Excerpt from City of Glass by Paul Auster

For now, the only thing that seemed to matter was going home. He would return to his
apartment, take off his clothes, and sit in a hot bath. Then he would look through the new
magazines, play a few records, do a little housecleaning. Then, perhaps, he would begin to think
about it. He walked back to 107th Street. The keys to his house were still in his pocket, and as he
unlocked his front door and walked up the three flights to his apartment, he felt almost happy. But
then he stepped into the apartment, and that was the end of that. Everything had changed. It seemed
like another place altogether, and Quinn thought he must have entered the wrong apartment by
mistake. He backed into the hall and checked the number on the door. No, he had not been wrong. It
was his apartment; it was his key that had opened the door. He walked back inside and took stock of
the situation. The furniture had been rearranged. Where there had once been a table there was now a
chair. Where there had once been a sofa there was now a table. There were new pictures on the
walls, a new rug was on the floor. And his desk? He looked for it but could not find it. He studied
the furniture more carefully and saw that it was not his. What had been there the last time he was in
the apartment had been removed. His desk was gone, his books were gone, the child drawings of his
dead son were gone. He went from the living room to the bedroom. His bed was gone, his bureau
was gone. He opened the top drawer of the bureau that was there. Women’s underthings lay tangled
in random clumps: panties, bras, slips. The next drawer held women’s sweaters. Quinn went no
further than that. On a table near the bed there was a framed photograph of a blond, beefy-faced
young man. Another photo-graph showed the same young man smiling, standing in the snow with
his arm around an insipid-looking girl. She, too, was smiling. Behind them there was a ski slope, a
man with two skis on his shoulder, and the blue winter sky. Quinn went back to the living room and
sat down in a chair. He saw a half-smoked cigarette with lipstick on it in an ashtray. He lit it up and
smoked it. Then he went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and found some orange juice and
a loaf of bread. He drank the juice, ate three slices of bread, and then returned to the living room,
where he sat down in the chair again. Fifteen minutes later he heard footsteps coming up the stairs,
a jangling of keys outside the door, and then the girl from the photograph entered the apartment.

Excerpt from A Room without Walls: Experimental Music and Queer Space by Jules Gimbrone

There is a room without walls. This room queers all that enters. When we are in this room we feel
welcomed and visible; clear in form but not predetermined in function. We desire this room. We
want to lay on its floor. Together we press arm to arm, the delicate skin on the back of our fingers
lightly touching the bodies to our left and to our right. When we hear, it is a sound emanating from
our own chest. It is the sound of being called to and calling out. When we listen we are both
speaking and being spoken to. The room listens. The room adapts to hold contour, to hold curves
and lines, to hold what we forget to acknowledge, the jagged excess or sagging mildewing floors.
It holds all of it, especially the junk. It likes it when junk piles up, spills upon each other, creates
sticky seams between forms; large, loud, mutated chunks start to become undefinable. This junk
changes the listenings. This room is nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. Sometimes it is
carried within a body, or between two bodies or more. Sometimes it appears momentarily and
then is gone. Sometimes we think we are making this room, but then thoughts form cement.
Cement forms bricks. Bricks form walls, and suddenly we are separated from ourselves and from
this room. We rebuild this room, dismantle it, and take it with us. It is a life’s work. The room is
hidden and only found by listening.