The Duluoz Legend on my blog and fix all the names as I go along and thereby create a new work by Jack Kerouac.

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Certain objections arise … concerns. Would (RE)typing The Duluoz Legend be a good use of my time? Why not use “my spare time” to write new works of my own creation rather than writing derivative works? But !! as Taylor Swift writes in his radical study of the radically uncreative : in become an unauthor one learns how to produce cultural artifacts in a way that is explicitly forbidden by capital. In becoming a pirate, the unauthor threatens the System. In attempting to be creative in the usual sense … in the production of text that can be traditionally categorized as a single author text, one submits oneself to the Systemic Imperative : create capitalizable commodities. In (RE)typing The Duluoz Legend, I would be creating a work of art that would have no commercially exploitable function.

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I will reveal here that the reason why I’ve returned to this idea of reading and possibly (RE)typing The Duluoz Legend is that this morning (Sunday, 9 November 2025) I read this paragraph in some of the dharma [p. 140] : “IN MY WRITING-LIFE:— Is the Duluoz Legend a repetition in many words of self-evident themes, details? or is it a great teaching of pity via the prose study of events in their dharmakaya light in the only story I know completely—?— Boys, I had a much better insulting first-predicate-question for it this afternoon—(Loneliness rides the words I do write in this dream in this book)— — I wrote Duluoz Legend not for praise, or blame neither? but for the reason that I have hired myself out to do the work of pity (as no one else know how) world-lover teaching the end of all things. What’s wrong with that?—I mean, why will Anton Rosenberg and Stanley Gould say that I write too much? Hieronymus Bosch, he painted too much; Dionysius the Pseudo-Aeropagite, he wrote too many mystic visions; Da Vinci, he knew to paint and he did something in his boredom, ere his Parinirvana Death—(Faustian)”

And this, a few pages later: Lying all the time—I write the Duluoz Legend because of pride in my artistic stature, vanity in my name, & greed to lose nothing of my success-potential—As to deluding myself that the Duluoz Legend will be good for the world, it will only be additional blind detail—If I write it must be the Teaching—the Duluoz Legend will have to be called AMITABHA BUDDHA / The thinking-mind is only used by divide selfhoods—there is no reason for unified Infinite Essence of Mind to “think”—

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While I was typing … (RE)typing … the Kerouac quotes in the previous chapter, I recalled a dream I had last night … a dream that might have something to do with Kerouac’s diary entry for November 1, 1954, the death of Pinky ,, Pinky being a cat.

In my dream, I am standing in a large church … possibly the church where Sabine goes to light a candle in Rohmer’s film, Le Beau Mariage … and a woman approaches. At first I think the woman is R. and so I turn to her and say, “I have this friend … Katherine … she died last month…” as I said these words I realized that the woman was not R. but was Katherine herself. Since I was confessing directly to Katherine, I knew I couldn’t lie and try to make out that she and I had been great friends … “We didn’t know each other very well,” I said to Katherine. “We only spoke a few times and I morn the loss of the future denied to us in which we were able to build a friendship based on our mutual love of books and of writing.” And in my dream, Katherine said, “Thank you. That’s all I need to know.” The dream didn’t end immediately, but we lingered for a few moments standing next to one another, not facing each other, but facing outward, in the same direction … I can’t say what we were looking at. Perhaps we were looking at nothing or gazing into a fog or contemplating the colors cast by the light passing through the stained glass.

53

If Kerouac were alive today would he be publishing on paper or blogging or TikToking his way across the Amerikan continent? or maybe he’d be a hiphop artist moaning out the groan of a nation under constant assault by power & authority? I’m sure Kerouac would say that new times need new techniques … in the age of the Internet and A.I. and data mining the old forms of the 20th century just don’t apply anymore … the unauthor-writer of today has to hybridize … for me, today, the form is one that begins with the blog, the daily bulletin, and crosses into print and into drawing and music and action in the world to find a poem

Sunday Afternoon beer drinking
the best kind … When this tank
blows up in Apocalypse of
self appointed World Oppenheimer
shatterers, you’ll need this
graveyard no more
  - - - - & maybe just as well
          I believe in death
          & hew to Whitman
          that other Whitebeard
          Long Island Lover ...