She says, “Perhaps you've never wanted anything.”

Suddenly he's interested. He asks, “Do you think so?”

“Yes. Not ever.”

He's the sort of man who doesn't notice whether something is said by himself or by the other person, doesn't notice who answers questions, even if they are put by himself.

“It's possible. Never wanted anything.”

He waits, thinks, says, “Perhaps that's what the matter is. I never want anything, ever.”

She wrote about everything while talking of nothing. I kept myself busy collecting all of these nothings. A quotation emerges out of a moment in time — you capture it, you strip it away from where it was lying, you relocate it. Quotations are dislocations — perhaps that's what marks them as a site of resonance.

He moved between voices, between codes. Sometimes he spoke in a way that he regretted, sometime he regretted speaking — in the sense that speaking was writing and writing was inscribing upon the world around him, and that things could so much simpler in the various caves and hotel rooms that were only months in the past.

Eventually there would be a break — there were mechanisms at play. This formed the basis of his writing — it was rooted in a relation to machines: social machines, emotional machines, inscribing machines, writing machines, reading machines. With another name, he tried to play the game — create a body of work about a Body of Work. A corpse to be displayed, not quite curriculum vitae so much as corpus vitae. It was a gesture on the threshold of discernability, like flipping a coin into a well and making a wish.

The matter of the residency wrapped itself up in etymology naturally: resident (n.) mid-15c., "an inhabitant, one who dwells in a place permanently or for a considerable time," from resident (adj.) late 14c., "dwelling, residing, having an abode in a place for a continuance of time," from Old French resident and directly from Latin residentem (nominative residens), present participle of residere "to sit down, settle" — these types of definitions usually offer seemingly very little, but in the minuteness are openings, loose threads waiting to be drawn together.

In this case, there was one. It was an event. These sorts of definite statements can be made with some level of assurance while subsequently undermining themselves, like a building that burrows into the ground as it ascends, rendering the foundation unstable. Eventually the glass castle reaches into the clouds just as the crevices in the concrete give way. A shattering rings across the sky — for a moment there are rainbows in the avalanche. Someone somewhere burns the works of Tennyson and Shelley. Before, the present faded.

Today marks my first official day of the illustrious Triest Residency program. I find myself very inspired by my environs — there are paintings everywhere, there is J's XDJ, there is H's Guitar, there is M's keyboard. I think this is my first time ever here while he isn't here. There's an interesting characteristic about the structures of this place that makes me want to imitate him. Mainly I would like to be healthier and in better shape. But also quieter, to stay in the crib more, and to get as much out of how peaceful living alone is. I did 10 push-ups. There is wagyu beef tallow in the cupboards but in order to justify using it to cook I feel as though I need to exercise a sufficient amount to do so.

When I read M's tour diary today, I was really hit with that 'Damn' feeling of how effortlessly his writing flowed. And how long it had been since I'd read such a dispatch from him. I was reminded of how my writing generating itself in isolation has skewed and twisted it in such a way. Perhaps this residency will provide me with an opportunity to re-center, to write alongside others from a distance, and to generate a different approach from that experience. I drift back to the summer of 2022 in India, when I was sending M a lot of virtualDJ stuff. Before leaving M explained to me that I can record straight to a USB off of the XDJ — my mind drifted to a workflow that involved making music with H's guitar and M's keyboard in a DAW, exporting those files as MP3s and then DJing with them and others to create some new tracks. I'd like to make some new Classic Selena soon.

I read more of Dublinesque and talked to my mom on the phone. The conversation reminded me of the one Riba has with his parents, where they ask what he did in Lyon and he can't tell them that he was in his hotel writing a theory of the novel, nor do they have any grounding for what his activities as a publisher entail, who any of the authors are nor a history of literature. I realize this is going to be the Joyce paragraph — Triest(e) emerges, as does the show at Le Bourgeois, (which I was explaining to S earlier is indicative of how seemingly willfully obscure and impenetrable the London artist-run space scene is in relation to NYC, as we talked through social scenes and belonging and event w/ flyers and how we spend our time in the city) which is at Molly Blooms in Dalston, a bar which S has walked past. None of the names on the show mean anything to him sans Bar Italia, and its funny that they show under that name. But the thing about my mom is she's asking what I'm up to, how things are going, checking on how much progress I've made towards getting certifications in Project Management, job applications for administrative jobs within the state bureaucracy, even telling me I should sign up for an online Master's not to finish or get a degree but because it'll help me get a job with the state, and she's telling me these things and I do what Riba doesn't, or at least doesn't yet, do in Dublinesque which is to attempt to explain things to my mom about the different things I'm working on and how I hope that they'll lead to more things. She doesn't seem convinced at the end of the call, but it's fine.

I made 3 paintings today on these Italian watercolor postcards I got at Noguchi. I had one of those beautiful learning moments, where an accident of putting too much red paint on the Soho Boys sticker that I placed on the drawing I had made yesterday lead me to using a wet bounty to dab it off, before realizing I could smear and stain the work in this way — I applied this method to two more watercolors after. I'd like to start work on a piece that I work on every day for the length of this residency. Perhaps I go to Blick after work tomorrow and purchase a small Canvas for my "Triest Residency Piece". This is a beautiful space because it's entirely full of possibility. I have a question in my mind of how concurrent project which are already at work will bleed into this and vice versa, but that seems fine. I grapple with the question of purpose, but it seems easy enough to keep things simple: record the residency. It's like TiVo'ing a football game so that you can re-watch it once it's over. I think of how funny and antiquated a verb that is and go to the TiVo wikipedia page — a funny moment: Janet Jackson's Super Bowl halftime show incident on February 1, 2004, set a record for being the most watched, recorded and replayed moment in TiVo history. The baring of one of Jackson's breasts at the end of her duet with Justin Timberlake, which caused a flood of outraged phone calls to CBS, was replayed a record number of times by TiVo users. A company representative stated, "The audience measurement guys have never seen anything like it. The audience reaction charts looked like an electrocardiogram."

I woke up late this morning. I didn't sleep well — this was my fault, and it would matter somewhat later.

Last night I went to bed on the couch. The bed was available for me but I wanted the couch and this was a poor choice. I wanted the couch because I haven't slept on a bed in at least a month. There were a couple of nights where S was in Connecticut when I was at his place. He had gone up for Easter. I slept in his bed and it was fine. I think tonight I'll sleep in the bed. But last night I wanted the couch.

I woke up late and I went to work. Most of the office works remote on Mondays so it was just me and a few others. I barely worked. Maybe an hour or two of the entire day. I finished Vila-Matas's Dublinesque and read about 10 pages of Peter Eisenman and Derrida's Chora L Works. I exchanged pleasantries with my co-workers. J, who went to RISD but doesn't know J2, recommended Log, an architectural theory journal to me when I told him about reading Chora L Works. I talked about an October essay about Piranesi I had read recently — it feels like it was February that I read it. I know that I've read so much since then. While leaving, I talked with J3, the bossman who runs the firm, about his weekend in Miami and he asked how my stuff outside of work was going — I described it as a lot of writing and a lot of reading and that it was mostly boring. Felt like a good answer — honest, but not getting into the weeds.

After work I went to go see India Song at Anthology. I had Indian food for lunch (Chili Chicken, Chana Masala, rice, and naan from Raj's Kitchen in FiDi) and hit Pak Punjab deli (chicken kebab with maggi ketchup and chana chaat) for dinner before the film. Punjabi Deli on Houston has all the hype but I think Pak Punjab is better — they've got a great chaat menu and they'll also fuck shit up for you if you know what to ask for (veg puff chaat, samosa chaat, etc.). India Song was beautiful — it was my first time watching it in a theater and in high quality. But there was the person in the row behind me who wouldn't shut up during the film. They were with three other girls and had an ambiguous gender — they'd constantly be whispering things like "purrrr" and "ate" to their friends and laughing at the film when it wasn't funny. I kept thinking "people think it's funny but I'm not laughing" — but no one else was laughing. The thing about laughter is you can tell someone not to talk during a film but you can't do anything about laughter. It came at the most inopportune moments, simply because a shot was long, or because the characters were in a dramatically slow fashion, and it dominated my experience of the film, except for a window of probably 10-15 minutes where I was nodding in and out of sleep. I like when that happens. When I come out of it the dream-state of the cinema is usually significantly heightened.

I thought of how India Song can be thought of as an ellipses of non-location. Much of the film you're looking into a mirror, viewing the staged action through non-location. I thought of the mirror in Duelle, thinking about how I won't see it in a theater while it plays here, wondering if and when I'll get that chance again. I wanted the mirror in India Song to shatter like the mirror in Duelle. Now my mind drifts to Arthur Jafa rewriting Taxi Driver and I've talked about rewriting Duras before, mainly to Z — the idea of rewriting it was in my head as I watched the dance. I wondered what it would be like if Graveyard by Chuckyy was playing instead.

In the theater I had so many thoughts. Thoughts about what I would write later. Thoughts that I was writing in my head, but there was no way to record them. I let them come and I watched them go. After the film I went to KGB. Bought a beer and a shot. Drank it. Walked down to Delancey-Essex and took the train back to the Residency. I read more of Guillaume Dustan's In My Room. He mainly just writes about having gay sex, going into substantial detail, and as much as certain passages about ways of performing anal sex with massive dildos causes a genuine feeling of disgust in me I continue to turn the digital pages. The translation is even and I know that it's autofiction because of how it's been contextualized, even though the guy who wrote the preface called it 'self writing', and the distance from him makes me think about someone reading my writing or M's writing from a distance — what it in turn becomes rendered as to them. They can read it in a way that I can't — but at the same time, I jump back to the titted person's laughter in the theater and how misanthropic it made me. I understood why the Londoners hide their exhibitions away behind veils of inaccessibility, as they're looking to create a circumstance with a good viewer. Vila-Matas wrote of talented readers. I was texting G about this and realized that as much as Schreibliga is a league of writers, what it actually provides is a system for a league of talented readers.

In the theater I thought about my sentences. I thought about how I would write this. I thought about Blue Eyes, Black Hair, how the sentences function in that book and its translation, and how I grafted them into a film about 3 years ago. Now I think of the passage of time. I think about how long these paragraphs have grown. I think of something J4 told me outside, on the banks of the river.

I woke up early and then I went back to bed. I slept on the couch again. When I woke up it was almost noon. I played a few games of chess on my phone before getting up.

India Song put me in a strange state — this sort of unreality has permeated everything. It's not just the film but a return to silence. Today there were only brief bits of conversation: ordering an egg and cheese at the deli, saying hi to the gallery girl at Spruth Magers, ordering a burger and a beer at JG Melon, and telling a man he left his Airbar on the train seat. And I went into a little Zabar's, the woman asked me if I wanted anything and I looked around, but I couldn't make a decision. I looked around a little longer, in that tiny store, while she took inventory. And then I walked out.

At Buchholz there were these photographs and books by Alix Cleo-Roubaud. One of the books published her writings posthumously. There was a section about her and Eustache with a photograph she took after his accident but before his suicide. She wrote: Photo of E. as a glorious corpse. The man who calmly feels he is going to die; very distant both from the world and from the white space of the paper that rises up like a shroud; a body withdrawn from the world, captured from behind; lovingly naked, sleeping and vulnerable, but also a corpse.

It's a suicidal photograph, a body that is, I suppose, mine, but glorious, dead. Finally dead but glorious. It's also quite a morbid photograph.

She'd continue to print photographs of him after his death: I am your memory. The words that you utter to angels at night, without remembering them, and which I will make note of. No greater loyalty. The pictures that you don't see. The words that you don't hear.

Your Amnesia. I will be your complete archive; your photograph library; your tapes; your books.

And one day, your fading into oblivion.

She would die in Paris a few years later, from a pulmonary embolism. Her husband, a writer, mathematician, and member of Oulipo, would publish her journals. I was filled with this sort of soft longing for death and oblivion the rest of the day, filled with a sort of pensive wretchedness. She wrote about how Eustache needed a bone graft and I think about that little bit of bone grafted into my mouth, how it's changed me, having a dead person's bone in my body. A week and a half ago I thought I was going to suffocate on the train, for rational and irrational reasons. The thing that steadied me was realizing I had felt that way before. The body and mind were fighting for life instinctively, as though I was drowning and needed to come up for air.

The quiet continued onto the train. Bullshit was happening on the train, as usual. A sort of deranged gay man, singing out loud, clearly not there all the way, which I instictively related to Dustan's writings about all the guys he's fucking and some of their mental states, drug use patterns, suicide attempts, and so on. On the train ride to Buchholz there was a girl. I think she was J's ex, whose birthday party I went to last year. I remember him calling her a stupid bitch and she laughed and said 'so true' or something along those lines. She got off at Bedford Ave., I assume she works at a restaurant or something like that. She had that type of outfit on, black pants, dark blouse. The train stopped right before Union Square and stayed there for a few minutes. It feels like things are falling apart slowly and quickly.

On the way back the train was packed. It was rush hour and at one of the stops a bunch of short latino men were trying to push their way into the train. A man yelled from inside

THIS AIN'T FUCKING VENEZUELA NIGGA

I made two works on paper - one at Buchholz and one in this room. The former was a sketch of a couple watching Moyra Davey's film, only once I started the woman got up and had moved to the part of the gallery with the photographs. The man she was with continued to watch the film. Once they left I took their place. For a while I was alone, and I thought about going to a gallery to sit and watch a film that loops for the entirety of the day. To sit in the dim light alone and in silence. I hadn't realized how much I missed silence, how comfortable I am within it. Tomorrow this silence will end.

I hear reggaeton blasting and tires skidding and look out the windows. There are two guys drifting through the intersection in those 3 wheelers. They go a little down the street, then turn around and do it again. They must feel so alive.

I didn't want to wake up, but I had to wake up, and then I went to work. Didn't do laundry like I needed to so I turned yesterday's pair inside out. Not ideal, but sometimes you gotta make do. As usual, idiom makes me want to drift off into etymology. At Broadway Junction there was a Jamaican man yelling about Babylon and the End Times, but it was striking how that was the first activity there in the last few times I've passed through that's been somewhat of a deviation from "regularity". A couple years ago you could buy turtles or fish there, there was so much activity that it felt crazy, overwhelming. I had a half-dinner with J — we both got beers, but he only got fries, I got a burger that came with fries — and I brought that up and he said

It seems like everyone had a long day today, and no one could figure out exactly what it was. I claimed it was the weather. When I woke up there was rain pounding down on the air conditioner (I slept on the couch once again, it's right next to the windows, and that wasn't my intention, but I wouldn't have heard it like that from the bedroom). While walking to the train I saw the three-wheeler that was blasting music and drifting last night parked on Wilson — the license plate read 1# Dad. At work I listened to the theme from India Song on repeat. I thought about opening up VirtualDJ to mess with it, but that felt like too much at the office. It's one thing to read PDF's, it's another matter to DJ. Maybe, maybe if I was running the Sonos I could use that as an excuse but I didn't have it today. If I was, I would've played Carlos D'Allesio's India Song Et Autres Musiques de Filmes.

The fragment was echoing in my mind on the way home. J was talking about how to orient himself and what he's doing when nothing matters. I was talking about some silly games and bullshit schemes. At the office I was reading an article in Harper's about how the film industry is at a moment in crisis. How television writing has become the only way to make money writing, how even that is falling apart. I was talking about Vila-Matas with S and he naturally took the conversation to Bolaño, who worked as a garbageman in Spain during the years when he wrote his novels. Before that he was a poet who never made money. Vila-Matas mentioned a French writer, Julien Gracq, a fair amount in Dublinesque. I downloaded an epub of "Reading Writing" the other night and then I converted it into a pdf. I read a few pages at the office today, along with a few pages of Chora L Works.

It's easy to fall into a stream-of-consciousness type writing. It's just a matter of connecting machines. In this case, my brain through my fingers, rapidly clicking the keys in such a way that the speed of my mind plays with the speed of my fingers, they're enacting a dancing of thinking. The keys receive this the words go onto the screen, the text becomes code, it goes up on the webpage. It's a simple enough mechanism. You can play with the variables — the mind and its state, the fingers and the device receiving them, the location of where the text is going, the machine of distribution and display. But generally this is the system at work.

The system so far has revealed a sort of operating logic, a pattern has emerged. Because each entry is a day, the inclination of mapping the day begins with a description of the wake. The wake as ending, the wake as beginning — the whole Joycean thing sure, but after enough repetition of the pattern and the recognition as such, the inclination then turns in such a way as to devise a way to play with this tendency. It could be something like:

M rang the bell and I greeted her and showed her the gallery. I wasn't sure where to go exactly. There's no gallery desk in the space so I retreated to the back and gave her about 10 minutes with the work before I came back out. She told me she was from Madrid but is living in Montreal now. She's about to finish her MFA. I mentioned that H, the artist, was from Melbourne and ran a project space there. She told me the friend who told her to check out the show was Australian. We talked about apartment galleries in different cities, but the part that sticks in my head the most is one that I repeated to L later in the afternoon. She was talking about how she wants to move to New York after graduating, she has a few friends here, and I asked about Madrid and she said that there isn't any funding for the arts so you have to work a job that isn't really related to it if you want to be here. A very funny thing to hear in a gallery that's someone's living room that isn't getting any money from the state.

I was talking about this to L on the way to Whiskey Tavern. Before that we were at the screening of the film A and him made. It's screening as part of Prismatic Ground Film Festival, one of the only film festivals I pay attention to. The work that the festival screens has a very specific angle of politicization. Before the films, the festival director addressed the genocide in a sort of 'things are fucked up, this makes me feel better' sort of way. That's a reduction of his speech sure, but the purpose of that sentence was to provide a concrete example of how the festival is politicized. Perhaps it could've been a paranthetical. The Lerner breakdown — the critique of the writing, as its being written. The thing is that I'm already doing that constantly — it's why my tenses are constantly fucked up and why I'm trying to pay attention to my sentences.

The first film had a really strong rhythm to its editing. Shots of birds in flight, masses of them, murders of crows, and then the dissection of a single bird, along with it being taxidermied. Which then segued into A & L's film, a single static shot of a field of lambs at night, lit up by a camera, as a dog barked off-and-eventually-on-camera. The programmer would later apologize for not giving enough time in between the films. It became a text about the body and flesh, how fragile they are. If you graft the genocide statement onto them, you can read it as these films are about the brutality that humans can do to animals, and humans are also animals. Both films were very open, there weren't definite statements being made, which leaves the viewer-critic with the freedom to graft.

A significant graft: a woman died a few blocks from the gallery tonight. There was a hit and run on Knickerbocker and Eldert. A blue mazda sped away after hitting a woman in her 70s and a woman in her 40s. The older one died. He ran off onto the Halsey train. I can't remember if it was the L or the J — I'm summarizing the news article. When I walked past there were cops and news teams. I was getting a burrito. I had to walk back in a different way. The fragility of bodies. How quickly life can change. How quickly it can end.

I caught the bus on the way to work for the first time. I only rode it for about two minutes before it took me to the J stop, but that saved me enough time that I could catch a train that I otherwise would've missed by walking. I got to the office and the boss asked me to buy some cookies from a Greek cafe across the street for a meeting. If the bus wasn't there at that point in time, I might've been late for that. The whole day would've changed.

Pretty standard day at work. Read a few pages of Gracq, a few pages of Eisenman+Derrida, and a lecture delivered by Vila-Matas on the future of the novel. I leaf through my screenshots for the right quotes and find something else — a Guardian review of The Illogic of Kassel with a quotation: "It seemed to me that art was still holding up perfectly well, and it was only the world ... that had crumbled". In the text about the future of the novel, Vila-Matas describes a type of writing that I've grown fond of penning, even if there is no pen and it has not been printed.

I thought this century would see the arrival of a kind of novel already quite happily occupying the borderlands: a novel that would have no problem mixing autobiography and essay, travel and diary accounts, and pure fiction-the reality that is brought to the text as such. I thought we'd be moving towards a literature in keeping with the spirit of the times, a compound literature, one in which the limits would not be clear and reality would be able to dance at the frontier with fiction, and the rhythm would blur this frontier.

He goes on to write about an interview with Bolaño, where Bolaño believed the 19th century novel of the plot had had its time, that people would still do it and carry on the tradition for a long time, but that sort of writing was not "the future". Then he writes about attention spans shortening, about readers disappearing, how writers must survive and how they have survived an extinction event of sorts. And then he talks about the catastrophe and where he truly sees "the future" occurring — in what voices that catastrophe:

That French hospital room led me to think on the refugees from the war in Syria who, having risked their lives, step foot on a Mediterranean island, standing, rising slowly up, also to feel they are people again. And thinking of them I heard the echo of the voices that speak to us in Svetlana Alexievitch Chernobyl document. The book isn’t so much about the catastrophe itself as the world after this catastrophe. It talks about the way in which people adapt to the new reality. The reality that has already come to pass, the reality that, though it is already here, amongst us, whispers the tragic chorus, hasn’t yet been fully discerned. And now you will forgive me, but the voices of Chernobyl, the great chorus, speak the future.

I went back to work and created a few different demos of email automation via Airtable. Then I went to the grocery store to get a few things for Friday office happy hour. Proscuitto, blackberries, fancy crackers, hummus, a fig spread. The boss has a bunch of wine in the fridge and a couple of bottles were brought out. I took a picture of one once it was empty. A Verdicchio del Castelli di Jesi "Loretello", Politi - 2022. It sells at Astor Wines for about 20 dollars. It was good, almost slightly bubbly. I talked with my coworker J for a while and then cleaned up and walked to the train with him. Chatted shit outside the station for a while as he finished his cigarette and then dapped him up and starting walking uptown.

I was still walking uptown within downtown. It was only 7 and L was performing at a gallery at 8. I decided to swing by The River in the hopes that E was working there, but instead the bartender C outside smoking a cigarette. We chatted shit about nothing for a few minutes and then he asked me if I wanted to get a drink. I needed to eat something before the show so I figured I'd pay 8 dollars for a glizzy. Ordered a Guinness too, which C gave me for free. I saw P walk in while I was in line for the bathroom, and then said what's up to her and her friend. Eventually I got tired of waiting for the hot dog so I left. Went to L's show where there were a lot of people. Hung with T, A, S, L2, met T's childhood friend C2, and otherwise chatted shit. Went for a late Chinatown dinner after with a big group. It was fine. I came back home and I felt like a catastrophe and collapsed onto the couch. I had gone through the motions once again.

I got in the uber home at 5am. It was an unnecessary uber but I didn't want to walk 15 minutes in the cold. The man pulls me up and I hop in his van and I hear his patois as he tells me "nice pants" and I ask where he's from, knowing the answer. He says Jamaica and I ask him Gyalchester. He laughs and asks what I know bout Gyalchester. We chop it about Vybz Kartel, Skillabeng and Byron Messia and he says that he never would've expected it with my beard and that I must be the first Indian to listen to dancehall. But then he tells me his baby mother is half Indian and half coolie. Maybe she doesn't listen to dancehall. Or he doesn't consider her an Indian in the way that I'm Indian, to him. He puts me onto Skeng, rapping it to me, before the car pulls up to Triest and its time for me to walk across the street. I pick up the amazon package containing Jacques the Fatalist that T sent me as I head in.

I got out of bed around 11 in the morning. I'd like to shift my sleep schedule to be consistently earlier to both enjoy and study the morning light that the gallery gets. Showered and got ready before heading to MOMA for the first four episodes of Out 1. I grabbed a coconut water and a protein cookie from the deli on the way there. I still have the Chinese leftovers from last night. If I wake up earlier enough tomorrow I'll eat them for breakfast. I got there in time for the film — C & S were late so we all sat in different parts of the theater. I watched the latecomers arrive and I was watching the theater as much as I was watching the film. I saw M arrive and I noticed that S was sitting in the row behind C but neither seemed to be aware of that. Afterwards, I went to the bathroom and S was right behind me. I took a piss and then went back into the theater and was talking with C and M as well as T and L. S didn't come back and I wondered where he'd gone. C said he probably went upstairs for a smoke. After the second episode ended and he still wasn't there, I went upstairs where there was cell service to figure out what happened. He said he waited for me outside the bathroom for two minutes and then left, thinking the film was over. During the third episode I had a crazy coughing fit and had to go to the bathroom. When I came back, I stood and sat at the back of the theater, watching the audience. I thought about Vila-Matas's notion of good readers and felt like I was witnessing something truly beautiful. I thought of Kiarostami's Shirin and the images of the audience's faces, of tears and of laughter.

After the film I walked with the group back to the train and then had my own communication lapse and didn't get on the right train. An abrupt goodbye, but I'll see them for Part 2. I took the train to Delancey Essex and then walked to the bar where E and F were having their birthday party. Read The Illogic of Kassel to kill some time after getting a fried chicken sandwich and a beer at the bar while they charged my phone. Then C2 and K pulled up, and then more and more people filled in. I met H and talked with her about Duras and going to the movies alone. I brought up a time that I went to try to see Akerman's The Captive by myself and I ran into L2 and his now-ex G while walking into the theater and how L2 kindly and instinctively moved his stuff so I could sit down next to them and then it created a situation where I was both third wheeling and having my solitude disturbed by their relationship in a film about relationships. After the film I talked about having read Proust — I was reminded of this when T brought up that I was the only one of the group after the film who had seen Out 1 before.

I have more conversations. I'm not too drunk as I'm sipping my Hennessey somewhat responsibly and slowly. I talk with L for a while about writing and publishing and how beautiful Ines de Medeiros is and I talk with F about art and institutions, galleries and worlds, and I talk and I write and others talk and write. We go from Rooftop 93 to Shinsen and then eventually E and F and I uber back to E's and hang out on her fire escape and talk for a while longer. It was a good night. I felt in pocket. I wish I could stay awake for the sunrise but I need to get enough sleep for the second half of Out 1 tomorrow. I listen to the theme from India Song again and mull over going to see it again this week.

In the same way that Joyce is the man in the Macintosh that Bloom sees at Paddy Dignam's funeral, perhaps we can consider that Rivette is Pierre, the figure who is sending messages to JPL's character in Out 1. In the theater I wondered if a man observing JPL harass restaurant patrons with a harmonica could be this elusive Pierre. This sort of insertion, as Vila-Matas points out has significant cosmological repercussions on the text should it be true. It meant that Bloom was looking at his creator. It means that the conspirators of Out 1 were calling their creator on the phone, questioning why he was doing such things. It meant he was the one arranging for messages to be sent to Colin, that he lead him into this magicized fantasy-world. And it means that they're talking about him, critiquing his charm and his power in scenes while he isn't present, but that he's writing these questions and critiques. He's the game-player and the puppet-master. In an interview he uses the phrase "decentralized motors" and goes on the point out their invisibiltiy as well as his.

It becomes much easier at that point: it doesn't matter if Pierre was on screen watching JPL because Rivette was behind the camera watching JPL.

There were so many mirrors, so much staging through mirrors. Gazing upon un-reality via un-reality.

The days have been long and drag into one another. I wonder when I will rest but I cannot rest now. T offered me a proposition in the vein of Mr. Beast, one that dictates that I must finish Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist if I want to get Venmo'd 50 dollars. Not only must I finish it but I must finish it before tomorrow ends. The clock ticks and ticks at tonight which will bleed into tomorrow. And then the sense of hours minutes seconds will strain upon my being, as I face a deadline with true repercussions.

Yet Jacques would have me know that it is already fated as to whether or not I finish the book. Just as it was fated for me to lose my teeth and it was fated for me to get dengue fever and it was fated for me to have pain and pleasure and to have loved and lost. In the room that has since vanished I dreamt a fantasy of romance that was doomed to be foreclosed. Yet there is a dream that is real and there is a fate that is cast and there are dice that cannot be rolled but can only be revealed.

Of course things happened tonight, but things of minimal importance, and to inscribe them and probe them might instill a certain level of importance which they do not deserve. In the middle of the rumor I thought about how unfortunate this deal of a signature is, how I long for invisibility, how I felt a certain happiness that E didn't recognize me, didn't know who I was, and I thought about how I read her online diary and how she set it to private soon after, she probably saw all the clicks. She confessed to being very directly careerist on there, and it was clear that I didn't figure into her careerist calculus as she navigated the busy room so we parted ways after I talked to her and her friend and A. The music had started. The dynamics had shifted. There was blue light. I thought about what it would be like to snort drugs in the bathroom. Later people would tell me I looked tired. And I was. I was exhausted. I consider rest, I consider dying. I consider an ending.

This consideration, of course, is an impossibility. There is a difference between dictating and dictating.

I was at the bar. M's birthday was happening behind me but I realized that these were all people I had either never met or hadn't seen in a long time. I didn't really want to do (re)introductions so I waited at the bar, first for M to arrive, and then for M to be next to me before I gave him his birthday well wishes. Earlier the woman next to me was talking to T, the bartender, describing a new place she was working at, how a mafia guy came in and cornered her alone in the bathroom when it was dark, he was tugging at her hair, and later asking her inappropriate questions. She said she was traumatized. Concurrently, I was reading a conversation between the hostess and Jacques. I projected this conversation onto the bar, onto the room. Vila-Matas writes about this, this need for life to be literature.

As I was walking to the bar I was reading Jacques the Fatalist, so as to get through as many pages as possible while the clock ticked away. I had texted T2 with a proposition that he accepted — that I get a single day extension to finish Jacques the Fatalist, but that upon finishing it I must start either Don Quixote or 2666 and that I have a week to finish either of those works, or I will need to Venmo him 25 dollars. If I successfully complete the above, we will stick to the 50 dollars promised. But like any good wager, it isn't about the money. It's about the game.

As I was walking to the bar I felt like Colin in Out 1, tracking down a series of clues nestled into this book that would guide me through the mystery of life. Earlier I was at the laundromaut and I brought a blank postcard with me. I drew on it with a thin ballpoint pen and a thicker felt pen, and there wasn't a true linguistic meaning behind what I was attempting to convey, but it found its way out through a series of abstracted diagrams. It felt unfinished, I flipped it over to the backside, and I thought about what S had said about the C.S. webpage reminding him of On Kawara's Date Paintings with information on the back — I figured a good joke would be to write today's date, first in arabic numerals, and below that in roman numerals. I added serifs to the roman numerals, thinking about when I was with M2 and S2 right before he left on tour. At the bar I realized that this would be a good gift for M, as it had today's date on it. He was holding it with the wrong orientation, asking if the roman numerals were a code, before I asked for it back, telling him that I would write a code for him, thinking of Colin and Out 1. Later I would flip through the Diderot and find a quote I had underlined and write it onto the margins of the back, along with the page number it was located on.

Perhaps now you're wondering why I would do such a thing — to be honest, I find these sorts of interjections the most tedious part of Jacques the Fatalist. Revolutionary for its time, yes I'm sure, but now, and in translation especially, it comes off as exceptionally grating as yes I understand that the narrator is unreliable, that the reality of page might not be the reality of the story so to speak, and that the reality is held in the whims of the person writing. But now it's a question of visibility: the words are already inscribed, and implicit in that is a decision to make things in such a way. Is it wholly necessary to do this dance on the page with one's words for the sake of the reader, to make them hyper-aware of the nature of the text that they're reading, that it's a constructed document with dubious veracity?

Generally speaking, the conversation was pretty banal. It centered around the details of the characters' lives, their day to days, what was new, what was old, books they'd read, films they'd seen, work they'd done, work that had to be done. He questioned why he had left, as he frequently did.

The catastrophe reemerged. Once again he thought about death, how far it was, how close it was, how it would come when it pleased and that there was nothing he could do about that. He resigned himself to fate, as he was wont to do, though with the delusion that fate still had something in store for him, an instinctual feelings that stemmed from visions he had had as a child and vibrating pulsations that emanated from his body during periods of long and silent meditation. He felt the pressure of the world, like he was Atlas, and the thought of the maps he had read and the maps he had written, knowing that in his brief evenings sitting and staring into his empty teacup at the leaves of fate that he was destined to author a series of cartographic documents. A map to the catastrophe? He couldn't say — all he knew is that he would write maps. To where? That was uncertain too — there was Dante, but that was when the sky had meant something, when the Heavens contained Heaven, when you could wish upon a star.

The romanticism returns — has it always been this way? I notice that I'm once again creeping closer and closer towards death. I was too honest, perhaps I'm too honest now. What did Future say? I was gon lie to you but I had to tell the truth... I'm just being honest If I had drugs I'd do them, I'm just being honest. Part of me wants to ask "who am I to know the truth?" only I know the truth better than almost anyone, because I am truth. A key falls onto the page, and it renders reality. I remember: writing of the holiest purpose. I remember my delusions — they still come and they still go.

At the bar I was speaking to Colin. I could call him C2 but he name was Colin, yet he was not the right Colin. C3 had texted me earlier, a picture of the theater from this weekend, with me in it, my image, my beard, my sweater, my cheerful face, saying "I wanna be back here". And that's the unfortunate thing about a thing like Out 1, is that the projection ends, and we must return back to out lives, often banal and without some great conspiracy that we're wrapped inside of, only life, people, places, work, non-work, drinks, non-drinks, drugs, non-drugs, love, and non-love, but few secrets, few great games to be played, and that those who seek these things out, secrets and games, are in search of them because of some lack. The previous night I ran into L and I told him that I was on my third Vila-Matas since he'd given me the rec. He was glad, he called him a writer's writer, which makes me a writer in a certain sense. That same night, when I was with A and E and R, R was asking us about writing, because we were all writers except for her, although I write in a very different sense than A and E do, different in the sense that only a few of my words are deemed fit for publication by the venerable outlets and publications of our time — or is it this time, or is it my time? Whose time is it? Where do the hands of the clock fall, where is my past, when was my present, how is my future, and what does delineation mean?

A note on reading: To read with this sort of hastened pace that I employ through Jacques the Fatalist is a different sort of pace than how I read a pdf, or how I've blown through Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob or leisurely flipped through the paperback of Balzac's History of the Thirteen that normally accompanies me on the train — though recently I've been leaving it in my bag, opting for books on my phone, which I highlight and draw upon with the annotation tools that the Books app offers. This rushed reading constitutes a reading yes, but it is a different sort of reading than the ideal pace, one in which my will dictates speed, or perhaps this sense of will has been preordained, and I move through the text at a rate in relation to all of the books I have previously read. Vila-Matas is a writer's writer — it's the hyper-referentiality of it that especially makes it so. A normal reader wouldn't care about Pessoa or Valery or Joyce or Rimbaud or Auster or any of the other litany of authors who pops into the pages of his work and is in turn fictionalized, dramatized, stretched from their existence and their being and instrumentalized. This word, instrumentalized, came into the fold with the text N and Z and I published, though not with the published version but with a version that existed prior, with the names of a certain artistic milieu in Los Angeles appearing rather than the names of characters from various Westerns. In any case, is to write and to publish, whether words or images and documentation of artistic work not a license for one to take it upon themselves to instrumentalize the other? And this thing of the Other. More and more I feel like the Other, I feel out of place, perhaps not displaced for that would mean that there was once a place where I felt in place, and perhaps there was such a place, in a place like France or Morocco or Bulgaria or Turkey, where I was in place as an out of place person and there was no reason to get in place. I could occupy the outside in peace. All this to be saying perhaps I should simply stay inside, perhaps I should read at a certain pace, and perhaps I should live at a certain pace.

The truth bleeds out and Jacques's story continues. Not the truth of Jacques, nor the truth of the narrator, but the truth of the page. Where was I? At the bar, with Jacques and his master and all of the letters and Colin. The catastrophe was there too, I felt it sink into my veins. I wished there was a different outlet, like the swimming pool in Silver Lake. It all feels like I've been here before. And I have. Where was I? A place I'd been before — thus there was no need to be there, it was already in my map. But was this place written in relation to other places? Could a place be defined in it of itself, without its relation to other places, and must every place that is in relation be mapped out in order for the map to constitute a map? I longed for and I long for an archipaelago, so I can swim between the islands. I don't have much longer, only forever, and still, I long. And still, I long, still I long, I long still I long still I long still

The day before yesterday they re-plastered the Great Mosque of Djenne.
I walked and I walked but I couldn't take enough steps to reach my destination.
The day before yesterday they re-plastered the Great Mosque of Djenne.

I sent T a screenshot from Vila-Matas's Dublinesque that I had previously sent to G. Then I realized that I had never sent T his website. So I sent it to him, along with a Vila-Matas quote from an interview he did with Tin House, in which there's a certain Joycean flair to how he describes his site — that it would take over 100 years to read it in its entirety. But a different part of the quote caught my eye — "There's also an area that's open to collaboration with other writers, La vida de los otros.". I wonder if this text could take its place in such a section, as I collaborate with Enrique, who seems so familiar despite reading him through translators, from a distance. And I browse this part of the site. I find a piece called "Indochina Song" — it's a translation of a piece Vila-Matas wrote about his relation to Duras, who at one point was his landlord. It's a sign that I've been looking for, that I should go back to Anthology to watch India Song once again.

This was in the office. Early in the day I had my laptop open to this tab, with the text editor and the code interface up, as S, my coworker walked by. She was curious and asked what it was and I dismissed it as a coding project. Better to maintain as best a distance as possible, especially given that I talk about not doing work here. Later S2 told me about the infamous A, who worked my job in 2022 and was let go for not doing anything. "Nobody could figure out what she did, so J was never in a rush to replace her". Despite not putting much effort into this job, I seem to be doing well in the eyes of my colleagues. What's funny is that I met A once at The River, I know here milieu to a certain extent, though she wouldn't recall me or know mine. I had a similar moment of having too much recollection later in the day as well. While walking to Anthology from Mast Books (where I purchased 2666 as they didn't have Don Quixote), I ran into C, who I hadn't seen in a long time. That time I had seen him he mentioned that his girlfriend had gotten a job at Greene Naftali and had left her job at the Federal Reserve for it — he made a bad joke about how they were basically the same thing. I wrote about that in a different place somewhere else. Maybe that's why I remember it so well. But I met her, she said she remembered that C had spoken about me and she asked what I was doing in the city and then I asked what she did in the city knowing the answer. She said she worked at an art gallery.

The theater replayed a situation of sorts — I ran into T2 and L. We were last all together on Sunday for the second part of Out 1. We talked outside of the theater for a bit. I explained Vila-Matas and how he lead me to return to this screening, but also how he fabricated histories in a similar manner to Duras. T2 talked about Ceddo, a film that I would like to watch soon. Her way of explaining it was very jumbled and haphazard, it didn't make too much sense asides from a significant amount of moving parts being present, which in its own way was enticing. She would later explain that she wasn't an encyclopedia, or rather that was my interpretation of her explanation.

There doesn't seem to be a grand epiphany tonight. No great spouting of words. T2 and I talked about Ulysses and school and, briefly, our pasts as we went downtown after the film. L had walked up to catch the L train at 14th street. We split as she went towards Chinatown and I went towards Delancey-Essex. I came back to Triest. I drank some orange juice and Hennessey (separately), unpacked my bag with the tile samples and discarded prints I plan to use as material for work this weekend, and then sat in the gallery, where I finished Jacques the Fatalist. A simple ending. He was fated to go to sleep.

He went to sleep.

But before he went to sleep he resolved to change his manner of operation. It'd be something like Carrere's The Moustache. Only he would be the one pretending. He wouldn't lie, but he would ellide. And after he went to sleep he thought about what Vila-Matas had written about Duras, about her piercing Berber scream in protest of Ayatollah Khomeini living in her village, and of his quotation of her:

Around us, everything is writing; that’s what we must finally perceive. Everything is writing. The fly, the fly writes. [...] The writing of a fly could fill an entire page. And it would be writing. From the moment it could be writing, it already is.

The day ended and I felt completely drained. As I was laying on the couch S texted me asking if I knew M — I did and she's good friends with R, who S has gone on a couple of hinge dates with, and R knew who I was because she went to the show I did with M2 last year. It's a strange thing, being known to people you've never met or have only peripherally met. I thought back to Monday and how I didn't recognize V at first and how E didn't recognize me, all the webs of social relations and knowing and not-knowing so many people. It made me tired.

In my dream a volcano erupted. I tried to run but it was impossible.

I went out last night. On the train I'll read I'm Going Out Tonight. Did I dream last night?

Everyone was talking at once.

I heard everything.

Maybe tonight will be quiet.

L'Amour Fou was playing and I thought why can't there be more days? The film was structured through them — yet I couldn't believe them. The days were constructed. Some of the time was all of the time and some of the time was an instant. I keep thinking to myself that I don't have very long left. In response, I tell myself that I have all of the time in the world — an old habit, conflating nothing and everything, infinity and one over infinity, the ever-expanding and the ever-shrinking. Today it feels as though there is a fire in my veins that is burning out.

I decide to write tomorrow.

In the process of questioning days, I lost my sense of them. Everything blurred together. The most overwhelming feeling I've been trying to shake is that this world was not made for me. I was walking past a bar in the neighborhood I'll move to in another week and made eye contact with a man, probably about my age, wearing a "pro-guns, pro-MAGA, pro-Trump" shirt with eagles on it. He was with a group of 5 other guys, all large, and in the middle of imitating someone trying to get a green card. When we made eye contact he stopped talking and put his hands around his neck and starting making choking sounds. The other guys all turned around and started laughing. I thought about running up on them and getting jumped but I kept walking and they kept yelling things as I walked. I met S outside the gallery and didn't want to get into it with her — I think she could sense I was off, but she didn't feel like the right person to get into it with.

I feel like I'm getting to the end of my limit with these things. The gallerists at the place where L had his performance immediately brought up Gandhi after L2 introduced me to them — my mind jumps back to L2 asking how to pronounce my name properly before jumping forward to a conversation last month with N and M where the former was talking about the case of an Anna being upset at it being pronounced Anna. The girl S2 went on a couple of dates knew me, but didn't realize it initially because he pronounces my name properly and my mutual friend with her doesn't. I corrected the new interns at work yesterday on how to say it, but I also thought about all the Chinese people in the office and how nobody is probably saying their name properly. J came to pick up some work yesterday from the gallery and called me Paul when he texted me — in a sense, there's a certain resolution in that that's fine to me. All this to say that properly belonging here feels impossible — a certain depression related to that has crept in. I've been drinking but I haven't bought drugs. I'm trying to shift this energy into my work. Soon I'll have my own room, and I wonder whether the possibility of having a world in there exists.

I decide I need to get serious about going to the gym. I'd like to be able to put up a decent fight. It'll take some time.

The words only kept getting further away from me — there was the realization that this wasn't the right machine for what was needed, but there was also that conversation with T on the street, about I's and eyes and film and what we do and don't write about, what we do and don't share. That idea of making work for the 15 people closest to you, but also writing that is for strangers. M came back today. We talked about the breaks in our respective writings, walked to buy some weed, and then I went on my way. Went to the theater and saw Belle Toujours and thought more about the written and unwritten. All that was and wasn't inscribed. The residency was over. There remains an envelope to be mailed. The world will keep spinning — it was nice to dance for this little while.

It ended and I wrestled with the question, with the possibility of writing the unwritten. What would such a thing entail — there were events yes, but everything was written in the way the Duras's fly was writing. This morning there was a fly. I let it land on me. I let it fly away. I watched it and then I lost focus. I still felt a little sick, but it wasn't as bad as the previous days — another question, of the relation between the body and writing, of health and control. There is this near constant slight burning in my teeth that I ignore. If you feel too much pain the nerves stop responding. It's the body's natural response to the over-stimulation.

I think back to the initial task I set out — a simple one, a collection of nothings and everythings: to record the residency. Once again, I find myself in etymology: record (v.) c. 1200, recorden, "to repeat, reiterate, recite; rehearse, get by heart" (senses now obsolete), from Old French recorder "tell, relate, repeat, recite, report, make known" (12c.) and directly from Latin recordari "remember, call to mind, think over, be mindful of," from re-, here probably with a sense of "restore" (see re-), + cor (genitive cordis) "heart" (the metaphoric seat of memory, as in learn by heart)... The meaning "set down in writing, preserve the memory of by written or other characters, write down for the purpose of preserving evidence of" is by mid-14c. The sense of "put sound (later pictures, etc.) on disks, cylinders, tape, etc." is from 1892.

So this idea of recording comes not from the inscription of memory upon a prosthetic, but from the heart, from the inscription upon the heart. Of course another problem emerged — the boundaries of the residency. The first day it started to fray was the one where I had so much outside the residency. I gave a key to S and recieved a key from C and K — in the process, I had hours of conversation, much of it about writing, much of it about this, as unformed as it was, which threatened to kill it with recursion had I attempted to inscribe it into text. At least this is what I had feared. Another variable in the mechanism — a looming figure of unpredictability of where the text could go, where the writing could go, and I stopped inscribing in order to allow myself to write. But this threat of inscription still weighed on me. At the end, I thought about what I could have written, what must remain unwritten, and my tendency to locate in this non-, this space of the non- that is infinite for me, where I can write the everythings and nothings.

Upon giving one key and receiving another, the residency frayed further. I wasn't residing anymore, I had returned to a nomadic state, bouncing from location to location, fraying time with place with substance. I finished a book and another bottle of Hennessey, but the second one, the one that extended the wager loomed large as something that could not be completed given the constraints of this movement. The constraints of movement — the realization that movement contains constraints. More keys were returned — doors were opened and closed. And the catastrophe loomed.

No matter how many centuries of oblivion pile up over their existences, their ignorance will have existed just as it is at that moment, on that date, in that cold light. They realize this and are delighted.

Also, that in a thousand years' time this day will have existed for a thousand years to the day. And the ignorance of the whole world about what they've said today will have a date too. Without sords, without ink to write it down or a book to read it in, it will have a date, a place in time. And they're delighted about that too.

They went onto the beach one last time, then couldn't think what to do till it was time for him to go.