Category: Follow Me, My Lovely…

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Ever a fall guy for a fatal blonde, Dean Kyte eulogizes a night-time flânerie from his recent holiday in Bellingen.

If Laura was still unconvinced of la bellezza di Bello, I proposed a flânerie of Hyde Street after dark.  Unjekylled du jour, it wore its other face, the fearsomely romantic night, bright, in places, with livid bruises of light.

—Just look at this! I exclaimed, my voice full of the wonder: the night, and the light, and the silence.

I intoned those syllables with the reverence of an incantation, such is the awe that the perfumed music du noir, le 無 du néant, the 哀れness of nothingness, inspires in me.

Like the floating world of a Japanese screen, my friend the mist, that flâneuse affouleuse, wafted coldly down from Dorrigo like powdered gold, sifted by the streetlamps, to encumber la rue with her noisome bruit du néant.

—I’m scared of the silence, Laura said, as I walked her back to her van—or rather, she walked me back at her Sydney pace, her steps beating a tattoo in doubletime to mine, drifting in consonance with the mist.

Like Tanazaki, all that is obscurity excites my soul:—darkness, emptiness, stillness, and silence.  I love les nuages, les songes, les ombres, les femmes, la brume, the mist of their mystery, and the conspiracy of their secrets.

—Dean Kyte, “Éloge au noir”

Well, your Melbourne Flâneur’s Bellingenian holiday is fini and I find myself in Sydney. On Friday morning I booked out of Bello il Bello with the deepest regret, but by the kind of uncanny coincidence that can only happen in Bellingen, I found myself thrown together on the train with a friend for whom I had a birthday present packed in my bagage.

Being able to take the train down to Sydney, a city (I say with no offence to my harbour-hugging friends and followers) I was not really looking forward to seeing, with a friend from the landscape I was déchiré to have to leave behind made the sorrow of that parting a little sweeter to bear.

For I discover that the Bellinger Valley still has a hold on my soul, years after I lived in that verdant éméraude entre Urunga et Dorrigo. For as decadent a city-slicker as yours truly, for a fashionable saunterer whose spiritual home is on the avenue des Champs-Élysées, whose pole-star is l’Étoile, and, failing that, is condemned to swan along Collins Street, to find that Hyde Street, the high street of a country town, is as memorable and significant a boulevard in my soul’s restless errance across the hellish plain of this earthly life is no small discovery.

You might recall, chers lecteurs, that I rushed up there this time last year, dodging the dreaded Lurgi when travel was verging perilously on verboten. Coronavirus or no Coronavirus, I had to see a woman I had not seen in years, but whose remembered image was the Dulcinea that had sustained me throughout sundry Melbourne lockdowns.

I feared, as I said in that post, that we had arrived unwittingly at ‘the terminus of love’:—that when I had turned my back on her at Roma Street Station, in Brisbane, several years before, determined not to look back but only forward to the next time I would see her, that this Eurydice was slipping behind me into the darkness of the past nevertheless.

It was a failed mission in many respects, and as I say in the dedication to my book Follow Me, My Lovely… (2016), if I learnt anything from doing Daygame, it was that ‘the hungry wolf never gets fed’: whenever you go after a woman with a desperate purpose, that hunger, that needy desperation, conspires with fate to throw off your vibe, and you end up going home alone.

And so when I left Bello at the beginning of August last year and promptly set foot in the man-trap that Newcastle became for me, it was with the sense that I had left unfinished business in that landscape: the cycle wasn’t complete.

I did not know whether, in my hunger to see this particular girl, I had voodoo’d my vibe with her, pushing her further away rather than drawing her towards me by that celestial clockwork which synchronizes the intermeshing Ferris wheels of our fates, or whether there was something else up there in that landscape I had arrived too early for. But my powerful intuition—(that same intuition which had dimly whispered to me as I turned away from C— at Roma Street Station, ‘You will never see her again in this life’)—told me that there was still something else in Bellingen for me, still lessons to be learned in that landscape, still a date I was destined for, even if the little gondola I was riding in had somehow gotten misaligned by my desperate vibe last year and I had yet to come into kissing contact with the other party, in the other gondola, I was due to meet there.

If you don’t know Bellingen, this talk of ‘celestial clockwork’ and ‘Ferris wheels of fate’ will doubtless sound like the ravings of a madman, but anyone who has set foot in that town knows there’s something about the vibe of the Bellinger Valley that makes inexplicable magic happen. The valley is sacred to the local Gumbaynggirr people as the place where their women went to give birth. The things that people need to heal their souls, they find in Bellingen, and the valley draws you in and won’t let you go until you’re healed.

Then it pushes you out without ceremony and tells you to get on with life.

So I was desperate to go back to Bello, but the desperation and the hunger were not to see this girl. More, I felt a soul-sickness when I left the place last year, something within me that I had left undone—or had arrived too early for—and which I needed to go back and complete—or experience.

And, certainly, there was the growing sense for me, during my two-week holiday there, that the renunciation of women, the slow whittling away of them from my life which has taken place since I left Bellingen for Melbourne in 2016, is not a done thing yet. I still have karma with the dames that I am yet to fulfil. I began to feel, despite myself, that there was still an encounter to be had, still something in a similar line to what I had experienced with Emma, the Norwegian tourist I took on a nine-hour flânerie of Bellingen, by night and by day, in Follow Me, My Lovely….

That book is only the most significant, the most memorable record of several flâneries de nuit I took with women through the streets of Bellingen in the years when I lived there. And as I said in my penultimate post, if you have never strolled the streets of Bello at night, in the dead of winter, with a beautiful girl on your arm, you have never experienced the most romantic place in the world for such a rotation.

Even in repetition, with another woman, it’s still a singular, rotatory event.

And it was just one of those ‘rotatory repetitions’—the experiencing with another woman of a singular pleasure I had experienced with so many before her—that is recorded in the video and prose poetic essay above.

I met this girl, a muse worthy to inspire Sg. Petrarca, at the monthly poetry reading at the Alternatives Bookshop, kissingly close to where three of the four shots in the video above were tourné. She had sat beside me and we had had an amicable conversation, but, as Raymond Chandler wrote, it is possible to have a hangover from women, and I have such a dog of one that I was sure I had forever sworn off a sauce that is damaging to me even in short sips.

I’m hard to move these days, having encountered, in my career as a pocket-edition Casanova, every kind of chicanery and con-artistry that women are capable of. And certainly, nel mezzo cammin di nostra vita, feminine beauty has little sway on me anymore. I’ve become hardened, rather dismissive of women since living in Melbourne, holding them in Delonian mépris. As I write in a prose poem on The Spleen of Melbourne CD:

Even smiling women bored him now: he had encountered all their infinite mendacities and deceptions, such that not one could impress him as being an original article.

—Dean Kyte, “In a lonely street”

And this girl certainly didn’t impress me as ‘an original article’—not immediately, at least.

But, as happens in Bellingen, I kept running into her over the course of a weekend, and each time she stopped to talk to me, she told me that she was leaving; that she had overstayed her scheduled stop here by several days, but couldn’t seem to pull herself out of the town’s mystic gravity. But this time she was off; it had been nice to meet me; good luck with the writing, etc., etc….

When our paths intersected at the top end of Hyde Street on Sunday morning (the spot depicted in the final shot of the video—and in the thumbnail), she sounded pretty determined this time, and I fully expected that she meant it.

But then, that evening, as I’m sitting in the Brewery, sipping my Porter and trying to shift some stuff out of the buffer of my memory and into the pages of my journal, positively the same dame turns up to chow down a woodfired pizza before getting on the road. She still can’t buck the Buñuelian forcefield around Bellingen, that strange gravity that draws you in, if you’ve got healing to do, and won’t let you leave until it’s done.

I’m a little annoyed that this girl is interrupting me when I’ve come (after my Parisian habitude of outdoor écriture) to the public venue of the Brewery for a little privacy, to closet myself with my brains, but I put Moleksine and Montblanc aside and go into a mode I’m known for in Bello—that of a sympathetic ear and occasional counsellor, as she asks me if, perhaps, she should stay here, having set out from Sydney on a solo around-Australia van adventure only a dozen days before.

The long and the short of it is that, despite a swearing-off of women I have largely kept to in the last four years, I find myself on my first instant date since before the Coronavirus, and here in what, in æons past, had served me very well as a date venue.

And it’s in this dangerously seductive atmosphere that has worked to my advantage in years gone by that I find myself being seduced. I now have a chance to really scrutinize this girl, to talk at length with her, and I begin to see, to my chagrin, that this instant date with the bespectacled blonde was the date with destiny I had been bound for.

Now, I said above that I’m not much moved by feminine beauty these days. My good friend Hermetrix, down from Brisbane to join me in a spree of intellectual bafflegabbery, also orbed this darb and will testify to the dame’s top-drawness, but in case, dear readers, you doubt my fortitude to resist a fine-framed dame—or in case you think this frill was less than the Ultimate Yelp in looks—let me give you my impression of her vibe:—for it is the vibe of women—their aura, their energy—that I see these days much more than their woo-bait.

With her tortoiseshell glasses and her rather dowdy brown get-up of puffer-jacket and loosely flared hipsters, in her energy, she reminded me of Dorothy Malone’s bookateria babe in The Big Sleep (1946): with her cheaters off and her hair down, she had the kind of cute librarian vibe I would have liked to have gotten stuck behind the stacks with.

The more she said to me, the more she ticked boxes in my mind—in pencil, at least—that I had given up hope of ever seeing ticked after C—, and I began to realize, to my chagrin, that this girl was my ‘type’.

Though I seem to have a lifelong fatal attraction for blondes, when I say that she was my ‘type’, I don’t mean in looks. I mean that her energy was of the sort that I very rarely run across these days—and which can still make me weak.

My ‘type’ is a kind of earthy, humorous, sensual girl, much more extroverted than myself, one who is capable and well-anchored, well-moored to the material plain of this anti-platonic reality I find so challenging to navigate, and who can thus draw me down, out of the æther of abstraction where I soar and sail, like a balloon adrift, buffeted by my thoughts, dreams, memories of the past and impressions of the future, and into my body, into the present.

Like many men, I’m turned off by intellectual women, but it must be a ‘meeting of minds’ with me: like one of these goofy, unworldly professorial types in a screwball comedy—Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve, say—I need a Barbara Stanwyck type to trip me up, to get my head out of the clouds and right down to ground-level—even if it means I graze my forehead in the process.

William Blake had his Catherine Boucher and James Joyce had his Nora Barnacle (of whom Joyce père prophetically declared, when he heard the improbable moniker of his son’s mistress, ‘She’ll stick to you!’). In a lecture at the Università Popolare di Trieste in 1912, Mr. Joyce said of the Blake-Boucher ménage:

Blake, al pari di molti altri uomini di grande ingegno non si sentiva attrato dalla donna colta e raffinata sia che preferisce alle grazie da salotto alla cultura facile ed estesa … la donna semplice, di mentalità sensuale e nuvoloso….

Like many other brilliant men, Blake was not attracted to a refined and cultivated woman. Rather, he preferred, to the graces of the drawing room, with its broad but shallow sense of culture, … a simple woman of cloudy yet sensual intellect….

—James Joyce, “William Blake” (my translation)

I too love an earthy girl with whom I can have an intelligent—but not intellectual—conversation. I’ve always been stimulated by the sensual wit of a down-to-earth girl who can burst the bubble of my lofty thoughts with some stunningly grounded insight.

In that respect, I’m a lifelong sucker for Virgos. Throw an earthy Virgo at me and watch my airy Aquarian aloofness founder before her demure modesty and meticulous material capability.

I also have a perverse attraction to Leos. For my sins, I seem to attract a lot of Leos into my life. It’s the attraction of opposite signs: in the Aquarian, the show-offy Leo finds what she would like to be; for while it is impossible for a Leo not to seek attention, it is equally impossible for an Aquarian not to attract attention.

And if a woman happens to be a Leo-Virgo cusper, as C— was, it’s like romantic kryptonite to me, as one born on the cusp of Capricorn and Aquarius. More than most cuspers, both natives are seeking to balance and reconcile very contradictory energies within themselves: the Leo-Virgo is torn between a desire for self-exposure and an equally strong desire to hide her light under a bushel, while the Capriquarian is torn between traditional materialism and revolutionary ideation, which often takes the form of dark dreams and transcendent visions.

Leni Riefenstahl, the adventurous cinematic muse of ‘the Austrian Gentleman’, was a Leo-Virgo, as was compromised collaboratrice Coco Chanel. Leo-Virgos tend to lead extravagant private lives which trip them up publicly—think Bill Clinton.

And if you encounter a Leo-Virgo woman, the chances are that she’s a spy of some variety.

On the other hand, David Lynch and Federico Fellini, with their surreal and disturbing visions, are good examples of the Capriquarian vibe. Everyday mystics living immersed in their vivid imaginations, they’re beguiled by the dark mystery of the bright, wide-awake world. The demonic monk Rasputin was one—as was gregarious gangster Al Capone.

As you can perhaps intuit, what these disparate types have in common is an internal battle between darkness and light, between secrecy and revelation on the one hand, and consciousness and the unconscious on the other. One likes to keep secrets and the other to explore mysteries. It’s therefore a rather unstable relational combination, despite the powerful attraction between their mutually complementary light and dark sides.

Moreover, there is an angle of 150° between the sun placements of these two natives, which is a difficult aspect, neither as hostile as an opposition nor as harmonious as a trine. This inconjunction creates some friction, as their personalities are not quite complementary, although there is a large overlap in their worldviews.

Where the Leo-Virgo and the Capricorn-Aquarian find common ground is in their mutual love of travel, adventure, and elevated conversation, which was the case with C— and I. When I first met her, I actually had a case for her little friend, who stubbornly declined to unzip the gab, while this blonde Leo got continually up in my face with her intelligent talk.

In a case of what John Vervaeke calls ‘reciprocal opening’, by the end of one conversation with her, I had had the ‘meeting of minds’ I so rarely get with girls: we had opened each other up in conversation, adventured down such a wormhole of mutually stimulating ideas together, that it was rather embarrassing to come out the other side and have to pretend there was no attraction there.

And I was forced, by my karma, to repeat that experience with this girl at the Brewery. Though she wasn’t my bête noire, a Leo with a heavy Virgo bias, she resembled C— for me, energetically. Yes, there was a passing physical resemblance between them, as there would be between any two dishy blondes, but it wasn’t really that which attracted me to her.

I often describe my encounter with the material world as being like that of a mole: I’m a blind creature with senses evolved for darkness, for the underground—the underworld—of the unconscious. Hence my insistence on ‘organized crime’ as an organizing theme of The Spleen of Melbourne CD. In my clumsy flâneurial trébuchements through the city, I burrow slowly into the subterranean network of my ideas, impressions, intuitions—the deep mystery that lies on the surface, in plain view. I sense, I palpate in my blind tâtonnements, the hidden structure and clandestine connections of reality without ever seeing the vast totality I am groping slowly through—except abstractly, conceptually, with the mystic vision of my mind’s eye.

It is there I see light and colour, not up here on the surface where you, my readers, live. Dragged out of my depths by the scruff of the neck and dumped on this superficial plain, I’m dazzled by the éblouissement, and just as when you look too directly at the sun, there is for me a ‘darkness at noon’:—everything that is bright and ‘normal’ for you is bleak for me with the dismal darkness of Kurtzian horror.

With senses like these, in the dim light of the Brewery, I was finally able to see this girl, to probe her energy by gentle verbal jousts and parries. Like a blind person seeing another’s face through moth-like pats and taps of their hands, I was able to run mine over the faceted, etheric network of this girl’s form. She looked vaguely like C—, but more than that, she resembled her energy—that exuberant extroversion and earthy, unaffected intelligence that draws me down, out of the paradoxical heights of my depths, into the body, into the present, and will always be a weakness for me with women.

Et son ventre et ses seins, ces grappes de ma vigne,
S’avançaient, plus câlins que les Anges du mal,
Pour troubler le repos où mon âme était mise,
Et pour la déranger du rocher de cristal
Où, calme et solitaire, elle s'était assise.
And her belly and her breasts, these fruits of my vine
Crept, more affectionate than naughty angels,
In to trouble the repose where my soul was cloistered,
In order to shake it from the crystal throne
Where, calm and solitary, it sat.
—Charles Baudelaire, “Les Bijoux”, translated by Dean Kyte

As I said to a good friend who particularly appreciates my translation of this poem, this girl, evoking C—’s kryptonite vibe for me, managed to ‘shake my crystal throne’.

I wasn’t angling to escalate the instant date with her. I was just trying to keep the foundering barque of my reeling ego on an even keel. I was so unprepared for the unexpected discombobulation she had caused me that I did not want things to go any further. But at some point, if she really wanted to know whether Bello was a place worth chucking in her van-tour for, I knew I had to share with her the experience of Bellingen that makes it, for me, the most romantic place on earth: I had to invite her on a nighttime flânerie through the dark and silent streets.

Such a flânerie makes up a sizeable percentage of Follow Me, My Lovely…, and you’re going to read about another two flâneries with a different woman in the forthcoming follow-up, Sentimental Journey.

The rotatory repetition of walking with a beautiful girl, one who evoked the energy of C— for me, through Bellingen at night was the karmic experience I had come back for. I had been too early for it last year, but now I was on-time to meet the encounter that my heart still craves from that landscape, where all the poetic symbols of mystery that beguile my mystic vision meet: in blackness.

We walked along Church Street and turned up Hyde as I escorted her back to her van, and I went as far with this girl as I was prepared to go with her that night: in the spirit of reciprocal opening that our conversation had engendered in me, I tried to share with her the vision that is most precious to me.

As the video above gives some evidence, coming from the noise and bustle of Sydney, she didn’t quite get it. She couldn’t see that invisible substrate of darkness, silence, emptiness, stillness—the 無 of Keatsian negative capability—which is always shining brightly before my eyes as a mandala of transcendent beauty immanent in the bleak and sanguinary hell of the present.

It’s the eternal subject of my writing; it’s the thing I try to capture on film and video (as in the video above, shot minutes after we parted ways, on the very spot where her van was parked), it’s ‘the sound of silence’ I try to capture in my audio tracks, and which I long to be able to share with a woman who might be, as Catherine was for Mr. Blake or Nora for Mr. Joyce, the ‘sister of my soul’, the one who can share the inward vision of heaven and hell—of heaven in hell—that burdens me.

I invited her to hang around and share that bath of silence and shadows with me as I set up my camera and my sound recorder to capture the vivid spectacle of nothingness, but unfortunately, her senses were not evolved to perceive ‘the wonder’ which is the balm of my soul.

But I don’t begrudge her for that. She gave me the experience I had come to Bellingen for this time last year—my final vision, in this life, dim and misty as a cloud, of C—.

If you enjoy sharing my visions, why not consider supporting me in what I do by purchasing the soundtrack to the video below for $A2? Or perhaps share it with a friend.

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Dean Kyte, in Geelong’s Johnstone Park, reads a passage from his book Follow Me, My Lovely… (2016).

In today’s video on The Melbourne Flâneur, I share with you an extract from my book Follow Me, My Lovely… (2016), the memoir of a most memorable flânerie, as I escalated the most beautiful girl I have ever gotten on the bed through a tour of Bellingen, NSW by night.

I intended to shoot this video when I was up in Bello last year, on the actual location where the scene I read to you takes place—the Meeting Place Park in front of the town library, the romantic backdrop to my famous attempt to ‘mash a pash’ out of the Norwegian tourist as it was to some of my other (more successful) efforts at seduction.

But I was having too much fun running the gab with my friends in weighty convos as we solved the problems of the world, so the video above didn’t get shot until after my abortive voyage to NSW was over and I was back in Victoria. You’ll have to imagine Geelong’s Johnstone Park—an altogether more grandiose green space—as standing in for the humble Meeting Place Park while you listen to me lube your lugs with the lubricious details of my adventitious adventure date with la Norvégienne.

Your Melbourne Flâneur goes on tour again to NSW from the middle of June—and hopefully this year, it won’t be an abortive experience!

First stop is Bello il Bello, where I alight on 15 June, so to all my friends in Bellingen, you will find me safely ensconced in my ‘office’, the Hyde café, and holding court for une quinzaine de jours from the following day, that feast day sacred to all writers (particularly those of a flâneurial disposition), the holy Bloomsday.

After that, it’s on to Sydney for another dizaine de jours in early July, and then your Melbourne Flâneur gets diplomatic and makes an embassy to our nation’s capital, running amok among the Canberran architecture for two weeks.

So, if you happen to be in any of these three locales—Bellingen, Sydney, or Canberra—in June or July and would be interested in meeting me to discuss how I can assist you in getting your message elegantly into print, do get in touch. You can reach me via the inquiry form or the Calendly app on the Contact page.

But to return to the raconteurial anecdote I unpack in the video above, the escalation of la belle Emma to the bedroom was the most memorable and significant of several such flâneurial encounters I had in the couple of years I lived in Bellingen.

As I say in the video, there are a few places in the world more romantic than Bellingen at night—particularly in the dead of winter, and the Meeting Place Park, which more than once served me as an impromptu boudoir for entertaining some lady-friend met fugitively, always had a resonance of Paris for me.

Indeed, even alone (and there were certain evenings when I went and huddled in the park for an hour or so, enjoying the triste twilight of winter), the flâneur in me could evoke from the trio of lamps in the Meeting Place Park and the façade of the Memorial Hall across the street the memory of the humble little neighbourhood parks of Montmartre—the one in the place Constantin Pecqueur (since renamed the square Joël Le Tac, after a hero of the Résistance), or the square Carpeaux, places I would go to sit on a summer evening before dinner.

At the risk of ‘Byronizing’ Bellingen and having a foule de touristes descend upon it, I’ll go so far as to make the bold claim that, on a winter’s night, nowhere in the world—not even my best belovèd Paris—is as romantic as Bellingen when you have a girl on your arm—particularly when she’s a beautiful Norwegian tourist with dark hair, pale, delicate features, and a smile as inscrutable as la Gioconda’s.

And without wishing to inflate my credentials as a pocket-edition Casanova too greatly, I’m no stranger, as a flâneur and a former Daygamer, to the peculiar pleasure of playing cicerone to some girl I’ve just met, conducting her on an epic escalation that ends in a place and an experience I could not have anticipated when I first tied into this attractive étrangère on the street, this passante I heroically resist passing by but choose to approach.

I’ve given you, dear readers, some hints, some teases of a plot I’ve been plotting since our second lockdown in Melbourne, when the only flâneries I could take were through memory and imagination, transmuting some of the experiences I had had doing Daygame on the streets of Melbourne into my first substantial work of fiction in about fifteen years.

And though I hesitate to tell you more about the literary crime I am plotting, which emerges as an off-shoot of The Spleen of Melbourne project, suffice it to say that, like Thomas Hardy re-entering ‘the olden haunts at last’ in one of my favourite poems, “After a Journey”, I have had cause and occasion in the last three months to re-enter ‘the dead scenes’ of my Melburnian amours and attempt to track, digital sound recorder in hand, the ‘voiceless ghosts’ of myself and some girl I briefly loved lingering in the traces of these places.

Last Tuesday night, for instance, I was up till after 2:00 a.m. in the city, re-tracing with my sound recorder the steps of a flânerie I had taken with a Canadian lady who had tied into me, liking, as she did, the cut of my dandified jib, from a certain cocktail bar in Swanston Street to a point, in Elizabeth Street, which ended in enigma and mystery for me.

I have written elsewhere on this vlog of the immense pleasure that nighttime flânerie gives me when I go out, analogue camera in hand, to bag some image of beauty that has caught my eye in other wanderings, how the walk takes on an intoxicating momentum of its own, leading me to other prospects, other potential images. In the last three months, I have found a similar, but even more rarefied pleasure in retracing my night walks through Melbourne with women using the sound recorder.

There’s a fair amount of ‘method acting’ involved even in the passive process of recording: four times between midnight and 2:00 a.m. last Tuesday, I retraced the steps I had taken, arm-in-arm, with la Canadienne. I was reliving in my memory what I had actually experienced with her and simultaneously imagining myself in the fictional version of our flânerie, which is altogether more surreal and sinister.

By the third time I set off from my ‘first position’ and passed the security guys in front of The Toff in Town, treading stealthily so as to get as little sound of a solo set of footsteps on the recording as possible, they must have thought I was some fou and wondered what the hell I was up to.

One woman with whom I shared a few beautiful flâneries de nuit in Melbourne used to call me ‘Puss in Boots’ due to my dandified prowling. The nickname confused me at first. Dredging up a dim memory of the fairy tale from childhood, I asked her: ‘Wasn’t he some kind of con man?’

Bien sûr, and she was savvy enough to intuit my Machiavellian admiration for these artists who are, as David W. Maurer calls them in The Big Con (1940), ‘the aristocrats of crime’. But more than that, she was savvy enough to tell me, in that intuition, what my ‘totem animal’ is: at night, I am the cat, that furry flâneur who is the urban hunter of big cities, as aristocratic a prowler as the little black panther who treads stealthily through Saul Bass’ title sequence to Walk on the Wild Side (1962).

And indeed, in one post on this vlog, I compared myself, lurking in my belovèd laneways on some rainy night, enjoying, as a cat does, the inhuman ambiance of this asphalt jungle, to that consummate con man Harry Lime—he whose totem animal, the cute but amoral kitten, finds this penicillin pedlar and killer of children smirking in the doorway.

I can’t wait to get up to Bello and do some night shooting. All the time I lived up there, the magic of midnight in Bellingen seemed so much a part of life it never occurred to me to record an instance of it. When I was up there last year, on my final night, loitering in Church Street after even No. 5 had closed, I knew I had had too much fun—I had been so run off my feet with it, with my Proustian obligations to be the literary social butterfly of Bellingen, that I had forgotten to haul out my camera even once to capture the ‘dead scenes’ of all my amours.

If you would like to read how it turned out with la Emma, you can purchase a personally inscribed and wax-sealed copy of Follow Me, My Lovely… below.

“Follow Me, My Lovely…” [softcover]

Personally signed and sealed by author. Comes with custom bookmark. Price includes worldwide postage.

A$40.00

“Follow Me, My Lovely…” [eBook]

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Shout out to Coffs Harbour street photographer Jay Jones (@concretefashionista on Instagram) who captured your Melbourne Flâneur on the prowl at Coffs Central.

Jay snapped me sans overcoat but otherwise suited up for winter as I swanned around summery Coffs, an unofficial ambassador of Melbourne moda bringing a soupçon of Collins street chic to Harbour drive.

The only unfashionable touch by your Melbourne Flâneur’s über-æsthetic lights: the muzzle (or ‘chin-sling’, as I call it) in my south paw, a fad which no one will ever convince me is elegant—even the flower-bedizened variety I reluctantly port.

Even when forced to hide my mug behind a mask, dear readers, the dandy in me indomitably prevails, and I must bring a touch of the æsthetic even to this despised item of bourgeois uniformity.

But whether I am airing my dial or have my mug camouflaged behind a floral mask, it seems I am instantly recognized in these parts. Even at the bus stop, preparing to decamp from Coffs to Bellingen, I was recognized by someone I had never seen in my life.

‘You’re going to Bellingen, aren’t you?’ the guy asked.

‘Yes,’ I replied, somewhat surprised. Perhaps, I thought, the bowtie I was wearing gave me away as the type of person who would be waiting for the bus to Bello.

‘Yeah, I’ve seen you there,’ he said.

‘It must have been a long time ago,’ I said. ‘I haven’t been there in five years.’

He seemed doubtful about that claim, as if it were more likely that he had last seen me only five weeks ago.

The encounter puzzled me until I alighted in Bello. Hardly had I squared away my luggage at the Diggers Tavern and taken my first fashionable flânerie in æons up one side of Hyde street, the Champs-Élysées of Bellingen, and down the other before I was recognized by John Ross, owner of the Alternatives Bookshop, who greeted me with the words: ‘We were just talking about you.’

That is a phrase I have heard repeated continuously. Five years may have passed, but my ‘celebrity’ in Bellingen (as John called it, introducing me to two passers-by) as its most dandistic resident remained undimmed by half a decade’s absence. Indeed, on Sunday, as I lounged on the grassy bank of the Bellinger River, relishing the sun (a dominical ritual of confirmed Bellingenites), two friends sitting at some distance and recognizing a jaunty Fedora worn rakishly askew inquired of their companions if it could be me and, more to the point, if they had lived in Bellingen long enough ‘to know who Dean is.’

I’ve become a fabled creature here, which I didn’t expect. If you have lived in Bello in the years ‘A.D.’ (‘After Dean’), you have clearly missed a spectacle as dazzling and memorable (in the annals of fashion, at least) as the Transfiguration of Our Lord.

I used to have a lady friend here, a cute little sculptress who lived up the hill in Dorrigo and who would come down to Bello on a Sunday to work a shift at the former Lodge 241 café. It never ceased to amuse her how, on our dates or after-work flâneries, we were forced to stop every few metres in our progress along Hyde street to acknowledge the friendly salutations of the most diverse people.

To her, I seemed to know everyone in town, but to me, it felt more like everyone knew me—even the people I didn’t know.

Conspicuous as I was in my day, I thought that when I departed Bello for Melbourne five years ago, I would be promptly forgotten. But it was I who had forgotten the curious phenomenon of ‘Bello time’, whereby a man can go away for five years and be greeted warmly by half the town as if the last time he had been seen in these parts was last week.

But I suspect there’s more to it than that. I am certainly not the only literary man to have passed a season or two in this town, and certainly not the most internationally celebrated, Peter Carey having lived in Bellingen and having set the Booker Prize-winning Oscar and Lucinda (1988) in this landscape.

Moreover, journalist George Negus and I occasionally shared co-working space at ‘my office’, the Hyde, and one of the last times I imbibed a long black there before checking out, on a day when the café was particularly bondé de gens, Mr. Negus and I were forced to sit coude-à-coude at the counter and cement the distant intimacy of our long nodding acquaintance with some polite pleasantries about the political nouvelles du jour, that mustachioed gent never suspecting the local literary celebrity he was rubbing his grizzled elbow against.

I kid, of course.

But like all jests, there’s a zesty grain of truth in the observation that if these two literary gentlemen have more conspicuous clout in the world of letters than your presumptuous little flâneur, in the public imaginary of Bellingen, at least, with the rigorous rectitude and correctness of my dress, I have always fitted the image of an homme de lettres more thoroughly than my more famous colleagues—for all my friends and acquaintances here know that the hygiene of my deportment reflects the intellectual hygiene of a man who makes the most exquisite discriminations with words.

But I find myself in an odd—even an embarrassing—position, overwhelmed by the well-wishing of people who have never forgotten me and never, it seems, ceased to think well of me in my absence.

All the time I lived here, people predicted an imminent removal to Melbourne for me, telling me that, with my sens inné de la mode, I was meant more for Collins street than for Church street, but I think I defied even the most prevoyant forecast about that imminent departure date by staying nearly two and a half years in Bello.

When I did, finally, satisfy the prophecy which had attended me from the first and vamoosed to Victoria, it was with the deeply regretted sense that this beloved landscape had, indeed, been eventually exhausted for me as a source of flâneuristic exploit—particularly as regards the flâneur’s addictive habitude of æsthetically investigating the women of the cities and towns he prowls through.

The dandy is always seeking to crystallize his image, to make his outward appearance thoroughly congruent and consubstantial with his inward self, and in Melbourne, it’s true, I seemed to find and set in perfect place the last pieces of the puzzle to my character which I had been searching for in landscapes as various as the Gold Coast, Paris, and even Bellingen.

In my ‘Paris-on-the-Yarra’, I was able to find again the lost qualities of Parisian flânerie (albeit curiously perverted by antipodean climes), and regarding the most Parisian city on Australian soil dreamily through half-closed lids, I could, in my flâneries around Melbourne, pretend I was in something like my heart’s home.

I will always be, first and foremost, a Parisian, proud citoyen of the first city of modernity, and hence of modernity’s most decadent product, fashion. But if I have integrated the high polish of the dandistic Parisian flâneur with a life spent wandering the streets of this benighted antipodean isle’s provincial capital of fashion, such that I have become a Melbourne flâneur, it is fair to say that without a couple of years of my life spent squinting still more tightly, trying to disengage and draw forth, like a fabulous perfume, the flâneuristic romance of marvellous novelty from Bellingen’s streets through half-closed lids, I would not have been able to see, as a living reality, a fragrant atmosphere which thoroughly surrounds and suckles me, the poetic Parisian substrate to Melbourne’s pedestrian actuality.

In other words, in Bellingen too (which I have occasionally described to the uninitiated as being like the whole of Melbourne folded up into two short streets) I found the lost quality of Parisian romance, of marvellous novelty, and in some sense the narrow circuit I traced for more than two years up and down Hyde and Church streets prepared me, as no place since Paris had, for the assiduous literary oisiveté of wandering the streets of Melbourne, on the perennial trail for tails and tales.

In fine, I think that, unacknowledged as my literary genius may be by the wider world as compared with Bellingen’s more famous scrivenly denizens both past and present, if I hold a special affection nei cuori dei Bellingeni, it is perhaps because they sense that, fitting the bill of an homme de lettres more perfectly, as one who uses words with the precision of a camera, I have seen the secret essence in this town, in real scenes set in its streets, and have recorded that invisible, fragrant essence which makes this town such a special place.

My last book, Follow Me, My Lovely…, was set here, the history of a night and a morning when I navigated a gorgeous Norwegian tourist I picked up at the backpackers through a flurried flânerie of streets and scenes, and my next novel is also set in the same streets, where the ghost of the former girl—(and of others, bien entendu)—lingers over the marvellous novelty of my romance with another.

In my last post, datelined Wagga, I wrote that I was coming to the end of the second draft of that novel, and there was a moment, in my assiduous painting and repainting of the scene, set in the little park in front of the Bellingen library, where I and that other began a slow escalation of each other which would lead, inevitably, to a transcendent experience in the bedroom, when I felt again the palpability not merely of her body, but of the place and the hour.

On Sunday, not a block west of the library, I beheld her face—a face I had striven through five years to hold firm in my mind, and which I had believed I would never see again—and her neat little body, that body I had held tenderly in the park.

There she was, at some short distance from me, dear readers, at a tantalizing inconjunction of space and time which made it possible for us both to pretend that we had not seen each other, or that, seeing each other, we did not recognize each other. But I know she knew me at a glance, despite the obfuscating bowtie (a foppery I didn’t port in those days), just as I knew her at a glance, swaddled in the faux-fur collar of her velour jacket.

Oui, there she was, one of the feminine ‘Elect’, one of that modest corpus of dames who have undressed your Melbourne Flâneur, who have divested him of his fashionable armour and have laid him out in state, and who have had the dubious honour of beholding the holiest of holies behind that implacable front.

I’ve said that one of the few things which sustained me through our extended Melbourne lockdown was the ability, in concentrating on this novel, to escape the limited vision of the restricted present, and take flâneries through my memories of Bellingen, repainting with precision the Memorial Hall, the walk across Lavenders Bridge and up the path above the skate park, No. 5 Church Street, and Church street itself before the camphor laurels had been removed and replaced.

But when I saw my palpable paramour’s face once again, slightly longer and narrower than I remembered it, she who had led me, arm-in-arm, on months of painstaking promenade through my memories of the streets of Bellingen as perhaps the Eternal Feminine essence of the place, consubstantial with it—for it was her even more than here that I have been trying, through five years, to paint perfectly with words—I saw in her face the slight, painterly distortion, the fault of perspective I had made in my painting of the place.

That slight lengthening and narrowing of her actual visage (as compared to my lovingly beheld memory of it) was like all the slight displacements I have discovered in re-walking these streets I have loved and written lovingly about.

The streetlight in Short Street lane is white, not yellow as I remember it, and the strangler fig under which we exchanged our first kisses ‘feels’ further down the lane, towards Church street, than I have pictured it—even with assiduous referral to Google Maps to aid and orient me.

Most significantly, it was not until I sat on the bank of the river on Sunday afternoon, remembering all the women with whom I had passed a tender moment on that spot, that I realized, for all my concentration on precisely rendering the actuality of the place, how much the palpable, experienced memory of pleasure in Bellingen—how much I used to enjoy sitting on that riverbank, whether alone or in company—has lain buried, sleeping deeply in my unconscious for five years.

Through all my restless movement through places and scenes—not just in Melbourne, but in all the towns and cities my flâneries have taken me to—the memory of the place where I was, for the longest time in my life, most consistently happy has lain buried and is, perhaps, unpaintable, as closely as one might approximate the essence of it.

I recall a quote by M. Degas, who says:

‘C’est très bien de copier ce qu’on voit, c’est beaucoup mieux de dessiner ce que l’on ne voit plus que dans sa mémoire.  C’est une transformation pendant laquelle l’ingéniosité collabore avec la mémoire. Vous ne reproduisez que ce qui vous a frappé, c’est-à-dire le nécessaire. … Voilà pourquoi les tableaux faits de cette façon, par un homme ayant une mémoire cultivée, connaissant les maîtres et son métier, sont presque toujours des œuvres remarquables.’

‘It’s all very well to copy what you can see, but it’s even better to draw what you can no longer see, except in memory. A transformation is worked upon the base material of actuality in which genius collaborates with recollection. You only reproduce what has struck you, which is to say, that which is essential to the image. … That is why paintings made in such a manner by a man with a cultivated memory, one who knows both the Old Masters and his trade, are almost always remarkable works.’

—Edgar Degas (my translation)

Follow Me, My Lovely…, written in this landscape, while I still had immediate visual access to every point in the parcours, while I could still see and measure the relative distances between every spot through which I had escalated the Norwegian in our nine-hour flânerie around Bellingen, has a very different quality and character to the one this next novel, Sentimental Journey, will have.

It’s a book I began writing almost immediately after I left Bello five years ago, and being reliant on my memories of the place, and of the woman, slight distortions and displacements—those qualities that M. Degas calls ‘remarkable’—have crept into my rendition of Bellingen, such that, between the essential traits of the image—and even within them—an imaginative collaboration of genius with memory has inadvertently occurred.

I suspect that, at the deepest level, the reason why the good burghers of Bello hold me in a regard I feel I have hardly earned is that they sense, despite my punishing exactitude, despite my dandistic subscription to absolute, rigorous perfection in everything—the sincerity of my dedication to my art which flows out from it through all my life—before reality I fail to get it ‘quite right’—and in that tiny failure, that loophole where the genius of imagination intersects with a rigorously cultivated memory of the place, the inestimable ‘essence of Bellingen’ emerges in my writing about my remembered experiences here.

Other, more celebrated men of letters may have written about this place, but I think i Bellingeni know that their presumptuous little flâneur has observed and absorbed the essence of the living reality of this place, and in his Parisian hallucination of it, will one day present a startling snapshot of the town in tableau at a moment of its most recent history.

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The Melbourne Flâneur at his ‘head office’: Dean Kyte hard at work at the 3 Little Monkeys in Centre place, photographed by Denis Fitzgerald.

Special shout-out to Bendigo-based photographer Denis Fitzgerald (@denisfitzgerald_ on Instagram), who was kind enough to forward this ninja portrait of your Melbourne Flâneur, covertly snapped while intently bent over the means of his subsistence.

I was either concentrating very hard, or Denis was very jungled-up (which is hard to do in Centre place at the moment, still beaucoup underpopulated as Melbourne struggles to shake off the enduring shackles of lockdown), because I didn’t notice anyone lurking in the laneway with a camera trained on yours truly.

But I remember the day—how could I not when I had opted to break out the white tie, white French cuff shirt with spread collar, and white opal cufflinks to go with my dark grey suit with its alternating pink and white pinstripes? Consequently, I remember what I was writing that day, and I’ve got a pretty good idea what I was studying so intently when Denis captured me peering at my screen.

I think I was probably plotting a literary murder at that moment!

Yes, beneath the serene, snapbrim-shaded visage of your Melbourne Flâneur, it looks like Denis has caught me, not red-mitted, but with full mens rea and Machiavellian malice aforethought.

It’s a great photo. I particularly like the way Denis has dialled down the vividness of my preferred location for literary enterprise to emphasise the grey and white camouflage of my ensemble. The skin tone of face and hand are the only sign of anything human hiding out in the monochrome locale.

Though you probably wouldn’t imagine from Denis’s photo that I was meditating on hinky deeds at that moment, I think he’s probably captured something essential about me, wrapped up in dark labours which seem externalized to the environment around me. As a writer, I am as ‘un prince qui jouit partout de son incognito’ (‘a prince who revels in his anonymity everywhere he goes’), as M. Baudelaire puts it: to be an homme de lettres is to possess an exclusive species of celebrity—the freedom to walk the streets and still remain utterly unknown.

This is a deeply satisfying species of celebrity which Delta Goodrem, for instance (who just walked past me in Centre place wearing a horrendously ugly white overcoat, like the shaggy pelt of some synthetic beast), will never know.

Ms. Goodrem, God bless her, is no princess enjoying her incognito. She wishes very much to be seen by her serfs, if not actually approached by them.

When I’m at work at the 3 Little Monkeys, I often fancy myself (as Denis seems to have intuited) as being deep undercover—practically invisible to the environment, so invisible does the environment become to me when I enter deeply into the meditative state of writing. But being an unreconstructed dandy, even camo’d up in my grey combo, I recognize that I stand out as the one of the more conspicuous pieces of wildlife in vibrant Centre place.

Although I have many other secret and not-so-secret writing locations cached around Melbourne, the 3 Little Monkeys has been the Melbourne Flâneur’s ‘head office’ for as long as I’ve lived here: as tiny, as ‘inconvenient’ a locale in which to write as this little café might appear, practically from Day 1 of my vie melburnienne I have colonized a table on its shoulder-width terrace in Centre place, come rain or come shine, and have done the boulot of writing.

As a flâneur, the thing I love about Centre place is the Parisian ambiance of this narrow café strip. I fell in love with that ambiance almost immediately, for the dark grey slate of the ledge of sidewalk running along both sides of the laneway reminded me of the asphalt trottoirs of Paris. Then too, the absurdly narrow width of those sidewalks, crammed, on either side of the garage-like doorways of the cafés, with postage-stamp tables, stools and the upturned milkcrates which serve, in Melbourne, as our native seating, recalled to me some of the tiny, tavolino-lined terrasses I sat on in the backstreets of Paris, scribbling away.

From my vantage at either of the two tables on the terrace of the 3 Little Monkeys, I have a narrow vision of the grey Melbourne firmament between the CAE and the Punthill Hotel—almost as grey as the platinum sky of Paris. When I first came to Melbourne, the no outdoor smoking rule had not yet been introduced, so—most Parisian of all—the grey atmosphere of Centre place was typically further clouded with carcinogens.

Moreover, the 3 Little Monkeys faces the side entrance of the Majorca Building, one of the jewels of art déco architecture in Melbourne. It didn’t take me a week to realize the cinematic potential of the terrace of the 3 Little Monkeys, and very early on in my vie melburnienne, I made the video below, in which you can see me sitting in meditative bliss on the terrace of the café but reflected, ghost-like, in the elegant side entrance to the Majorca Building across the laneway.

In this brief video essay, Melbourne writer Dean Kyte offers a (self-)conscious (self-)reflection on the narcissistic art of the selfie.

I’ve always written outdoors, in parks and cafés. When I was a film critic on the Gold Coast, I got into the habit of writing the first draft of my reviews as soon as I came out of the cinema. I would write in cinema foyers, on the platform of train stations, at bus stops. The most uncomfortable locations served as ersatz offices for me, and I learned to block out the environment and go inward, projecting my thoughts onto the landscape around me.

I learned to enter something like a ‘conscious trance’ in public: within a few minutes of picking up my pen, all the noise and distraction of the place falls away, and it is almost as though material reality becomes a symbolic projection of what I’m thinking. The words are ‘out there’, occluded in the shapes of streets and people, trees and flowers, and the deeper my gaze penetrates into the environment around me as I write, the more I am mining out of myself the precise shape of a thought.

It’s in one of those trance-like states, when my introverted intuition is operating at maximum revs and, despite the manifold colourful distractions posed by Centre place, I’m locked onto an image deep within myself, one which I can see spelled out in the environment around me as I search for le seul mot juste, that Denis has captured me in the picture above.

But although I had gotten into the habit of taking the office outdoors on the Gold Coast, it was not until I went to Paris that the habit of conducting the most private, the most introverted of arts in the most public of places became a matter of the deepest necessity. In Paris, the streets were my office: having no private place in which to write, I bared all, exposing myself to the public gaze in parks, gardens, galleries, bars, cafés, street-side benches.

The analogy of the flasher, the exhibitionist is not sans raison for the écrivain en plein air—particularly one who is as unreconstructed a dandy as myself. I have written elsewhere of the deep introversion which is a prerequisite of dandysme pur-sang, and of how the dandy’s shy propensity towards introversion makes the literary art, one typically conducted in deepest privacy, almost the only profession that this ‘splendour among shades’ is fit for.

But for the writer who is a dandy and a flâneur, a man of the street, a man who is forced to make his home in the street, to treat the most public, the most impersonal and uncomfortable of environments as casually and comfortably as if he were relaxing in his own private parlour, there is almost a samurai-like discipline about the way in which he makes friends with discomfort, performing the most private art-form, the ‘art of thinking’—which is what writing is when it is performed with absolute sincerity—in the most public of places.

In fine, in making himself, in his deepest reflections and meditations, vulnerable to view, in entering that trance-like state of deepest, most concentrated intuition in public, he ‘exposes himself’ in the act of thinking.

Like public onanism, there’s something rather aberrant about writing en plein air, I admit, because we usually regard it as so difficult a task that a setting of perfect comfort and seclusion is required to optimally milk the muse of inspiration. All distractions must be banished so that we can concentrate.

There’s something aberrant, moreover, about thinking in our society, so that someone who is clearly ‘doing it’ in public is making rather a spectacle of himself!

But after a certain point in my career, having been jostled and hassled out of my sedentary nature by life, I found it almost impossible to have a private place in which to write, and having been forced to discipline myself by doing the work in public, making the best of all possible conditions, making myself oblivious to all external distractions by entering a conscious state of trance, I would not want to go back to the days when I had my own desk and chair in my own private office.

The experience of making do with my lap, with dirty park benches, with cramped and narrow tavolini or corners of noisy cafés and bars in Paris, of having my pages rained on or blown away by the wind, of being harassed by distracting gypsies wanting to gyp me out of a euro, was a salutary training for what my life, as a peripatetic writer living out of a suitcase and a duffel, has largely been since then. Like the samurai who makes a pillow of a stone, as a writer I have made the street my ‘private thinking parlour’, and I am perfectly comfortable and relaxed doing my private business of thinking in public.

In Paris, ‘my office’, the place I repaired to every evening to do my writing, was Le Cépage Montmartrois, at 65, rue Caulaincourt, the golden café I immortalized with page after page of hallucinatory description in my first book, Orpheid: L’Arrivée (2012).

For the price of a demi of Amstel, I could sit for hours on a grey-gold Parisian evening, my notes of the day, the drawings I had sketched before the works of the masters in the Louvre, the maps tracing my flâneries, my dog-eared copies of Flaubert and Baudelaire, my beautiful monograph on Ingres all spread open before me on the tiny table as I wrote, like fantastic celestial maps linking all my disparate thoughts.

I was, for a time, a subject of curiosity to the indulgent folk who ran Le Cépage, so extravagant and strange was the wealth of material I produced every evening in the arcane alchemy of converting the reality of experience into scintillating prose. They’ve probably forgotten me by now, but there was a brief period when the burning question of the day was what ‘le M’sieu’ (as I was then known aux bons gens du Cépage) was up to with all these puzzling pages covered in his cryptic script.

As Les Deux Magots was to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, so Le Cépage was to me—and is, for it remains the café by which I have measured all my far-flung ‘offices’ ever since. As I wrote in L’Arrivée, the moment the taxi drew up, in the dark of night, before ‘le sein d’or du Cépage’, I knew (as one occasionally knows with a woman one meets by chance) that my life was inextricably linked to this café, and that we had been predestined by our mutual karma to meet and become historically significant to each other.

But Orfeo did not yet know that le mystère du nom de ce café-ci would be the least of les mystères which Le Cépage Montmartrois would pose for his sensuous investigation, nor that tous les mystères which it would pose before him would in one way or another be connected avec la question du nom.  How could he?  He had had no connaissance of its existence avant ce soir.  Nevertheless, faced avec ce café-ci with its enigmatic nom, ce café which immediately invited Orfeo’s sensuous investigation, he had the inescapable sense that somehow he had known that Le Cépage Montmartrois would be here, as if it were somehow connected à son destin and all that he had come à Paris à la recherche of, although he had had no premonition of it beforehand.  He had had no conscious premonition of it, but nevertheless he felt as though he had had some unconscious intimation of its existence; and however hard he stared into the alluring lueur of it, Orfeo could not for the life of him make out what it was about ce café-ci, what hovered in its golden radiance which made him feel as though its mystère—its mystique, même—was somehow personally and intimately connected with him, avec son destin.  He was bouleversed by the 哀れness that ce point-ci at which he had been destined to arrive since the dawn of his days, which he had worked towards in his soul without any conscious connaissance that this physical point dans l’espace was destined to be consubstantial with Orfeo’s psychological, and spiritual, and developmental arrivée à sa nouvelle réalité, was indeed ce point-là; and that henceforth ce point, as le cœur et l’épicentre of that experiential map which Orfeo would draw de sa nouvelle réalité, would be his anchorage, le point to which he would habitually return, whether or not it was precisely le point to which he had asked le chauffeur to deliver him to.  For the golden allueure du Cépage Montmartrois was too strong to be resisted, so that Orfeo felt that whatever was mystérieux about Le Cépage Montmartrois, whatever impalpable allure was atomized in that golden agency which had called to Orfeo’s unconscious mind from across oceans and was consubstantial avec la forme de ce café-ci, whatever it was that was in the yellowmellow beurrelueur of this particular café—nay, even inside of it—to be explored, was destined to be intimately connected with Orfeo’s sensuous investigations du monde parisien; and his explorations du nouveau monde de sa nouvelle réalité, as he redrew his own experiential map du monde de jour en jour, pushing back the boundaries of himself, would have their bearing upon ce lieu-ci as much they would derive their bearings from this anchoring point, such that whatever was le mystère du Cépage Montmartrois which le détective des belles choses, in his unique destin, had been called this great distance to rationalize and resolve, to reveal to all in all its mysterious relations, parttopart and parttowhole; this mystère had its inevitable cœur—its starting point—au sein d’or du Cépage Montmartrois.

—Dean Kyte, Orpheid: L’Arrivée (2012)

I think you can tell by the babel of lyricism which Le Cépage evoked in me that it was love at first sight!

Only in Bellingen, where the rather restless lifestyle I’ve led for the last seven years really began, have I had a similar experience of a café which felt as much to me like a ‘home’, a place where I would effectively ‘live’—and do my best living—when I went there every day to write.

When I stepped off the XPT and my friends straightway took me to the Vintage Nest (as the Hyde was then), a café-cum-quirky-antique-store in a former drapers’ shop on the main drag, I knew I would love Bellingen. At that time, the café was run by the church who owned the op-shop next door, as a rather upmarket outlet for their more valuable wares.

It was tragedy to me when it changed hands and the ever-altering array of beautiful antiques which gave the place so much character and charm gradually disappeared, but faithful to the last, for more than two years, rarely a nine o’clock would chime without me coming through the door to set up my laptop, pour a long black into the fuel tank, and start writing.

And it’s as much a testament to my affinity with the Hyde in the early days after the change-over that, as Le Cépage occupies so many pages of my first book, there’s a significant scene set at the Hyde in my last book, Follow Me, My Lovely… (2016). I think I devote some of the best writing in Follow Me, My Lovely… to the morning-after moment when I took the most beautiful girl I have ever had in my bed to ‘the best café in town’ for breakfast.

So cafés are, for me, more than merely ‘my office’, the places I go to in order to write: they are significant sources of inspiration in my writing. I love them as much as some of the women I have known, and like women who have left some lasting impact upon me, sometimes I feel driven to immortalize the ‘souls’ of these cafés in which I have done my work.

In July last year, Emily Temple wrote a blog post asking if global Coronavirus lockdowns would spell the end of writing in cafés. Admittedly, the hardest part of our insufferable (and multiple) Melbourne lockdowns last year was the fact that I was forced, finally, to do an extensive spell of writing in my hotel room, facing a wall.

I don’t think they saw me at the 3 Little Monkeys for the rest of the year after lockdown was declared in mid-March. But I still needed the matutinal fuel of writing. I discovered some good java-joints in North Melbourne, where I hunkered down to weather the storm, but it was not the same to have to dash out for five minutes each morning, hiding my beautiful mug behind a mask, simply to port back to my room a paper chalice I could suck on while punishing my brains.

As misanthropic as I am at mid-life, I missed the people, whose hubbub in the laneway makes the jangling music that accompanies my mental labours. Inured to distraction as unconducive circumstance has made me, I am probably one of those writers Ms. Temple cites in her post as actually requiring a measure of background noise to focus me: my literary antibodies need something in the environment to fight against.

There is, as Ms. Temple says, something vaguely ‘performative’ about being a café littérateur, but only, I would argue, if you’re there to make a ‘show’ of writing rather than to write. Whatever the artist, we can all tell a poseur from a professional—except, it seems, the poseur himself. As Denis’s portrait reveals, there is an earnestness, a look of presence—of investment in the present moment—which radiates from the writer who is really thinking, and who is not just licking the end of his pencil.

As a case of a writer who undertook the public performance of his craft with sincerity, Ms. Temple cites Harlan Ellison, who had the idée géniale of writing in the windows of bookshops, like a cobbler or a watchmaker plying his trade in his shop-window. ‘I do it because I think particularly in this country people … think that people who write are magicians on a mountaintop somewhere,’ Ellison said. ‘… So by doing it in public, I show people it’s a job … like being a plumber or an electrician.’

Living a peripatetic lifestyle, one of the joys of being a writer on the hoof is having an ‘office’ in every city, town and suburb I visit, just as a sailor has a girl in every port. Wherever my flâneries take me, the first order of business is to find a café that serves good coffee but, more importantly, has a good ambiance in which to write.

So in Sydney, you will typically find your Melbourne Flâneur stationed at Parisi or Jet, his ‘field offices’ in the Queen Victoria Building. In Brisbane, I have my command post set up at the suitably European Marchetti in the Tattersall’s Arcade, where you might hear me pass a few terse words of Italian with the wait staff.

Adelaide still poses a problem for me. Being a Parisian in my soul, I do like the French crêperie Le Carpe Diem in Grenfell street, but there’s unfortunately not a lot of visual interest or colourful foot-traffic at the eastern end of Grenfell street. The coffee is great, but the location is comme ci comme ça.

En revanche, you can get a good brew at the well-situated Larry & Ladd in the Regent Arcade. Unfortunately, if you want to write, you need to sit at the big benches outside the café in the middle of the arcade, because Messrs. Larry and Ladd play their dance music so loud it’s like a nightclub inside.

It certainly gives your literary antibodies something to fight!

By far the best café for writing in Adelaide, in my experience, is a little out-of-the-way place in Somerton Park, so if any Adelaidean writers can recommend a more central location, I would be happy to hear any suggestions in the comments below.

And I invite you to take a closer look at Denis’s Instagram. With so much of photographic interest in Bendigo to occupy him, I was very complimented to receive his picture of me out of the blue and discover that I had caught his savvy eye while revelling in my princely incognito! Check out more of his work here and on Facebook.