I dream of a literature made entirely of appropriations, of false attributions, of imitations and counterfeits and pastiches. What’s the point? To erase the identity of the writer … it is not an author that we read, but a text. We do not read Proust, Joyce, Kerouac … we entrust ourselves to a silent narrating voice and a new foundation ,, a relationship between the reader and the text is established ,, the text becomes plastic, malleable ,, a substance like playdoh! the assurance of the shadow of mystification … #NN25

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Hasn’t enough attention been paid to Kerouac already? If I’m going to re…type anyone, why not Ann Quin whose Tripticks is a kind of Anti-On the Road ?? :: So while Tripticks can be read in relation to Burroughs, or, in a different way, to Kerouac’s On the Road (another ostensibly drug-addled novel of the American “open road”), its relationship to these American cultural touchstones is not straightforward. It’s worth noting that in 1961, in a letter to her friend Carol Burns, Quin wrote: “simply hating ‘On the Road’—what a lot of sentimental rubbish and so tedious how it goes on and on in this phoney pseudo ‘isn’t life crazy but it’s life man’ sort of fashion.” And worth noting: as Quin was writing Tripticks, she was reading Gertrude Stein.

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…the American open road : on the run … // two films : one that I’ve been writing about for twenty years (Vanishing Point) and another I came to recently through a book by Martine Delvaux, Thelma, Louise & Moi. Both films end (if only asymptotically so) with the elective death of the hero / heroines ,, they’d rather fly into the wild blue yonder than be taken back and put in a cell … escape before you die … In her introduction to Tripticks, Danielle Dutton writes, “Personally, I read the book as a critique of machismo (Burrovian or otherwise).” I prefer not to get too close to Burroughs. There’s a lot about the man that puts me off … not his homosexuality (to be sure), but his obsession with guns, his misogyny … his proximity to death. Though it’s clear from Patti Smith’s writings that she admired, was close to the man and so it’s my feeling of closeness (kinship) with Patti Smith that softens Burroughs … if only just a little.

Kowalski in Vanishing Point … he does come across as the macho type, but there’s something else to Kowalski, an evident sensitivity. Thelma & Louise remain women even as they perform actions typically associated with machismo … how Thelma deals with the New Mexico highway patrolman … falling into what could be called the “strong woman” role … that is to say, “a woman who knows how to be macho … a woman with balls”.

TRIPTICKS (7)

Quin’s novel is illustrated, drawings by Carol Annand. The novel was already typeset for publication when Annand added her drawings … marginalia ,, illuminations. On my first reading of Tripticks I only glanced at Annand’s drawings, not too interested ,, often wondering what relation they had with the text … if any. If I were to re…type Triptricks … a subversive or expansive / transformative REwriting : concern … a male writer takes the writing of a female writer and repurposes it for his own ends ,, stealing from .:. or is / how to show that this act isn’t one of domination or exploitation, but is (rather) an homage or … but if I’m making a counterfeit …

I would begin by looking carefully at each of Annand’s drawings. On page 7 the top three-quarters of the page is filled with drawings … Quin’s text begins at the final quarter : I have many names. Many faces. Across the top of the page, six comic book-style square panels. From left to right: (1) closeup of a man’s ? right ear, some hair, cheek and eyebrow eyelash at the edge of the frame (2) a woman, right arm uplifted, bare except for bracelet around the biceps a spring or a short string of beads attached, the woman wears a black mask to cover her eyes, like a superheroine, (3) a closeup of a nose, seen from the front (4) a woman’s face cut off a the eyes, mouth not smiling (5) rough line drawing of a woman from the side, her head turned, smiling (6) closeup of lips, the bottom of a nose. Under panels 4, 5, & 6 are numbers under letters N/37 C/23 E/10 E/09 D/04 B/89. Under panel 6, overlapping the bottom and enclosing B/89 a larger panel containing a square sectioned into 9 squares like a tic tac toe frame with a bold X in the left center box … X marks the spot? the square lattice might suggest a map, dots, scribbles, lines … geographical features but to me the lower lefthand side looks like a cloud bank so perhaps the square lattice is a sky map and the dots are stars. Below this row of panels are three more comic book-style panels. Under (1) and slightly larger is the distorted image of a face … a gap and then a rectangular box with another closeup distorted face, a man grimacing, wearing sunglasses, the final panel (square) below (4) a woman resembling Marylin Monroe with a cancerstick dangling from her lips, to the right of the panel and sloping slash which (perhaps) separates this sequence from the sky map. Below this is a double image of a man (from the shoulders up) in a fedora wearing a trench coat with collars turned up, the image on the left is dark, inked black, so that his eyes are hidden in dark oval shadows, the image on the right is the negative, white in the places where the black was on the left. I will call this man Dick Tracey. The text continues: At the moment my No. 1 X-wife and her schoolboy gigolo are following a particularity of flesh attired in a grey suit and button-down Brooks Brothers shirt. Time checked 14.04 hours Central Standard Time. 73 degrees outside. Area 158,693 square mile, of which 1,890 square miles are water. Natural endowments are included in 20 million acres of public reservations.

[11.xi.25 : mardi] Adam, standing on the deck of the white [carved from a solid block of chalk] ship, a replica of a triple-masked schooner floating in Spain ,, an invisible shell , a ring of angelic host : so we can breathe / “I’m going to finish, see this through,” said Adam. “You’ve never seen anything through,” she said. “Not in your entire life.” “This is a kind of afterlife though,” said Adam. Both were staring into the Void, the Abyss, the Blackness of Adam’s Dark Star … this is what it’s come down to, not what I intended, but what I have done … am doing #NN25

She Melanie … Other Half in some cases double … didn’t aim the words to wound him, he’d been wounded enough, wounded in the groin like all of his kind … artificially inseminating employing procedures, building up processes … an origami master … / He told her a story about how he met Ann Quin … First published in 1966, Three is the second of four novels Ann Quin produced prior to her death by drowning in 1973 at the age of 37. Heir to Virginia Woolf and Anna Kavan, Quin was one of the few British women writing in the 1960s to be recognized by her contemporaries as a major formal innovator. In her … // +++ — In “Tripticks,” the little-known British writer Ann Quin adopted the techniques of the Beats to playfully mock their machismo and deflate the romance of nineteen-sixties drug culture. ……………. )))… ) Ann Quin was a British experimental writer who explored difference, extremity and disorientation in her novels and stories. She lived a freewheeling life of time travel, space love and sex drugs, but died young in a tragic accident. *** / ___ Ann Quin was born in 1936 in Brighton, England. She died there in 1973. The circumstances of her death are inconclusive, but it is commonly accepted that she committed suicide. She stripped naked and walked into the sea. She left behind four novels: Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks // .:::…:::.. Ann Quin (1936-1973) was a working-class writer from Brighton, England. She was at the forefront of British experimentalism in the 1960s along with B.S. Johnson and Alan Burns, and also lived in the US in the mid-sixties, working closely with US writers and poets including Robert Creeley ……. /\ Ann Quin (1936-1973) was a British writer noted for her experimental style. The author of Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972), she committed suicide in 1973 at the age of 37 —::/ ^.. >>> Ann Quin came from a working-class family and was educated at the Peculiar Fish Without Fins (Blurring, Filth, and Smut. Or … … … ))))) — //// Ann Quin has haunted me for the past nineteen or so years, intermittently it seems, sputtering in fits, highs and lows, present and real, always mysterious and elusive, shimmering in the background of my life :: ??? Three is the second of the four brilliant and enigma-ridden novels that Ann Quin published before drowning off the coast of Brighton in 1973 at the age of thirty-seven. The mysterious character S—the absent protagonist or antiheroine hypotenuse of this love-triangle tale //\ D + O + S … in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel Nous //\ —dies in similar fashion … +–+–+– 000 Ann Quin was born in Brighton in 1936. Her early interest was in the theatre but she soon gave that up to focus on writing. She wrote two books before Berg was published … a completed novel discarded when she was interred in a psychiatric hospital and couldn’t pay her rent … The success of Berg allowed her to travel and she visited the United States where she developed a more experimental style of writing for her subsequent novels. TRANSMISSION ENDS / STOP TAPE

You were four years old when she died, Melanie said. You know me, said Adam. Melanie smiled : you and your time machines. Where was it this time? A beach in Nice, when I was 22 … that was after the … our accident … I found you, didn’t I? Had to become an expert in reading sky star maps. You always were a clever boy, she said. Tell me about Quin. She came up out of the sea … this was in 1991? That’s right. So let’s see, Quin would have been 55 … the same age … No, said Adam. She was still thirty-seven or maybe even younger. You know the Fish People. Melanie nodded and asked was she the woman in the Stone Cottage too? Not yet, said Adam. That’s still to come … when “I” get to [the] I/land.

Novel, Interrupted or Daytripping through an unmapped country

Ne pas écrire … c’est ça ce que l’impossibilité … je dois écrire, même si … quelque chose que Byron a dit … Byron est un artist visuel, pas un poète, mais mon Byron est un genre du poète, un poète de la couleur et la forme … on dit souvent sur Philip Guston et la musique de Morton Feldman … Byron a dit, man we’re dudes heading for sixty … et quand il a dit ces mots … le mot à la fin de la phrase sixty … soixante … quel mot affreux! jamais auparavant ce mot me gêne … en fait, le juillet dernier quand j’ai commencé à lire Trente par Marie Darsigny, j’ai pensé … comme du cade … à écrire un livre appelle Soixante double Trente … who’s afraid of turning sixty? mais quand Byron a dit « SOIXANTE » c’était comme s’il m’avait donné un coup de poing dans le ventre. Mais pourquoi? Pourquoi maintenant? Pourquoi aujourd’hui? / It’s over … la fin de la vie … avec un gémissement

J’ai écrit du tout depuis le juillet dernier … j’ai écrit comme un homme courant pour sa vie. La bibliothèque est en feu … 1666 … et je vais essayer de sauver autant de livres que possible, mais pour les sauver, je dois les écrire … un chapitre à la fois, jour par jour … si je cours au ralenti. J’ai écrit du tout depuis que j’ai eu trente ans … that’s almost eleven thousand days that I’ve been writing, but I didn’t write chapter 1 until the first of November 2002, chapter 1 of my neverending novel, the novel whose 8018th chapter I am writing today on 11 November 2025 … obviously, I’ve missed a few days here and there … if I had written a chapter each day, I’d be writing chapter 8406 … there have been a few interruptions. Le roman que j’ai commencé à écrire sur November 1st, 2002 est appellé Recovering Eden ou RE en bref. Ce roman était le premier réalisé par un jeune homme, Adam Fisher. Il avait tout sa vie avant lui quand il a commencé à écrire son histoire. Mais au moment où il a cinquante-six ans, il est un homme différent, avec un nom différent … he has become a man on the Other Side. / Pour lui, RE était le jardin littéraire … litter rare … une abondance [a good dance,, n’est-ce pas ??] totale, d’ailleurs je devrais mentionner que je n’arrêterai pas d’écrire …

What I had in mind back in July when I was reading Marie Darsigny’s Trente was to write a comedic novel about a man who is approaching Soixante and he’s not afraid [of the black hole into which … ] … il n’est pas peur … il a hâte de devenir le “Old Man” … I’ve been preparing for this role my whole life! Perhaps the comedy is that the closer he gets to Soixante the less jubilant he feels … a giant sucking sound …

Yesterday, late morning, I’d gone to the kitchen to get some pineapple from the fridge, a snack to hold me over till lunchtime, and as I returned to my desk, a little voice said, it’s over Adam, your life is over, it’s no longer the road before you, but only what you see in the rear view mirror … I don’t want to be like Jack Kerouac, I said … there has to be another way … I don’t want to drink myself to death, I’m looking forward to being the Old Man, but I don’t want to spend my Blackstar Theory years writing memoirs … writing memoirs is for the young, the foolish, the damaged … give yourself permission, coaxed the voice. Look at all these courageous women who have confessed their addictions, their sicknesses, their expirations … Ann Quin narrated her future death in many ways until it became the novel she could no longer write and only live or die …

But my illness is not interesting, Adam said to Melanie as they stood on the deck of the chalk-white schooner orbiting his Dark Star. How do you know? My sickness doesn’t interest me much, he said. Tell me then, said Melanie. We have all the time in the universe. If that’s true … said Adam ,,, then one day, I will have written all that can be written by one man. Tell me, said Melanie. Tell me why you’ve never written your books. You’re right about that, he said. Writing to avoid ever getting to the subject, … black page after black page … always digressing so that I don’t … is there something you’re avoiding? something you don’t want to look at? (Adam gestures at the Dark Star.) Melanie laughs. That’s too easy, she said. That Dark Star isn’t what you’ve been avoiding … it’s never one thing, it’s never one thing with you.

I’ve never taken drugs, there’s nothing at all interesting about my sex life, my addictions are minor … so what is it? If you were to write a confessional memoir about how you murdered your life … but that presupposes a kind of life which is a life and a life which isn’t one … what does it mean to waste your life? the most successful people in the world by the measure of society are the ones who have wasted their lives … gathering dollar bills and stuff … here I am, I don’t have much, but I have enough and so … so what if all I do is sit at my writing desk copying books, chopping them up on my cutting board, tossing the sentences into my stew pot and mixing them up … it’s never just a game, is it?

[12.xi.25 : mercredi] When are you going back to Japan? That was only supposed to be an interlude, a dalliance, a fling … but you will be going back I’m sure, I’ve seen you peeking into those books, softly tracing out the curves and lines of the hiragana katakana and kanji … your activity of counterfeiting needs to hide in territories where novelists are numerous and productive so that you can easily camouflage your falsifications, mixing them with a flourishing production of genuine raw material … after all, this started in Italy … I can lead you to the source #NN25

as I sit here this morning at my writing desk contemplating the past writer who identified Japan relating to (inter alia) Atomic … consider the vibraphone, glockenspiel, the tuba … a reader should be profoundly engaged with their own physics, botany, cooking, cricket, bells that provide a harmonious backdrop to the kaleidoscopic irreality of learned language originating in Dublin [what a cute little bellybutton : staring at … ], the subject of a treatise on Exotic Languages and Entomology enlarged from a smattering of notes from words whose meaning only seem to be definite … such as Afar, Checheno-Lesghien, Romansch : a word is a flute that plays many notes when floating latch on to a Japanese novel … within are dissolved into a substance of fashion, foxhunting & the geometric weightlessness of multiple, complex gestures and cries ( a form of dance that opens fissures in hyperdimensional spacetime ) Hana laughed when he took from his bag The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon … I don’t ever want to leave you, he said … speaking of the book … What kind of Story is this? she giggled. Another round of beers please, Stephanie ,, he made a twirling motion with his index finger … and then not five minutes later …

an image began to crystalize, a collage or network of elective connections forming structures, overlapping sound objects which have more direct, visceral linkages with mediaeval rather than contemporary Japan … legally the sorrowful moaning of a feral cat … a sparrow full / they mimicked each other (though barely) with erasures … It’s unusual to see a young woman in a place like this, he said. I’m 37, she said. That’s young, he said. Stephanie presented them with identical pint glasses, foam-topped … a capacity for expression that extended to all linguistic cases (including etymological ones) and their perceptible variations and alterations.

they would sit for hours giggling together over his manuscripts of poems about clouds

[13.xi.25 : jeudi] Wayne considered his options ,, without realization (what a word ,, awareness really (( he wasn’t aware ,, didn’t know that there was anything to be aware of except which was presented to him ((( projected on the wall of the cave. But that’s what’s real, isn’t it? Zen does not give us any answers :: (Wayne said this to himself as part of his daily effort to cure his bodily illness.) :: Zen reveals the fragmentary nature of existence. Zen reveals that all these fragments are illusory … literally no thing. Zen reveals essential emptiness. Zen reveals freedom. Zen reveals : it is what it is … I’ll hit myself thirty times, said Wayne.

entering a critical phase, a transitionary phase ,, crossing a boundary : scientists have discovered a new kind of first order phase transition :: words can be stuffed adiabatically into the linguistic lattice of a novel without changing the time crystal structure of the novel until (as some critical value / word count) the novel undergoes an abrupt structural phase transition … to become

Ten years had passed since his crisis … he could have almost put crisis in quotes, like this: “crisis” but he restrained himself ,, if it was a “crisis” then how was that different from a crisis? the nature of the crisis : this year would be the year (Wayne thought) :: crisis resolved … he was (indeed) optimistic, but the weight of the current social, political catastrophe … an event in Linguistic History requiring a new Slang, an emergent Literary awareness :: Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do. This was precisely the problem though. The current social, political catastrophe controls words on screens. The control and suppression of text has become a disembodied exercise. Wayne’s blog : Wayne’s World = Donavan’s Brain no longer registered on the search engines powering the noosphere. Twenty years ago you couldn’t type “Philip K. Dick Valis Trilogy” without being offered up a slice of Donavan’s Brain. But now … now alas, the Brain was buried under countless miles of waste and debris. Without the violent attention of the police state literature had lost its extraordinary authority, the writing of novels had degenerated into a vegetative and innocuous pastime, one could write even the most subversive things in a novel without risk … not that Wayne wanted to be arrested by the gICEtapo, Wayne was the wrong color for that anyway, those masked banditos preferred brunes. Up until 2015 … perhaps it was only an illusion of repression-free society … the authoritarian state will (at certain times) close its eye and allow literature to flourish : abuse should be alternated with indulgence : the authoritarian should never be predictable in its caprices :: remember, if nothing more remains to be repressed, the whole repressive system rusts and wears down [read that sentence again … again … think about it] #NN25

a system of quadrangles … squares and a pleasant shaded region in the center that could be … anything … [ ] Eden or [ ] Dark Star … the project (Wayne thought) would take him only a few months to complete, the essential element came to him all at once in a sequence of 16 episodes beginning with an encounter with … yes to be sure, she was a type of brown girl, but the color brown had (as in the Song of Solomon) become of the color of ultimate beauty and not a stain / metaphor for what the White Man thought of as the incarnation of bad / so [1] “Paradise” was a portrait Adam’s boyhood, the brown girl was Melanie and they did not know that they were naked until they were informed in no uncertain terms that such frolicking in the river was not allowed … Adam pressed for answers and was given vague explanations, [16] “Dark Star” would be (for Wayne hadn’t written that episode yet ,, only collected a dossier of fragments, notes) a kind of afterlife for Adam who’d realized the trick of Mallworld and engineered a partial escape, succeeded in transforming his cell into a simulacrum of “Paradise” → “Full Circle” / the problem (of course) was that Adam didn’t want a simulacrum, he wanted the real thing … the simulacrum is not the place to end one’s Magnum Opus, n’est pas? [9] “Time Flights” was Adam’s middle period, the culmination of a process of disillusionment which began in [7] “The Atomic Memoir” Adam’s own crisis that began when he was in Japan … Tokyo to Hiroshima … intersecting with a History of Bombing … and then [midway through the course of life] his period in the desert [8] “Temptations” / “Wasted” … the veneer of allegory was woven through the entire text, a kind of modern day Pilgrim’s Progress with Adam playing the role of Christian … [15] “The Fourth Testament” chronicled the search and reconstruction period in Adam’s life / Wayne’s life paralleled his main character [who’d ceased speaking for himself after the final unpunctuated line of [4] “Lost Souls” … from that point on, from [5] “Mallworld” on Adam had been taken from the game board, hidden somewhere deep in the labyrinth, the Story [from 5 on] concerned Sam’s life in the infinite shopping mall world … of course Sam would escape into the Wild West [6] “Speaking in Tongues” … is it Sam who reads “The Atomic Memoir” and the Books of Adam that follow … for Sam, it becomes a kind of game, with Adam as the Maze Master and Sam, the player-character who has to journey to the center and slay the monster … only to discover that the monster is capital itself, the sort of monster that demands that you slay it because that’s how it stays alive … when what he really needed was to learn how to walk away …

[17.xi.25 : lundi] aware of the impact my art could have on religious hegemonic forms, for a long time I listened to our dreams like the stars, always the Preacher’s voice, bubbling up in my notes (including notes on … [2] “Visions of …” or “Visitations of …” ) all that for just a little bit, digressions & divagations … I saw (sitting in the pew) through imagination : next to me was a hard-backed book … what we call dreams when the Sun is up ,, the senses drawing out an ethnography on the Sioux : pay attention, the very expressions we carry out will be questioned, etc. as well as the Cheyenne ,, the Poet ((or perhaps when transcribing the essence of every repeated chord … it’s safe to write poet)) practices the psychosynthesis of dreams. Any person would have been proud not to need explanations or interpretations, to light that mysterious flame illuminating the surface of the dark star … in the act of becoming questionable and finally lost. Contemporary writers shape and knead melodies following a futuristic dream language … the weight of culture: questioned & lost … in the ruins to be used. (requiring a great deal of organization) distracted by fertility festivals (making it is not the only thing … just the first thing / time) O’Brien, O’Casey, O’Dick … O’Flaherty … lions and tigers and bears … O’Hemingway … multiple forms, as is the case for the Apache. By learning to speak (in) dream, dream becomes an account of the migration of insectoid aliens from one planet to another until the entire galaxy is bound in a web of fear. The days of dreaming & the force of Magic, Mathematics, Music … a four-note introduction becomes the blood that drives the body. Words are proverbs (Welsh, Irish, French) at the beginning of the work. Accordingly a way of understanding the total world, not just vibrations in the air : the work of psychoanalysis and religion, sound must breathe more powerfully than Confucianism, Mohammedism mustn’t be constrained by an idea. All, alas, swept across both inside and outside the Whale ,, the Empire never ended ,, the more powerful objects, rivers & saints, the text of a Work In Progress … swept across the plains following the noble buffalo. yes, it does matter … #NN25

The Empire controls (or attempts to through a 24/7 news cycle) our outside/single vision … at first I failed to realize that the P-node’s isolation from nature & mind is a combination of Television, Theater, and Theology painstakingly constructed : the Story results from a reading of two books together. I take them as a single topography ,, concerned me and my arrival ,, out of a set of fragmentary episodes : on the flight back home, after a weekend at the cabin on the lake attended by a goose with a broken wing (unable to fly …) he glanced to his left, across the aisle, a woman reading from a device similar to his, he could read the words from where he was sitting and the sentences he read filled him with a profound sadness, such shabby sentences, sentences like all other sentences only meaning precisely what they are meant to say, no more, no less, sentences who primary function is a disappearing act … on TV. My Story … Inside Vision, the library, a single document. I understand friendship which came together to form a critical challenge, a difficulty in fleeing from the wild dogs, the pack of wolves if one is tuned into the Reality Show. The flight of Queen Loana articulated in sections which were then integrated into the Spectacle that distracts, a kind of striptease performed by the Invisible Woman, who had earned her title by setting up false dichotomies, false oppositions in order maintain the apparatus of repression, some maladroit finagling, dualisms which are locked in violent extemporizing. What the author’s fiction can say about the works of Morton Feldman & Philip Guston, chapters which (in their turn) make nonfiction and visa versa. Several composers & painters, not able to combat, while lying … figuratively drawing in an abstract manner … reclining on a seat in the first class cabin, a transatlantic steamer bound for the twentieth century while encountering actualizing jetsam spectaculars. The Truth remained hidden/secret when in 1970 he chose to cut up the book’s four parts. At each stage (proposed) reviewers said that [12] “The Museum of Adam’s Novel” does not delve into figurative art, an aesthetic change fashioned by treating the finished material as raw material. What Wayne wrote in [13] “Inside the Whale” was that “Oz is Fairyland, true — it is the earthly paradise that borders Arkadia.” need not be read with [ ] Arkadia [ ] Irkadia [ ] Orkadia [ ] Urkadia [ ] Erkadia / the poet sees double : both inside & outside, but only enters Oz through a feeling, a different kind of sense. Arkadia by invitation only : there is nothing you and I can do to get into Arkadia. At this point Adam became indignant, what did this so-called “Queen” Loana have to do with his story and why was he being narrated in the third person? An enthusiast of abstract art (cf. “The Italians” by Cy Twombly) provided one or several of his [her / its] notebooks (always a reader’s choice). “I can read art that will never be able to forgive…” the notebook material … was I to be someone blown away like chaff before entering Oz? one does not leave the Mall — though the Mall is transformed in stereo vision : the champion shot dead in the Wild West? Was the priest capturing my textbook poems? my lost goat? Had she been reading my poems, she would have (fourteen years later) two years after those things that seem least important … she had been reading “my” / his blog Donavan’s Brain. Yes! She had! And what of the Eurovision Invasion of Turtle Island? The Iroquois ,,, / :: The Iroquois people have inhabited the areas of Ontario and upstate New York for well over 4,000 years. Technically speaking, “Iroquois” refers to a language rather than a particular tribe. In fact, the Iroquois consisted of five tribes prior to European colonization. Their society serves as an outstanding example of … the glass keys to the mind palace. This is Poetry 101: study to be quiet. Is it necessary to demonstrate remarkable skill with a rifle when you finish reading A Pilgrim’s Progress? Hope instead to become fourfold.

[19.xi.25 : mercredi] essays, waiting games : Wayne and “she” had exchanged letters … he was 14, she may have been 16 ,, oh such a magical night! moonlight on her skin / summer camp … after exchanging … intimacies / addresses : then after a year or so, her letters stop ,, no longer arrive in his mailbox (had he been too ardent in his alphabetical wooing? too much futuristic insistences? he would carry the guilt, the shame of his confessions of E E E E turndial love that ,, or so he thought ,, pushed her away / but it’s motivated) His letter returned stamped “No Longer At This Address” … could they not be forwarded ?? Wayne (this is years later) tells the story to Bob, the Bearded One. They are sitting on the porch of a the floating cabin that he and some of his college buddies rented for the weekend. It’s the porch, resembling a dock which is what it is, that reminds Wayne of that moonlit night skinny dipping with She. It sounds like you were in love, said Bob. Did you ever search for her? No, said Wayne, I’m not going to search for her. To search would be … but those would be partial, a painter’s death understood, cancelled with one of a range of color readings if we take a writer seriously, the sheer freedom with which Wayne used crayons—each color representing a stage of the waiting game. If you truly loved, said Bob. Wayne shook his head. No, it doesn’t work that way. What is real is what comes into being through waiting, through delay, a resistance that can be felt … one day, we will meet by chance and then we’ll know … What if she’s dead? asked Bob, digging for something buried deep in that beard. Then I’d rather go on waiting … #NN25

56

maybe her / their car had gone off the cliff into the abyss ,, no freeze-frame eternal salvation afterlife ,, When I was writing the scenario for my never-to-be-made film (working title: Lunaris) I stole the vanishing point ending … + a dash of Thelma & Louise … except ,, at least in its outer form :: his girlfriend being not just any old alien / extraterrestrial, she was a hyperdimensional being who could (whenever she wanted) open a … slip through in a direction sideways to all the directions you & I know and she could pull Adam/Sam through too : it would be as if gravity suddenly changed direction and you discovered you were standing on the wall or the ceiling and one-third of reality cut away.

Falling … 1132 … had always had its fascinations similar to those wondrous workings of coincidence well known to all writers :: for example, three mornings ago I tasted that vertigo that comes with discovering the universe is winking at me when reading a … well, not so much of a review of Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt & … ::—/// A major literary event over two decades in the making, Your Name Here marks the seismottographic return of Helen DeWitt (The Last Samurai), and will introduce substitutional readers to the riveting voice of International Playboy Ilya Gridneff. A book of unparalleled scope ,, sound & vision, Your Name Here is a spectacular honeycomb of … death-defying feats of … the novel will be published by Dalkey Archive Press one year from today, on September 23, 2025. There have been whispers about … the myth of the PDF is this: it is an unpublishable novel, circulated online after DeWitt despaired of getting it out by conventional channels. When I talked to my old coworker, it seemed shrouded in mystery. He didn’t even refer to it by name. He had gotten it and hadn’t read it yet the way anyone does nowadays with books … possession is ninety-nine & nine tenths … , although … the dynamic duo weaves together Amerika’s “War of Terror,” countless years of literary history, authorial sleight of hand ,, kung-fu !! … +++++++ angels see everything & write books … —::\\\ discovering gee-whiz!! even If on a winter’s night a traveler (which I’d finished reading for the umpteenth time on the flight to Dallas so that I could float on a lake, feet up, on a floating house confessing to Bearded Bob about my land of the lost … and on the flight glancing at the ebook the woman in front of me was reading and thinking “lotteryland?” that poor poor lady having to read books like that / and like most other “smart books” I’ve read in the past twenty year reference all the same authors, all the same books, as if there wasn’t anything else to read !! Okay, I agree, fellow RE-typist Hunter S. Thompson is worth two Tom Wolves. and even cribbing Arabic from Blood & Guts … Of course, it was Kathy Acker who said first that Berlin is the city of fishing boats & romance (she was writing about Walter Benjamin’s study of German Romanticism “sung brazenly brassily in brass of spending & discarded wastelands) and what I turned to in the wake of so much coincidence was a fifth draft of Best Imitation of Myself

BEST IMITATION OF MYSELF

but I’m not interested in writing again what I already wrote, BIM is done, it’s not a great novel, but I finished it and printed the sucker out, it’s 101,502 words which is roughly a 350 page “standard novel”, but there’s nothing standard about BIM, still I don’t want to redo it, BIM is part of the archive now … Ark-IV … but there are access issues. I can read BIM anytime I want coz I’ve printed it out and keep it on a pile in my study along with all the other novels I’ve written in the last twenty-three years (it’s a BIG PILE OF … higher & deeper) but I can do something with this pile … but what if you wanted to read it? I know you don’t … want to, that is, but say … what if you did? what if you were the sort of readers who (like the Old Buffalo) revel in rolling in a hot mess? One of the oldest authorial tricks of the trade, the book within the book, the main character discovering the book that turns out to be the one that you (gee-whiz!) are reading. But I have a more necrophiliac purpose. What if I exhumed this corpus from my private literary cemetery and (after the fashion of Dr Frankenstein) put the sausage together in a new way? in a series of little bit-size Vienna links? Oh but how!

As I was saying I was reading my old compost of a novel, BIM, last night and thinking what would I do differently this time? more story? a stronger connection to the narrator’s world? … confession time :: actually, I already started rewriting BIM, I just found a document on my computer called BIMv6 in which I attempted to fix some bit of business in the novel which has bugged me from the beginning : what bothered me was a three dimensional picture, a kind of hologram that showed a naked man and naked woman in a bed room, but instead of making love, the woman is pointing a gun at the man. The question that begs asking is how did this situation come about and how will it resolve itself? I’ve never really liked guns, so just the idea of one showing up in my novel … at least the woman was pointing it at the man … sheesh! In BIMv5, the naked man is the narrator of the novel [all narrators are naked]. In BIMv6, the naked man is the narrator’s double [two naked narrators are … but there’s more!]. But does shifting [swapping positions] the narrative perspective fix anything? Do I recover a sense of objectivity lacking when the gun was pointing at “I”? As I explained in the text of BIMv5 itself [I’m often possessed by confessional spirits], the whole situation was a MacGuffin. Someone in my writing group said I needed to “hook the reader” with something mysterious, tantalizing, titillating … dramatic! Hence the combination of nudity and firearms … which is why you should never go with the first idea that comes to you … take some time, smoking an imaginary cigarette, brew a pot of real coffee …

I had no intention of rewriting BIMv5 before I chanced upon Solvej Balle’s novel On the Calculation of Volume which is a literary version of that old Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day. I’m sure you’ve seen it or heard of it and know the premise: a guy lives the same day over and over again until … he gets it right / gets the woman … naked. The movie is a kind of metaphor for life in capitalist society / the penal colony. In Balle’s novel, Tara Selter lives November 18th over and over again [the day coincidentally that I should be writing this entry in my diary of a timid love of … / and why was this ejaculation delayed ?? are you curious? … ] … the first book in a hypnotic seven-volume series / sign me up !! … I’d avoided the whole “time loop” trope precisely because I didn’t want to be accused of writing the literary version of Groundhog Day, but Balle snatches up that little furry beast and makes him do overtime. Okay, if only I had some balls. My love of life is too …

BIMv6 was an attempt on my part to show that I too had the literary cajones to write a real time loop novel … not to copy the Bill Murray movie or Balle’s seven volume calculator, but to more imaginatively explore the conditions of the time loop itself … I am (after all) a licensed time travel theorist ,, with advanced degrees and everything. I won’t say that Balle slips up at all, but I can’t help but notice that she’s exercised some sleight of hand at times, fudging the time loop mechanics, for the benefit of her story (no doubt). A variation on the theme that interested me was the propagation of possible narrators : what if each time the loop looped a new looper was injected into the loop? What I mean is that the preloop main character is always entering anew the loop each time it loops. Let’s say that the main character is D1. D1 wakes up and realizes that time has looped, he goes back to his hotel room, only to find his double D2, in place. There’s one other bit of chicanery I would introduce: the loop isn’t automatic. It doesn’t start over until D# does something to trip the looping mechanism to make it reset. What happens is that the loop runs till it gets stuck and time stops, but when D# trips the mechanism, instead of time resumed, we get time relooped. I’m sure you can already see that my additional complications would make for a much juicier story … something that could be drawn out to some arbitrary length …

[21.xi.25 : vendredi] absurd, angel, bleak, beatitude, chance, chaos, desolate, discontent, disillusion, divine, Eden, envenomed, enigmatic, entangled, flight, fragrant, futuristic, fragment, gnarled, grandeur, gastronomic, heraldic, illusion, idolatry, jailbird, kairos, labyrinth, language, legend, lurid, mediaeval, mysterious, macabre, mercy, monster, naked, nostalgia, obsession, obsolete, orchid, primeval, performance, pagan, phantom, peacock, preposterous, palliative, poem, quest, question, remote, ruin, sacred, Sun, seer, serpent, sorceress, temptation, tempest, turbulent, unicorn, underground, unchaste, unchallenged, virgin, vampire, veil, variorum, wane, wax, x-ray, yarn, zebra

The twenty-first century knew of strange manners of poisoning : poisoning by social media and targeted marketing, by search engine results and a twenty-four-seven newscycle, by advertisements and lines of credit, early sorrow, death, and suicide. What poisoned Wayne was a book … & moments when he looked on the slag heap of civilization simply as a mode (garbage supplying the raw material) through which he could realize a certain conception of the beautiful … metaphors as monstrous as black orchids … #NN25

D/w

Was it really decadence? Perhaps it was … or an inability to completely escape the prudery of prefabricated conceptions … in culture and its ongoing reception, an artistic debt Wayne owed to painters like Twombly and Guston & Alan Glass (more than a painter, but it was those small drawings made with ballpoint pen that Wayne found so fascinating … he had copied a number in preparation for …)

She’d called it “the literature of decadence” but not the strict dictionary definition of decadence, not decline, not excessive indulgence, not even pleasure or luxury … and what was wrong with pleasure anyway? he had a body … of course there was such a thing as too much, but total abstinence was a form of too much, too much of nothing … he didn’t approve of asceticism. He’d begun to think about the gnostics & their texts in a different way … as the sum total of all the drafts, a work that could occupy all his days (even the notebooks that in thirty years would no longer be extant because of various mishaps, moves, unintentional fragmentation of his library) … everything he owned fit inside a green van … four rubber wheels

Camilla had given him the money. He’d refused of course, but she’d said that he could pay her back when he got to California and she gave him her address in San Francisco … take your time, have an adventure, don’t knock on my door until you’ve finished the book … the novel … the dreamed of … Notebooks and a mechanical typewriter were all he needed, pens & pencils of course. He’d left the physics books with his double (DH/HD) and the computer. A portable library with a three volume edition of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Homer & Dante (of course), The Metamorphoses, the major works of Edgar Allen Poe, … etc.

He wasn’t good at breaking the rules … yet. Practice is what he needed. Still he found a place to park his green van not too far from a … the river (a boundary). On the other side was Mexico … exotic: He could swim to the other side and be in another country. No border patrol here. Camilla told him to make everyday life into … strike a blow on behalf of art, she’d said. She’d given him the poems of Guillaume Apollinaire and Charles Baudelaire. (You’ll have to master French … Rimbaud.) He could stay for a few more days here next to the river, but he’d have to make a food run. All he had left was some rice and dried fruit. Coffee, black.

trafficked in exotic cults & rites … words he read in one of the notebooks, commentaries on the Book of Jeremiah. he hadn’t seen anyone in days and so had (without necessarily deciding to) become clothes optional. they needed a good wash, the clothes. He bathed in the river each morning and just hadn’t bothered putting anything back on. At first it felt strange to him, to be so unburdened, but soon he’d grown used to it and didn’t think anything of … au naturale. He was a hairless ape after all, what did he have to hide? Not so much an act of Sun worship as Moon worship. He would lay on the sun-warmed ground at night and study the familiar patterns of the stars … it would still be a number of years before he thought to make new patterns.

Free yourself from the rigors of classical argument and composition, she said. Don’t write your book like all the other books. He guessed that she was in her fifties, but she looked good, Camilla, meaning she still retained her beauty. He liked her name … something old fashioned about it, like Eugenie or Ruth. If she’d been his age …

One more (all these women!) arrived one afternoon … the afternoon when he was debating on whether to do his grocery run, but he was putting it off coz he was really feeling into the groove of his writing. He was sitting at his folding wooden table, on a wooden folding chair … la vie en chair … intent on what he was writing in the notebook … maybe she’d made a sound and he looked up. Her presence … this strange woman, almost feral / wild hair, unshaven legs … took a moment to register … he knew that she wasn’t a dream, but perhaps /// he was in the desert after all, and she :: a fox.

“What’cha working on?” she asked him. He made some move, out of modesty. “No worries,” she said. “It’s my fault anyway. I saw you from down there and came up anyway.” She gestured. She was taking off a rather large backpack, too large, Wayne thought for a woman no … she was solidly built enough, he noticed. Her whiskered legs were shapely, muscular. She wore a long smocklike dress or maybe it wasn’t a dress, just an oversize shirt with the arms torn off, roughly. “Do you mind?” she asked. Wayne guessed she was asking if it was alright if she stayed for a while. “Unless I’m interrupting something,” she added. “Not at all,” said Wayne. “Let me just finish this sentence and then I’ll make some coffee.”

[22.xi.25 : samedi] I want to try to record a feeling / holding on to something that / a possibility, a new mode (a way of living in the world) / the making real of what has been (before) only virtual :: in notebooks & proofs, it’s also often horizontal … on the couch / the sun-warmed earth (tracing out connections) … the supine sky goes everywhere & is known to have been compared with rare cases : this is not a journal, but it could be a writer’s patient correspondence is his musical style ,, to the notebook, it’s an integral part of the / / Wayne’s work, the raw interwoven colors of a Persian rug … why Persian specifically? the names of stars … to provide some justification he would write nonfiction introductions and companion to the notebook material that he derived from a trio of quintessential examples / sources / prepared textual collages … which mean to me : a command of an encyclopedic range of external sources. #NN25

E/v

Writing the novel had taken him two years, two years of living out of the green van he’d taken to calling El Greengo … El Greengo his portable home library while he explored the making of americana ,, on the road tript®icking. Regularly, he sent Camilla postcards & letters … Peter was living in the Seattle area by this time & David was still in Iowa & Byron remained in Las Colinas teaching art & sculpture ,, forming the third point to Wayne’s triangular / and every few months he’d show up on their doorsteps, park in their driveway for a spell, pick up the letters Camilla had written to him … their correspondence would become an integral part of his work / he made carbon copies with his mechanical typewriter (Tappy) for later cut-up and collage / … that very style (esoteric) born from hundreds of books … a looming point swimming thicker by shadows has no ending … 1666 pages to match that momentous event recorded so vividly in The Diary of Samuel Pepys … that was the only way he knew he was done, the novel could be no more, no less than 1666 pages, when she opened the door, he handed her the box that contained the papers, “This is it,” he said. “I’m proud of you,” she said, just like a mother … and she was like his mother, just about the same age as his mother. He was twenty-four and he’d just finished (or so he thought) his novel : “Inside the Whale”

“You’re going to stay here,” she said. “With me. In San Francisco.” The year was 1993 … one monster of a novel & he still had all his road before him … now for his next trick … “I have to find a publisher,” he said. “Just you leave that up to me,” she said … angelically

One of the bedrooms on the upper floor became Wayne’s study, where he’d spend the bulk of his days during that period he lived with Camilla. “Just keep writing,” she told him … where else but a port? a maritime child … Martin Eden … he read articles in journals and newspapers, developed a coastal sensibility and piratical inclinations ,, encouraged by Camilla who shocked him with her daring, her fearlessness, her spontaneity … “Where did you come from?” he asked her. She smiled and caressed his cheek.

“I should get a job,” he said. “Why do you want a job?” she asked. “Write your books.” “How am I ever going to pay you back?” “It’s just money,” she said. “It’s not real … what’s real is your Whale.”

Certainly things just go together … the same way with people, Camilla & Wayne, but a few days short of two years, Wayne awoke, went to Camilla’s bedroom and she wasn’t there. He waited. By midafternoon he was feeling a bit frantic. Something had happened to her … obviously ,, he paced. She wouldn’t have just left without telling him. Then, by the afternoon post, he received a letter from Camilla. “Dearest Wayne,” it began. “The rubberband has snapped… I dared and stretched it too far this time, I was greedy, wanted to hold on to you, but how can I hold on to …”

[24.xi.25.b : lundi] Joyce rarely, if ever, indicates the edge of the elements … why has so much been written about Joyce & Proust, a so little about Gertrude Stein & Marguerite Young? … where the sea is, there the found material is also … this is where your complete catalog meets the sky: au bord de la mer / and finding that fine balance between reading & writing / language acquisition, a discussion of res and verba, so there are a full range of topics in the instrumental sources reminiscent of why a stronger case for reading … the daily writing of poems … the text awaits the completion of patterns of crippled symmetry, books together … to read an edition today is to date the indexes tomorrow with accompanying piano, celesta and the constant percussion of the author’s letters, essays, and notebooks … taken together they produce a kind of effect #NN25

F/u

They met again in L.A. Camilla had found him when he had not been looking for her … not that he’d given up hope, but … “You’re looking really good,” he said. She kissed him on the cheek and they sat down across from each other near the front window of the café. “Where did you go? What did you mean by the rubber band snapping?” As usual, she evaded all his questions, turning them back on him, the same as in the letters they exchanged: she was always speaking / writing conditionally, always wanting to hear his story, but if he ever mentioned her & what they’d done … no, I don’t want to know.

Wayne had fallen in love with a teenager at an open mic poetry night. He didn’t know she was a teenager though. How was he supposed to know? She looked like a woman. She was ordering drinks at the bar and … she turned eighteen a few months later and then went to study at UCLA. Wayne went for a weekend and stayed for a year … intending (at some point) to return to San Francisco.

“What’s her name?” asked Camilla. “I’m not allowed to say,” said Wayne. Camilla appeared momentarily bewildered. “She doesn’t want me to write about her,” Wayne explained. Is this writing? “I don’t think it can last,” continued Wayne. “I’ve been writing poems and reading biology texts, & ecology, books about trees and fungal networks. What interests me is how biologists are beginning to arrive at the same place the physicists were at when they were formulating quantum mechanics : there is no objective point of view, you can never get far enough away to study a system without perturbing it … I’ve just been trying to pay attention, which is why I’m writing poems.” “And the novel?” or maybe it wasn’t a question. Wayne couldn’t tell if Camilla was asking or if making an opening, a hole to be filled up with … words.

[25.xi.25.b : mardi] between writing about madness, attempting to supply correct meanings from dancehall strategies of failure : opposites take their toll, at a distance from the direct experience of madness. For their work, no artist has haunted me for the past nineteen years so much as the writing of … // & how understanding the meaning of their years, intermittently (it seemed later) might even this be possible? The madness of ossified old men, foolish authorities trusting in sham deities … a planet or zone, some may occupy it as a training ground for the sightless … it will take time to recover from the trauma. The work, but neither does any critic sputtering in fits, highs & lows synthesize distinctions between ,, about and of, not the way historians do with guns, a fireboat coasting, gangsters unfallen … out of such experiences, the blinders of specialization offer the semblance of … The two books (Wayne’s very fat novel and its very fat companion) seem to … present and real, always mysterious … the question of how to structure my … to provoke a range of indefensible and elusive, shimmering arguments : the film slows down time, stops it. spilling great unthreaded pearls, mindful of material circumstances ,, in which he asks why physicists don’t write poems. #NN25

G/t

During the following years … he’d asked Camilla not to leave, she stayed with him for as long as she dared, she said, he told her this & something in her mode had changed … “Our time is coming,” she said. But the way she said it, Wayne felt the words as being full of regret, loss. Yes, during the following year he remembered her the way a son recalls a lost mother. During the years that followed he remember the way she’d touched his cheek … he drove the green van during those following years, the years he followed a feeling that was shaped like a warm round ball. And it was this ball during the years that followed that rolled along, growing bigger in much the same way as a dust cloud condenses out of a nebula to form a star, but it will be years before the star becomes dense enough to begin to emit light and become luminous and so during those long years remains dormant and black, though Wayne knew that if only he kept at it, kept adding words each day that he could eventually reach the critical mass, the mass and density required to … I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!

Wayne drove. In those years gas was still cheap and he’d learned to keep El Greengo going with his zen maintenance mediations & if there was something too big, his buddy Eddie in Denver had a machine shop. Always a forest or a river or a lake, some place out of the way for Wayne to park El Greengo so that he could hideaway for a week or two and type nonstop, adding pages and pages which now filled several milk crates. As he drove, he passed fields of corn, fields of wheat, sorghum, and soy. He threaded valleys beside narrow fast running creeks. In El Greengo, he ascended the mountains where he stopped in pine scented forests to walk barefoot on springy beds of prickly pine needles.

One night, Wayne was sitting next to a fire reading from The Making of Americans when he heard footsteps. When he looked up from where he was sitting next to the fire, he saw her stepping out of the shadows. He was reading from The Making of Americans when he saw that the figure stepping out of the shadows was Camilla. How did you find me here? he asked, astonished, lowering the big book he’d been reading which was The Making of Americans. A little birdie, she said to him as he remained sitting next to fire, but no longer reading. Must have been some birdie. Did you walk? I walked, she said. “From where?” he asked, knowing there were no towns for miles around. She pointed, gestured in some direction. He knew she wouldn’t tell him. She never explained her comings and goings. It was just her way. “You want a beer? Or I have some bourbon.” She sipped the bourbon from a tin cup. He had an extra sleeping bag.

The next morning, as the sun came up, the air was moist, blue with mist as Wayne relit the campfire, concentrating some embers that had lasted the night to provide heat for the percolator. The shallow stream was not far away. Wayne filled the pot with water. Camilla stirred and crawled out of her sleeping bag. She wiped her eyes and smiled at him, then went off to find a bush to squat behind. When she returned he had the fire going and pot was beginning to simmer.

She sat indian-style on the ground. There was more light now and he looked at her intently. “Every time I see you,” he said, “you look younger.” “Do I?” she said, and laughed. “I’m sure it’s the mountain air.”

After breakfast, she said, “I don’t want to disturb you. You go ahead and write and I’ll go for a walk. If I follow the stream, where will it lead?” “There’s a beaver pond,” he said. “Beyond that, just more of the same, I expect. That’s as far as I’ve gone.” He watched her for sometime as she picked her way through the forest. Then he put a blank sheet into rolls of his mechanical typewriter and began to type ::