“Office at night”: A ficción by Dean Kyte.  The tracks below are best heard through earphones.

Thanks to our friends at Implant Media, who punched out the platters for The Spleen of Melbourne: Prose Poetry & Fiction (2021), I am pleased to announce the release of “Office at night”, a new CD single featuring the most popular track off the album—as voted by the attentive ears of my listeners on Bandcamp.

I admit it’s a bit unorthodox to release the single after you put out the album, but you know the Aquarian contrariety of your Melbourne Flâneur by now, chers lecteurs: Whatever the masses are doing, I’ve got to do the opposite.

But, more seriously, I could not have predicted beforehand that, of all the tracks on The Spleen of Melbourne CD, “Office at night” was going to be the one that would intrigue listeners on Bandcamp the most.

On the spectrum between ‘prose poetry’ and ‘fiction’, “Office at night” represents the most extreme pole of the latter on the album.

As an experimental preview for the forthcoming Melbourne Flâneur podcast, written in the Jamesian/Robbe-Grilletian style I call the ‘nouvelle démeublée noire’, I regard it as by far the most merciless application of the style featured on the CD, so I’m very surprised indeed to discover that this track, freezingly cold in its literary voice and brutally ‘objective’ in its treatment of the main character, the anonymous bald, stocky man in the window, should have proved to be so popular with listeners.

In light of its popularity over the last couple of years, I thought that “Office at night” deserved to be released as a single in its own right.

And remembering my misspent teenagerdom as a collector of CDs, I decided to ‘go a bit nineties’ and press it out as a CD single. (I know everyone reading this is old enough to remember what those are.)

The gang at Implant Media did a great job once again on helping me to realize my vision for the artifact.

Although I couldn’t achieve my initial nineties vision of presenting the CD single in one of those slim plastic J-card jewel cases you’ll remember, I think the glossy card-sleeve is actually a great compromise—one which better complements The Spleen of Melbourne CD, but which also, from a graphic design perspective, better complements the nineties vision I had for this product as a lightweight, portable, low-cost introduction to the fictional side of my literary œuvre on contemporary Melbourne life.

(When I had to abandon the plastic J-card format and go back to the graphic design drawing-board, the card-sleeve slipcase for Jewel’s “You Were Meant for Me” single seemed to stand out in my memory as a simple yet elegant design inspiration.)

Slimmer than a book, and arguably more interactive than one, quickly consumable yet eminently collectable, I think the card-sleeve format has a certain funky, retro, analogue/digital cachet, as the CD singles of the nineties did. And the “Office at night” single is further enhanced by a four-page glossy sleeve booklet—an added luxury no single I ever bought in the nineties sprang to.

The nineties CD single was a subcultural artifact you could palm discreetly to a mate as a ‘gateway drug’ to a new musical experience, or press, as a volunteer evangelist for an underground band, on a new adherent you were sure ought to be ‘in the know’ of the Fitzroy/Fortitude Valley/Kings Cross scene.

And it’s in that spirit of underground, networkcentric distributivity that the “Office at night” CD single was conceived.

But the CD single was also an analogue/digital artifact that emerged as a transitional media technology during that golden decade which had one foot in the near-past of the vinyl record and one in the near-future of the infinite iPod. It’s an analogue object which records digital music—quite a steampunk little dingus when you think about it.

And with its blend of analogue tangibility and digital abstraction, the CD single is a neat conceptual fit for the bespoke, artisanal methodology which underlies the brand promise of all the books, eBooks, and audiobooks I publish under my own imprint through my Artisanal Desktop Publishing process.

As with The Spleen of Melbourne CD, all the photographs illustrating the “Office at night” single, including the one above which inspired the A-side, are examples of my analogue street photography of Melbourne, shot on Kodak film. In fact, the physical CD itself is designed to form a close-up iris shot, as if you’re sighting through the lens of a camera, of the bald, stocky man on the first floor of Block Court.

So you can see how the analogue/digital interface works in the graphic design of the artifact: The analogue photo I took of the bald man is the ‘essential image’ that inspired me to write the story—and it’s that story you’re listening to in the abstract, conceptual, three-dimensional space of the sound world on the CD.

And yet the actual artifact of the CD, its ‘object quality’ as a flat, circular, very nearly two-dimensional design space, replicates as a tangible analogy the hidden perspective revealed at the end of the short story—the ‘plot twist’ which is the key to the enigmatic mystery, the ‘game of perspectives’ that listeners on Bandcamp have found so intriguing about “Office at night”.

Having come of age in the nineties, and working, as a writer, in one of the most analogue artistic media it’s possible to practise, I’m a hawkish chauvinist for analogue culture. And yet, straddling that millennial divide, I actually think there needs to be a practical reconciliation between analogue and digital media, that the digital needs to be ‘incarnated’, ‘embodied’ in some kind of tangible physical form for these abstract bits of data to become ‘real’, as cultural products, to us as human beings.

And in many ways, as a border-dwelling millennial literary artist who comes down hard on the side of analogue, but who has been forced by his semi-nativity to immigrate into—and adapt to—a digital world he regards with scepticism and suspicion, I see myself as a kind of bridgehead to that reconciliation, a new cultural order of life, an incarnated ‘analogue digitality’.

Perhaps more than any other writer working in Australia today, I’m quite sure that I define the term ‘avant-garde’: As a flâneurial writer, an undercover résistant to technological, capitalistic (post)modernity whose literary practice is directly inspired by his idle ambulations around the cities and towns of this country, I’m working at the edge of something that is mysterious even to me.

The two main ficciones on the single, “Office at night” and “The Trade”, deal with this numinous mystery in hard, pragmatic terms.

They’re examples of what I call ‘literary crime fiction’—literary fiction, – fiction, that is, that deals with human beings, with their psychological behaviour and interactions, – from which the melodramatic tropes of generic crime fiction have been largely erased, but which leave their vestigial traces as a ‘felt mood of mystery’, an ambiguous ambiance of vague yet realistic intrigue.

The inferior novelist tends to be preoccupied with plot; to the superior novelist the convolutions of the human personality, under the stress of artfully selected experience, are the chief fascination. Without character it was once accepted that there could be no fiction. In the period since World War II, the creators of what has come to be called the French nouveau roman (i.e., new novel) have deliberately demoted the human element, claiming the right of objects and processes to the writer’s and reader’s prior attention. Thus, in books termed chosiste (literally “thing-ist”), they make the furniture of a room more important than its human incumbents. This may be seen as a transitory protest against the long predominance of character in the novel, but, even on the popular level, there have been indications that readers can be held by things as much as by characters…. The popularity of much undistinguished but popular fiction has nothing to do with its wooden characters; it is machines, procedures, organizations that draw the reader. The success of Ian Fleming’s British spy stories in the 1960s had much to do with their hero, James Bond’s[,] car, gun, and preferred way of mixing a martini.

—Anthony Burgess, “Character”, in “novel”, Encyclopædia Britannica

As I said in my recent post on Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes, I also call this style, written under the influence of the French nouveau roman, the ‘nouvelle démeublée noire’—the ‘unfurnished dark short story’.

As an offshoot of The Spleen of Melbourne project, the short stories on the “Office at night” single deal with characters, locales and situations in a more explicitly fictional—as opposed to poetic—story-world that has organically emerged from the prose poems, and which forms the basis for the episodic narrative proposed in the projected Melbourne Flâneur podcast.

“Office at night”, for instance, is an ‘interstitial episode’ in that narrative, taking place halfway along the storyline, while “The Trade” is ‘adjacent to’ the narrative, referencing a major supporting character who steps out of the background to play a leading rôle in “Dreidel”, one of the other ficciones on The Spleen of Melbourne CD.

The literary style of these ficciones is much harder-edged, much less romantic in its vision than the ‘softer’, ‘more human’—‘more feminine’, even—style of the prose poems. In their hard-edged, more masculine and pragmatic style, they owe something to generic crime fiction in the hardboiled pulp style, but much more to French crime fiction, and even more still to the French nouveau roman.

And I’ve noticed that the audience for these ficciones which cast oblique and intriguing side-lights on what is now a very dense and precise story-world that has emerged organically in my mind over the past three years—a purely internal, fictional Melbourne of people, places and events that maps in incredible detail to the external, actual Melbourne we all know—is largely men.

While female listeners appear to prefer the ‘softer’, more romantic treatment I give the city in my prose poetry, male listeners have shown a preference for the brutally ‘objective’ style of literary crime ficciones such as “Office at night” and “The Trade”, these so-called nouvelles démeublées noires which ‘objectify’ their characters, treating them ruthlessly as ‘things’ in a world of yet more things.

I’ve been gratified to discover through my on-going market testing for this podcast that, although I have consciously removed and erased almost all the generic tropes of popular crime fiction, leaving only their traces as a felt sense of unease and ambiguity, a lot of people who have either listened to these tracks on Bandcamp or have heard me read the ficciones aloud in live performance—particularly men of my own age and older—have sensed the ‘density’ of this larger narrative they can only grasp obliquely in these interstitial and adjacent fragments.

They can sense that, like an iceberg, there is a significant and detailed story-world, one that maps accurately to the objective actuality of Melbourne, in back of these mysterious and intriguing ‘shards’ of a story—precise details I am choosing not to furnish the listeners with in the text, but whose presence they can feel.

So the “Office at night” CD single is not only a low-investment introduction to one end of my literary œuvre as represented on The Spleen of Melbourne CD, but it’s also an entry-level introduction into the dense and detailed story-world I’m building for the forthcoming Melbourne Flâneur podcast.

I’d also like to build the prospective audience for that serial, so to inaugurate the release of the “Office at night” single, I’m offering a special Christmas deal for the next two months: If you’re looking for a unique Christmas gift for someone you feel would be intrigued to enter my world, my dark and surreally Parisian Melbourne, I’d like you to introduce them to my writing.

Using the sales form below, you can purchase a copy of the “Office at night” single together with a copy of The Spleen of Melbourne CD and save 25% off the album’s usual price.

Keep one for yourself and give the other away to a friend who you think would be a ‘good fit’ for my style. Do me a favour and press me, like a secret handshake, into the palm of someone you think will be intrigued by my æsthetic philosophy of flânerie and help me to build a prospective audience for the larger narrative of which “Office at night” and “The Trade” are mere tasters.

Of course, all my products come autographed and wax-sealed as a mark and a guarantee of their artistic authenticity, so whichever CD you keep and whichever one you give away, there’s some added artisanal value attached to the artifact for both you and your mate: You’re getting something that comes directly from the author’s hand, but, more crucially, the entire tangible artifact you’re holding is a palpable realization of my inner vision:—it’s leapt directly from my brain to my hand and into yours.

Plus, of course, every CD I sell comes personally gift-wrapped in suitably Melbourne-centric apparel for an unparalleled unboxing experience.