Tag: Artisanal Desktop Publishing

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Click the cover to preview.

One of the several top-secret creative fruits which occupied me during the Melbourne lockdown has now arrived!

I’m pleased to announce the release of The Melbourne Flâneur zine, which collects the most popular posts appearing on The Melbourne Flâneur vlog between July 2019 and June 2020, as voted by you, chers lecteurs.

Your all-time faves, “What is a flâneur?” and “Are there flâneur films?”, are there, as well as articles about the father of flânerie, Charles Baudelaire, and my innovative art of ‘flânography’.

I’ve even included a bonus spread showcasing my moody black-and-white film photography. It features pix of Melbourne’s mean streets and gritty laneways as yet unorbed by you, dear readers.

A piece of fiction, plenty of groovy graphic design, and—most ambitious and gruelling of all—I even turned one of my videos, “Dismembrance of things past”, into a six-page, 54-frame comic strip.

Thank God the video was only one minute. Photoshop almost went into meltdown, and me with it.

Check out the super-short video below as I take you through a whirlwind flick-through of what you’ll find inside!

I’ve always loved the grungy zine æsthetic. As you can see in the video, with the slick paper and full-colour pages, this zine isn’t quite ‘grungy’, but it’s as close as a dandified fellow as your Melbourne Flâneur can come to getting ‘down and dirty’. I chose a dirty, low-res printing option to give it that grungy, Risograph-style sprezzatura.

Mostly, I used the zine æsthetic as a licence to take some innovative liberties with graphic design. You’ll notice, for instance, that in the article titles, I do some funky things like turning the lettering on its side, back-to-front, etc. I primarily designed The Melbourne Flâneur zine for print rather than for on-screen reading because, even though I crafted it on the laptop through my Artisanal Desktop Publishing process, I wanted it to be tangible, substantial, like an old-school zine, but handmade new-school-style.

The primary purpose of the zine was to create something exclusive I could give to my clients as a piece of added value. Often when I’m working with businesspeople, academics or other creatives, they evince an interest in reading my work or looking at my art, but the urgency of servicing their projects doesn’t leave a lot of time for that.

I wanted to design something tangible and substantial which would give them an insight into my world as a peripatetic writer, the Melbourne I see through the lens of my Pentax K1000 and my Minolta XL 401 Super 8 camera, as well as something a bit off-beat, design-wise, mixing the funkiness of the zine with the boutique approach I take to writing, editing, designing and publishing documentation.

The thing I like about zines is that the artisanal, handcrafted aspect of these typewritten, photocopied, stapled-together little mags gives them a sense of ‘exclusivity’.

The magazine proper is a totally commercial creation: it’s always pushing products at you. The zine, on the other hand, takes the commercial form and makes it distinctly personal. The exclusivity which comes as a function of a zine’s tiny print run subverts the slick-paper mag’s purpose to push as much soulless product to as many faces as possible and makes the format a humble, intimate ‘advertisement for oneself’.

I often drop in at Sticky Institute, the zine shop in Campbell Arcade, and pick up a few weird little creations. I love owning a few handcrafted zines by Melbourne writers and artists that I can puzzle and ponder over, and I wanted to give my clients something of that experience of exclusivity, of entering intimately into my world of flânerie, into my dark vision of Melbourne as a place of friendly menace.

The Melbourne Flâneur zine is now available for purchase in the Dean Kyte Bookstore. If you want to experience this feeling of exclusivity and re-read all your favourite articles, revised and illustrated for print, you can purchase a physical copy for $A25, including worldwide postage, or you can download the PDF eZine for free!

Just click this link to go straight to the product page in the Dean Kyte Bookstore.

And I now have brochures for my print and video products!

The two new brochures below are more of the many creative fruits I pumped out during lockdown. I’m really pleased with the designs I came up with. After a rocky start, I caught a wave of inspiration. I invite you to download my new brochures and check out what I came up for yourself!

Discover the books of Melbourne’s most stylish writer! Dean Kyte Press.
Dean Kyte’s books
Discover the films of Melbourne’s most stylish writer, Dean Kyte.
Dean Kyte’s DVDs and Blu-ray Discs

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Self-portrait of Dean Kyte.
In captivity:  Self-portrait of Dean Kyte, locked down in his West Melbourne hotel room.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.
— W.B. Yeats,
“The Second Coming”

 

Your Melbourne Flâneur has been conspicuously quiet the past few weeks, despite events in Melbourne which demand urgent comment and analysis.

The reason for the buttoned-up bouche is very simple: I’ve been trying to keep the little barque of my small business afloat—in spite of the unconscionable economic vandalism being visited upon Victoria from week to week by Daniel Andrews and his government.

So I may as well throw in a plug for myself at the start.  If you’ve been following my critiques of the Coronavirus situation with interest, you might also be interested in the personal services I can provide to you.  If you’re a creative writer and you’re seeking to self-publish a thoroughly bespoke book, my Artisanal Desktop Publishing service is probably the ticket for you.  I can bring the same critical scrutiny to editing your work as I’ve brought to analysing the Coronavirus crisis.

And while I aim to be unfailingly courteous and considerate of my clients’ feelings in framing my criticisms, as you know by now if you have followed me this far in my critique, I don’t pull any punches, so if there are weaknesses in your writing, you can trust me to tell you so, and I will also suggest some strategies, techniques and approaches to strengthen your message so it lands well with your intended audience.

My special skill is providing what I call ‘content strategy’ to my clients: I can counsel you on how to logically organize your writing at its deepest level so as to ensure maximal comprehension on the part of your readers.

Of course, it would be a much more pleasant experience for both of us to work together face-to-face, but that’s not an option at the moment.  Nevertheless, we can get a good rap going over Zoom, so if you’re further afield than Melbourne—parbleu! if you happen to be overseas, even—there’s no obstacle to us working together remotely as we edit, design and lay out your book.

Visit the Contact page to get in touch with me or to book a consultation.

All right, enough with the word from our sponsors.  Let’s unbottle the tough talk.

So in my last post on the Coronavirus, I made some predictions that rapidly proved to be prescient.  Principally, I said that the next frontier in the battle about the deadly reality of this invisible belief would be fought over masks, and I noted that Victorian premier Daniel Andrews—while not making the wearing of face coverings compulsory in Melbourne at that time—had strongly lent the colour of his support to them, which suggested an imminent move towards mandating masks.

A week later, the Premier announced that you could not put your snoot outside your door in Melbourne without a muzzle over it, under pain of a $200 fine.

There are times I hate being right, particularly when it comes to my occupational talent for reading the characters of people and predicting what they will do.

Mr. Andrews couldn’t win a hand in a poker game: he telegraphs his tells a week in advance of his play.

I was sincerely hoping he would not prove me right because I knew what it would mean for his character, and for the consequential state of play of this crisis in Victoria.

It would mean that the Premier was not capable of strategic thinking, merely tactical, and that he was prepared to risk plunging not just Melbourne or Victoria but the whole country into a Hobbesian state of nature for the sake of one ill-defined goal on the health dimension.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was a political philosopher who lived through the English Civil War.  He observed to what a spectacular extent civil society can break down into a naked competition for individual power and resources.  Hobbes defined this condition as ‘the state of nature’—a multi-polar environment of mutual fear and distrust in which individuals leverage whatever tools, tactics and strategies of violence they have at their disposal to extractively centralize power and resources to themselves in a zero-sum game.

In his book Leviathan (1651), Hobbes described this state of nature as a ‘war of every man against every man’, and he said that the life of the individual in the state of nature would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’

The zero-sum dynamics which underwrite our Faustian civilization in decline tend necessarily to drive us towards a Hobbesian state of nature: the fallacy of infinite derivatives in a world of finite resources must eventually lead to a societal collapse as our civilizational Ponzi scheme folds under its own unsustainable exponent.

You can’t keep Hoovering resources up to the top of the pyramid without the foundations collapsing under the weight.  And when that happens, alienated individuals start taking resources for themselves.

If you want to see what a state of nature might look like, take a glance across the pond at Portland and Seattle: the looting and rioting in those cities should be read as a cautionary tale of the civilizational collapse humanity is courting.

We’ve been slowly sliding towards the abyss of an all-out war of all against all for a very long time.  But it took the Coronavirus to expose just how weak the veneer of civility—and civilization—is in Western society.

Way back in March I raised the alarm with you in my first post on the Coronavirus, stating unequivocally that a global systems collapse had been triggered by the pandemic which would cascade through the economic system, through the political system, and ultimately through the geopolitical system.

I would propose that the more a civilization in its late period of senescent decadence tends towards a Hobbesian state of nature, the more one sees a quality I would call ‘mediocrity’ emerge—not only in the macro-character of its social and political institutions, but in the micro-character of the people who comprise them.

More specifically, in the descent towards a Hobbesian state of nature, we begin to more conspicuously notice in failing institutions such as governments the progressive emergence of individuals who are adept at playing the Hobbesian zero-sum power game of resource centralization and extraction from the commons.

Indeed, in the Hobbesian state of nature, I would argue, these mediocre individuals are naturally selected for by the mediocre conditions of the system.

In other words, mediocre individuals whose only genius is the tactical animal cunning which enables an organism to more or less optimally negotiate a salience landscape of risks and rewards in a state of nature begin to populate social and political institutions with increasing conspicuousness.

In the Western Anglosphere, for instance, it is hardly controversial to notice that the leaders of the four major English-speaking democracies—Mr. Trump in the United States, Mr. Johnson in Great Britain, Mr. Trudeau in Canada, and Mr. Morrison here in Australia—are all men who, prior to entering political life, had careers in the public sphere involving pretence, mendacity, deception or dissimulation—qualities which, if we were not living in conditions of an escalating state of nature, would have disqualified them for public office.

As an entrepreneur, Mr. Trump was an unashamed con man.  Mr. Johnson debased the profession of journalism with his lies.  Mr. Morrison had a career in ‘marketing’, and Mr. Trudeau was, of all things, a drama teacher.

In the Hobbesian state of nature, a capacity to pretend, to deceive, to dissemble, dissimulate or outright lie with bravura is not a political liability but a positive asset—for in a multi-polar environment of mutual distrust, in order to maximize one’s personal resources, one must be able to forge alliances of a temporary and contingent nature with other actors.

There are some resources which cannot be extracted from powerful rivals by main force but which require the subtle dissimulation of allyship in order for one to gain access to them.  These men at the apices of the pyramids of power in their respective countries are currently the most adept exemplars of the socially pathological phenomenon I call ‘mediocrity’.

Daniel Andrews is also a mediocre person.

But as, when I apply the word ‘mediocre’ to somebody, I mean it as a term of art which describes the integral quality of their character, its capacity under pressure, not as an insulting epithet, it would be as well to provide a technical definition of mediocrity, of the maladaptive, pathological traits which I believe the mediocre person typically possesses in the state of nature where he or she thrives—for the state of nature is the ‘ecological niche’ of the mediocre person.

In essence, my definition of the mediocre person is a conflation of Spengler’s Megalopolitan man and Flaubert’s bourgeois.  Spengler describes the pathology of this human phenomenon in The Decline of the West, while Flaubert, in Madame Bovary and in Bouvard et Pécuchet, illustrates the character of the mediocre person in action.

The mediocre person is a creature of the city in a civilization’s senescent period of decline, and as, in our Faustian Western civilization, the Megalopolis of ‘the City’ is now the World Wide Web, a global caliphate that is everywhere, we are all creatures of the city, and therefore more or less mediocre.

I’ll leave it to Spengler to describe the mediocre late-City man:  ‘They are the market-place loungers of Alexandria and Rome, the newspaper-readers of our own corresponding time; the “educated” man who then and now makes a cult of intellectual mediocrity and a church of advertisement; the man of the theatres and places of amusement, of sport and “best-sellers”.’

It’s perhaps worth noticing that in that short sentence, Spengler identifies all the métiers practiced by the four conspicuous examples of political mediocrity I identified above—journalism (Mr. Johnson), advertising (Mr. Morrison), theatre (Mr. Trudeau) and sport and other places of amusement, such as casinos, wrestling and television (Mr. Trump).

In its feminine manifestation, the mediocre person is Emma Bovary, indefatigably fatigued with ennui, and hence the constant victim of fashion.  And in its masculine form, the mediocre person is la Bovary’s nemesis, the progressive, pragmatically materialist pharmacist M. Homais, whom Flaubert later reprised as his two hapless copy-clerks, Bouvard and Pécuchet.

Flaubert, in his pathological hatred for his own class, the bourgeoisie, delineates the essential qualities of the mediocre person, whom Spengler defines as ‘small and shrewd’, amply possessed of the animal cunning of the trading class.  Let us not forget that the etymology of the word ‘mediocre’ stems in part from the Latin medius—‘of middle degree, quality or rank.’

The mediocre person, by Flaubert’s lights, is eminently ‘middle-class’.

And the thing about the mediocre person is that he is not unintelligent.  You don’t get very far in the game of mercantile resource centralization and extraction if you don’t have an edge of intelligence over your competitors.  But I consider this form of ‘tactical’ intelligence to be ‘mere animal cunning’, the application of the predatory instinct to the social realm which is the human equivalent to the pure state of nature.

This form of predatory intelligence is purely middle of the range.  The life of the bourgeois, citified person is entirely geared towards the goal of maximal personal resource centralization and extraction from the commons, and his education system is necessarily geared towards facilitating this practical end.

But intelligence is really an index of one’s problem-solving faculties.  It’s true that ‘making a living’ in the social realm, extracting the resources from it that supports one’s life, is as much a demonstration of the human capacity to solve problems as the tactics and techniques that other organisms have evolved to extract resources from their environments.

But at the human level of intelligence, there are higher order problems to be solved than merely extracting the resources that one needs to make a living—particularly when the problems are of a species-wide, existential nature.

The most conspicuous aspect of the mediocre person is what Spengler calls his ‘intellectual mediocrity’, his relatively modest cognitive capacity to perform these higher order mental operations of abstract problem solving.

The mediocre person is narrowly educated to be ‘fit for purpose’ in the economic domain of resource extraction, but he is conspicuously poor in his capacity to perform sovereign sensemaking.  Thus, he is the continual prey of ideological possession: the mediocre person doesn’t have ideas of his own; ideas have him.  He is their spokesperson.

This is the ‘deindividuated memetic possession’ I spoke of in an earlier post on the Coronavirus as being a characteristic of low internal individualism, the deprecation of individual freedom of thought in favour of individual freedom of action.

And it was this characterological flaw of the bourgeoisie that Flaubert mercilessly satirized at the end of his life with his Dictionnaire des idées reçues, recognizing that mediocre people imbibe their ideas from the air exhaled by those around them.

I would submit that, en revanche, genuine intelligence is a capacity to handle complexity at a sufficiently high level of resolution; to tease all the relevant variables of a problem apart, like the strands of a great tapestry; to hold them separate yet relative in their dynamic relations with one another for as long as possible as one negotiates a solution which strategically balances these variables.

Except in the STEM fields, where we have scientists working tirelessly to discover a vaccine for the Coronavirus, that kind of intelligence, that kind of strategic thinking does not appear to be in very great supply to us in negotiating the aspects of this crisis which touch most directly on people—on the social, political and economic variables of this problem.

The short-term, tactical response of mediocre leaders such as Daniel Andrews is more to throw oneself bodily on the brake of one dimension—the health aspect of this crisis—and say, ‘Well, we will sort out all the long-term damage done on the other dimensions after we have got numbers under control.’

Yet it’s precisely that approach of looking to tactically solve one salient variable in the short term by ignoring, delaying or commuting the long-term strategic solution of tangential variables which has weakened our entangled global systems to the point of civilizational collapse.

The sensemaking capacities of our socio-political institutions—including governments—are found wanting in this crisis, and in Victoria, from day to day new evidence emerges—despite the Government’s efforts to keep mum—that both the institutions responsible for the state’s response to the Coronavirus and the individuals who comprise them are mediocre thinkers—tacticians whose short-term problem-solving skills backfired in the long term.

One of the major problems for collective sensemaking in negotiating the incomputable number of variables associated with our existential crises lies in the realization that democratized universal education—the Western model of mercantile education for narrow economic purpose—has failed our civilization.

We have three generations of the most educated human beings in history currently alive, and their pieces of parchment ostensibly credential these people as the most intelligent cohort of human beings who have ever lived at any one time in history.

But education is a Hobbesian resource extraction game too.  In the civilizational Ponzi scheme of infinite derivatives extracted from finite resources, democratized education is another numbers game:  You’ve got to get a lot of suckers through the doors of the universities; soak the value out of them; pass them (since that is what they’re paying you for in exchange for the exorbitant debt you’re saddling them with); and credential them—no matter how mediocre the quality of their thought.

And because, in the Western model of mercantile education for narrow economic purpose, universities are the gateways to the professions, you don’t have to follow this Ponzi logic many steps along the chain before you realize the dire consequences for collective sensemaking in all the institutions we depend upon for a civilized life—from law, to banking, to media, to education, and to public policy.

As the Peter Principle famously predicts, everyone in a Scientific Managerial hierarchy rises to a position just beyond the level of his competence.

But in this competitive landscape of personal advancement, the capability to rise to an ultimate position of hierarchical eminence which is beyond one’s sensemaking capacity to properly serve in represents one’s optimal capacity to fraudulently extract resources from the economy and centralize them to oneself.

And when all our institutions are populated by people who are not well-placed to serve our collective sensemaking and problem-solving needs, but are excellently placed to serve their own private interests, we are primed for a Hobbesian state of nature to ensue under conditions of common existential crisis and civilizational collapse.

Public life in these periods when the cultural paradigm is in decline attracts only mediocre people—short-term tactical thinkers like Mr. Andrews in Victoria, and Messrs. Trump, Johnson, Trudeau, Morrison et al. on the world stage.  It doesn’t attract the long-term strategic thinkers, for ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’

Spengler, co-opting the name given to that sanguinary epoch of ancient Chinese history, calls the Hobbesian state of nature in which mediocre individuals vie for political power ‘the Period of Contending States’.  He says: ‘In the degree in which the nations cease to be politically in “condition,” in that degree possibilities open up for the energetic private person who means to be politically creative, who will have power at any price, and who as a phenomenon of force becomes the Destiny of an entire people…. [W]e have now the accident of great fact-men.  The accident of their rise brings a weak people … to the peak of events overnight, and the accident of their death … can immediately plunge a world from personally secured order into chaos.’

Tactical thinking is about maximizing short-term benefits by negotiating a salience landscape of long-term costs.  Like a pinball glancing off an array of scoring targets, you negotiate a chancy path through this valley of consequential hazards which involves trying to maximize your current resources in the hopes that you will have enough of them at your disposal to eventually deal with the long-terms costs you are ignoring, delaying, or commuting.

The worst leaders are those who are the most brilliant at tactics, for, as Mr. Trump demonstrates, their agile, impulsive responsiveness to the random windfalls of chance in a rapidly evolving situation is often in temperamental contrast to the skill of predictively calculating long-term consequences and orienting micro-actions towards macro-goals.

It’s the difference between playing checkers and go.

Like all the so-called ‘leaders’ of our time, Daniel Andrews, by the evidence of his decisions, amply demonstrates that he is not capable of strategic thinking, the balanced negotiation of short-term costs to ensure the achievement of a long-term goal, because he is, like all the so-called ‘leaders’ of our time, a mediocre person.

The evidence of his decisions demonstrates that he has risen to a position beyond the level of his sensemaking competence, but not beyond the level of his capacity to play the Hobbesian social game for fun and profit.

The quality of Mr. Andrews’ thought is mediocre.  His manipulation of the ‘algebra of thought’—human language—to express his tactical calculations is mediocre.

Strategic leadership, the capacity to inspire social coherence by virally communicating a vivid, memetic sense of the situation which can be shared by a population, cannot emerge from tactical mediocrity in conditions of existential crisis.

Statesmen are poets in their thinking and speech: they communicate ‘the big picture’ so that the population can share their strategic vision and get behind it.

In the late period of civilizational decline, however, the politicians who emerge to seize power are small and mean prosateurs—eminently bourgeois in their mediocre thinking and speech.

Mr. Andrews cannot bring the Victorian people together behind a shared sense of what the Coronavirus situation is and what it means because, in his own mediocrity of thought and expression, he himself lacks the strategic capacity to visualize the landscape of salient hazards thrown up by the lurgy at a sufficiently high level of resolution and predictively calculate alternate pathways through it.

The aim of strategy in this situation is to find a pathway which balances the endurance of acceptable costs by the population on all relevant dimensions—not merely the health variable—so as to maximize the long-term benefits for the society from the short-term costs of their temporary distress.

The decisions that the Premier has made on the social, political and economic dimensions of this problem have the hollow, panicky ring of tactics about them rather the solid, reassuring ring of strategy.

Mr. Andrews’ government has lost its legitimacy as a prescriptive authority.  The authoritarian, Scientific Managerial approach the Premier has taken to this networkcentric problem—the dictates on mandatory masks, the escalation of repressive restrictions, the imposition of draconian curfews—is evidence that, due to his mediocrity as thinker, speaker, and leader, Mr. Andrews’ has, as I predicted at the end of my last post, lost the capacity to inspire endogenous compliance by Melburnians.

When you take an authoritarian, hierarchical Scientific Management approach to a networkcentric problem, you only attempt to impose more overt control on the problem when it is already clear that you have lost it.

Take, for instance, the issue of masks.

It’s well-known that transmission of the Coronavirus is not principally a function of whether one’s face is uncovered or not: transmission is principally a function of human mobility.  Hence the justification for repressive stay-at-home measures and social distancing.

So to anyone studying the science, when the Premier mandated the wearing of masks in Melbourne on 22 July, three weeks into the Stage 3 lockdown when everyone ought properly to have been at home, he was making the tacit admission that the Government had lost control of social distancing, had lost its monopoly on violence to restrict the movement of its citizens, and had therefore lost its legitimacy as a prescriptive authority.

Melburnians were refusing to keep apart from one another by staying at home.  In effect, when he mandated the compulsory wearing of masks in public, the Premier, having lost control of the people, was throwing up his hands and saying: ‘If you insist on breaking the rules by going outside and mingling, at least wear a mask while you’re doing it.’

There are calls for Mr. Andrews to resign, but in my view, that too is an example of short-term tactical thinking.

There is nothing to be strategically gained, as far as I can tell, from removing Mr. Andrews now:  Despite the revelations of his thoroughgoing incompetence, no challenger has stepped forward who demonstrates that he has a better familiarity with this crisis as it is relevant to Victoria at the macro-level than the Premier has acquired in the past five months, so it makes no sense to change horses mid-race.

The Premier must seek to undo the damage he has done.

Moreover, in the Hobbesian state of nature into which we are entering, you have more to fear in the long term from the person who demonstrates a more exquisite degree of mediocrity by dispatching the present incumbent in a coup than from the incumbent himself.

But if our democracy endures to another election, Mr. Andrews will have to step aside from the leadership of his party.  Unless he can tactically capitalize upon some extraordinary and inconceivable stroke of good fortune which entirely cancels out the record of his incompetence in this crisis and puts his reputation with the electorate into surplus, he is unsalvageably tainted and a political liability to his party.

They can’t retain political hold of resources with Lurch at the helm.

But whoever follows Daniel Andrews as premier, from whatever side of politics he or she comes, the odds are six, two and even that his successor will be of even more mediocre character than the Chairman of the Hoard himself.

Better put your seatbelt on.  There’s turbulence up ahead.

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Charles_Ponzi
The talented Mr. Ponzi: Charles Ponzi (1882-1949), dapper dandy and absolute scoundrel.

In 2017, I worked with my good friend Paul Forest on a submission he was preparing for the Global Challenges Foundation.  Through their New Shape Prize, the foundation was seeking ideas to reform global governance in order to ameliorate potential future threats to humanity.

You can read the paper that we wrote together here.

A document that we referenced significantly in framing our response was the Global Challenges Foundation’s own white paper, 12 Risks that threaten human civilisation: The case for a new risk category (2015).  The paper is the first report to explore a class of risks to human civilization ‘that for all practical purposes can be called infinite.’

The twelve risks which the authors explore in the report include the usual suspects, such as climate change, nuclear war, bad global governance and financial systems collapse.  They also include such ‘sci-fi’ scenarios as asteroid impacts, supervolcanic eruptions, and the threats to humanity posed by artificial intelligence and nanotechnology.

And then there is the threat posed by global pandemics such as Coronavirus.

The authors found that in most financial assessments of risk, these twelve infinite-impact scenarios were rarely considered for two reasons.  On the one hand, they are so low in probability that their inclusion in forecasting would unduly unbalance calculations of risk.  On the other hand, if any one of these low-probability risks were to eventuate, their ultimate impact on human society would be incalculable.

But the problem is, that in many circumstances, if any one of these twelve infinite-impact risks were triggered, it would likely have a ‘knock-on’ effect, triggering other infinite-impact risks which would further compound an incalculably devastating scenario.

I think we begin to see this knock-on effect taking place with Coronavirus.  What began as a health crisis is now metastasizing into a financial crisis which could easily trigger a global systems collapse—in addition to killing significant swathes of the global population.

I do not think it is at all controversial to posit the view that the systems we currently rely upon as a global population—political, economic, educational, environmental—are not fit to withstand the common challenges we face.  These are ‘legacy systems’ which are not adapted to withstand the conditions of novel complexity and rapid rates of change that are now our ‘new normal’.

In the case of our global financial system, it is clear that, in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, a necessary opportunity to reform a legacy system which had demonstrated the limits of turbulence it could withstand was lost.

It is also clear that much of the political and civil unrest which has metastasized in western democracies post-2008 may be traced to the institutional inertia inherent in one complex system—the politico-regulatory—making insufficient efforts to reform another complex system—the financial—with its own institutional inertia.

The mounting civil unrest manifesting in the body-politic of western democracies is the consequence, in large part, of an inchoate sense in ordinary people that the currency which lubricates civil exchange in society, decoupled from a material standard, is fundamentally bankrupt, and that the political and financial systems have conspired in a thoroughly extractive fiscal policy to vacuum out all remaining value.

Whatever the truth of this popular intuition, the politico-regulatory system which governs us finds itself in an uncomfortable position: having thoroughly eroded the trust of the populace it governs through its institutional inertia, its inability, and even unwillingness, to effect reform in the financial system, it now demands the people’s trust when another infinite-impact risk threatens in the public health system—one which will likely spill over into the financial system with more globally devastating results than we experienced in 2008.

Indeed, at the most immediately visible financial level, that of the everyday civil exchange of currency for goods, we begin to see how the public incivility which has progressively mounted since 2008, being accepted by the body-politic more or less as a ‘new behavioural normal’ in a world where all our systems are revealing their unfitness for present conditions, has begun to manifest itself as a breakdown in social order.

The instances of ‘panic buying’ in supermarkets and online profiteering reveal the fear of missing out—and the greed it rapidly metastasizes into—which underwrites the zero-sum dynamic of competition in capitalism.  In 2008, this zero-sum dynamic saw all the chips on the table accrue to the crooks of the financial system, while the little man was left bereft, feeling betrayed by the political regulators who were elected to defend his interests.

It’s easy to feel some measure of sympathy for these ordinary people, whose civility has been so eroded by the betrayal of civilized systems meant to safeguard the social order, and who act barbarically in supermarket aisles, possessed by a financial ‘panic’.

The last time this happened to these ordinary people, twelve years ago, their fear of missing out was justified.  One can understand why they would want to buy up all the stock of quotidian things it is in their financial power to acquire when the ‘Masters of the Universe’, who have exponentially more means at their disposal, could easily stockpile and profiteer for themselves, sucking the last penny out of these ordinary people.  Again.

For some years I’ve had an interest in the con game.  If you’re a student of human psychology (and of course, if you’re a writer, you ought to be), few fields of study reveal the immutable laws of social dynamics in more pronounced relief than the confidence game.

Having intuited that we now live in the fraudulent world of the ‘long con’, a world of ‘fakeness’ and kayfabery, of screens and surfaces upon which the counterfeit of life doesn’t even have to be good, it just has to be ‘believable’ by some sucker somewhere, I should have been less shocked to recently hear economist Eric Weinstein give the elegant articulation to what I had sensed and ought, with my interest in the classic con game, to have been able to define for myself: our global financial system is a global Ponzi scheme.

When the currency of civil exchange is decoupled from a material standard for which it can be redeemed, you introduce nice conditions for a Ponzi (or pyramid) scheme to take root.  I do not necessarily mean to suggest a return to the gold standard; rather, more abstractly, I am suggesting that the numerical, monetary value I demand of you must be attached to a commensurate value, whether in the form of a tangible good or intangible service, which you agree is exactly equivalent.

In wealthy western democracies, where a trend towards an ‘imaginary mathematics’ of value demanded decoupled from actual value provided began to take root in the 1970’s, the conditions for a society-wide pyramid scheme of extractive value-taking was established.  And with less and less new entrants (read: marks) into the pyramid available at the national level, the scheme had to be exported and globalized in order to remain viable.

Hence the blowback, in 2008, of ‘toxic derivatives’ and other insane feats of financial imagination based on a principle of extracting real monetary value from fictitious values decoupled from a material standard for which they could be redeemed.

I am sure I am not alone in noticing that in our extractive western ‘service economies’ (which are conspicuous in their lack, for the most part, of producing goods to which a real material value is equivalently attached) that the price demanded for common goods like bread and milk is far above the actual value which the consumer gets out of them.

Moreover, at the other end of the spectrum, in the service sector, we have institutions of higher education which extract monetary value from students in exchange for worthless credentials, ‘mortgaging’ future earnings which these institutions know are impossible for students to realize under the zero-sum dynamics of a mature pyramid scheme, and landlords who charge exorbitant rents for four walls and a roof simply because a desperate market will bear the value demanded.

Whether in the case of small goods or large services, the value of what is actually being provided is significantly less than the extractive value being demanded.

When you consider that the policy of extractive value under a competitive, zero-sum dynamic extends equally to small things in our society as to large, you can see how, under infinite-impact conditions, trivial items like hand sanitiser can easily command prices of ten or twenty times the real value which the consumer can obtain from them.

The infinite-impact risk of Coronavirus has exposed the infinite-impact risk of a global systems collapse which is immanently embedded in the competitive, zero-sum dynamic of our global financial system, based as it is on a principle of extractive value-taking radically decoupled from equivalent value-giving.

In my own life, the panic and sudden contraction of the market has immediately exposed me to risk on both the health and the financial fronts.

As some of you know, I housesit as a means of lowering my personal overhead.  Under the extractive conditions of our economy, I simply can’t afford to pay rent.  In exchange for a place to stay, I look after people’s homes and pets while they are away.

While I rarely get anything out of it in the way of money, I like housesitting because the value proposition is equivalent on both sides: I render a valuable service to homeowners for a given period of time, and for that given period I can live in some comfort.

Although, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, I’m technically a homeless person, housesitting is usually a pretty nice way to be homeless—when Coronavirus doesn’t create a double panic, causing people to cancel their travel plans at the last minute and the market for available housesits to suddenly contract.

So at the moment, I really am homeless, with no safe-haven where I can sequester myself in order to preserve my health.  Instead, I’m spinning my wheels at the dingy hostel I usually only bunk down at for a night or two between sits.

But (as you may infer from the extensiveness of the economic argument I have made in the foregoing) I am almost less concerned about my health than the immediate economic impact that Coronavirus is having upon my circumstances.

The non-financial value-exchange market of housesitting is a nice analogue for the sudden contraction we are beginning to see in our global financial markets.  When you’re aware of the number, gravity and cumulative likelihood of infinite-impact risks which threaten human civilization, you are prepared to accept that this global pandemic will, in all probability, trigger a global financial downturn at least equal to, but probably greater than the one we experienced in 2008.

Our global pyramid scheme of extractive value-taking barely withstood that turbulence, without the presence of a second infinite-impact risk to compound it.

It’s clear that a competitive, zero-sum dynamic of extractive value-taking radically decoupled from value-giving is not serving humanity well in the face of a class of risks which can cause both the total extinction of our species and our planet, and completely collapse the social order and infrastructure we depend upon for a civilized life.

Under such circumstances of crisis, it becomes clear that, in order to restore confidence in a marketplace where trust has been thoroughly eroded by the extractive assumptions of zero-sum competition, the risks we collectively face become an opportunity to reform our global financial system by recoupling the value that we ask of others to the value we are prepared to offer them.

Lately, in these times of crisis and panic, I’ve been re-reading David Deida’s The Way of the Superior Man (1997).  It’s not a well-written book by any means, but it’s one of the few I carry everywhere in my suitcase.  Sometimes I need to be reminded of what it is to be ‘a man’—which is almost more a vocation, an ideal standard of conduct to aspire to, than a biological condition of what you’re packing in your pocket.

Truth-telling, the integral alignment of thoughts, words and deeds, firmness of will, determination in purpose, decisiveness in action—these are just some of the virtues which Deida attributes to the ‘superior man’, the person who embodies the ideal standard of the masculine principle.

A superior man does not withdraw or close in upon himself in times of crisis such as those we are experiencing, says Deida.  He maintains an open heart in the face of grave challenge and continues to offer his fullest gift—the unique value which only he can provide—to others, living at what Deida calls his ‘real edge’—his place of fear.

‘Your edge,’ Deida says, ‘is where you stop short, or where you compromise your fullest gift, and, instead, cater to your fears.’

I know I haven’t been playing my real edge lately, giving fully of the unique value I can provide to others with my gift for words.  The double risk to health and wealth which Coronavirus poses is an existential opportunity to do my small part in the reform of how we do business with each other, providing commensurate value of service in exchange for monetary value.

For confidence to be restored in a market where extractive value-taking has thoroughly eroded public confidence, leadership—the masculine virtue sine qua non—needs to be shown by individuals who don’t buy into the fraudulent zero-sum assumptions of our legacy economic system.

These individuals will demonstrate leadership in their own small fields of expertise—the places where they can give their fullest gifts to others—and they will, in their personal economic conduct, make earnest efforts to recouple the value they demand in trade to the actual value they provide to others.

In one of his homilies, Deida invites you to describe your edge with respect to your career, and if I’m honest with you, at the moment, my edge of fear is this:

Finding myself temporarily homeless and with no immediate way to protect my health, my small business based on providing my gifts as a writer, editor and desktop publisher to other small businesspeople, to academics, and to other writers and creatives is so fragile that it could easily fold up under present economic conditions by the end of the month, and I would be on the street and without a cent.

Equally, I fear that, if I offer my true gift in the open-hearted way that Deida prescribes, what I offer, under the prevailing extractive economic assumptions, won’t be valued by others—that I will meet a wall of silent indifference which leads to the street.

That’s my edge right now, and as Deida says, there’s nothing dishonourable about admitting your fear as a man—provided you’re prepared to lean into your edge of fear and play it.  ‘… [A] fearful man who still leans into his fear, living at his edge and putting his gift out there, is more trustworthy and more inspirational than a fearful man who hangs back in the comfort zone….’

If I learned anything from my days of doing Daygame, the golden lesson is this:  When things are not are not going well for you in life, your first order of business should be to see where and how you can offer value to others.  Nourish your existing relationships by pre-emptively offering value, and seek to form new relationships by pre-emptively offering value.

So this is my offer of value to you, dear readers:  I’m in pretty desperate need for ready cash to get myself into a safe environment and stabilize my business during this contraction of confidence.  And I’m prepared to offer you value for value.

Times are going to be tough for us all during this downturn, but narratives will still need to be skilfully told, and images will still need to be manicured and managed.

Do you require bespoke writing, editing, graphic design and desktop publishing services?  Do you know somebody who does?  I would sincerely appreciate any introductions and recommendations you can offer, either in the comments below, or via my Contact form.

During this period of financial contraction, I’m going to be lowering my rates to take better account of the real financial circumstances in which clients—old and new—find themselves.  So if you’re new to my Bespoke Document Tailoring and Artisanal Desktop Publishing services, this is an opportunity for you to experience the genuine value I seek to provide businesspeople, academics, and other writers and creatives by giving my fullest gifts to them, with some absorption of the risk on my side.

In any event, if you are genuinely sincere in wanting to work with me and provide value for value on your side, you will find me very willing to negotiate an appropriate service which is optimal to your budget, no matter how modest.

If you would like to experience the difference of working intimately with a wordsmith who is determined to provide you with equivalent value in service to the price we ultimately negotiate, one who will take on your concerns as his own, I invite you to contact me directly by calling (+61) 0423 296 927, or by filling in this Contact form.

And yes, I’m very open to working with overseas clients.  One of the few advantages of the Coronavirus situation is that it facilitates remote collaboration, and with the decline in the Australian dollar, if you’re based in the States, Canada, Britain, Europe or New Zealand, it’s a very advantageous time for you to explore how I can bring value to your business, academic, or creative writing via online collaboration.

This has been a long and very different post from the ones you usually expect of me, dear readers.  I obviously felt some trepidation about speaking so baldly about my own situation, but I felt even more trepidation about setting forth a long and complex intuition about the political and economic state of the world at the moment.

You’ve seen a very different side of me from your ebullient Melbourne Flâneur who waxes lyrical on flânerie and art.  l hope this very different kind of post has brought value to you in your own evolving perspectives on the crises we are facing, and I look forward to engaging with your thoughts and intuitions in the comments below.

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They say that every person has a book in her—a painful state of affairs which, if you happen to be a writer, often feels like nursing a mental gallstone.

I’m working on my sixth book, and believe me, the process of writing and self-publishing your own books does not getting any easier after the first one.  It doesn’t get any easier after the fifth, even.

But, as I say in today’s video, what sustains you through the years is the knowledge that, if you persevere, a day will come when you can literally hold your thoughts in your hands.

There’s a certain magic—which I can only equate with holding your newborn child—in the sensation of being able to weigh your words in your hands when you at last see your thoughts, the lightest and most ethereal of things, crystallized in a beautifully bound book.

I’m dreaming of that day with my next book, my sixth mental child, but maybe you are dreaming of experiencing the soul-deep satisfaction of giving birth to your first one.

You’re nursing the book within yourself and you would like to get it out.  Maybe you even write in secret, but you dare not knight yourself with the holy title of ‘writer’.  For you, writing is a hobby, and you feel shy about even sharing the fact that you are ‘writing a book’ with family and friends:—for everyone knows how hard it is to write a book, and you know that, behind their polite smiles of encouragement, your nearest and dearest are doubtful of your staying power.

As I say in the video above, writing and publishing a book is like ‘climbing a mental Everest’, and most of the time that you are climbing it, you still feel as though you are pottering around base camp.

The writing life is more than simply putting words on a page—and what if the words you do manage to put down are no good?

Probably the better part of writing is not writing at all but dealing with rejection—the rejection we make of our own bad writing; the slighting sneers with which our grand ambitions to write a book are greeted by family and friends; the politely deprecating rejection slips which dismiss our entire efforts.

Paradoxically, writing is a rather introverted activity, and yet it is one of the most self-exposing activities an introvert can perform—and therefore one of the most fraught with potential rejection.

But despite its introverted nature, there’s a certain ‘performative’ aspect to writing.  Indeed, being a published ‘author’ is the performative side of a writer’s life.

Your book is the stage upon which you enact all the parts, so it’s perfectly reasonable that you should feel a little ‘stage fright’ when you turn up to the blank page.  If you’re feeling ‘writer’s block’, it’s simply the writer’s stage fright, the dread of giving a bad performance.

Fortunately, self-publishing allows you the greatest latitude to control your stage and your performance.  In the video I state my earnest belief, which has attended me since my earliest days as a writer, to wit:—that the book (to borrow Richard Wagner’s term) should be the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’—‘the total work of art’ of its author.

To continue the Wagner analogy, self-publishing allows you the scope to make your book your Bayreuth—not just a stage, but a whole theatre devoted to you, one in which you can control every aspect of the production.

But the problem with having such scope for total control is that most writers don’t have the requisite skills to handle it well.  Despite its venerability, the printed book is still the most technically complex analogue knowledge technology humanity has ever produced.  As any writer who sets sail on the hazardous seas of self-publishing for the first time will attest, the number of things you have to consider, the number of choices you have to make when publishing your own book is intimidating.

There’s the editing and revising and proofreading, the layout and formatting of the text and illustrations, graphic design and typesetting.  Dealing with the vexing issue of the cover alone will take you almost as long as writing the book—and is just as important as the words behind it.

Indeed, the two categories of problem which the virgin authorpreneur typically faces may be filed under two heads: ‘words’ and ‘images’.

As an Associate Member of the Institute of Professional Editors (IPEd), I can handle the words, bien entendu.  But what makes the Artisanal Desktop Publishing service I provide to my clients original is the instinct I have for the visual, for the ‘readability’—(as important as the legibility of the words on the page)—associated with good graphic design.

It would seem in life that one is either more orientated towards words or towards images, but rarely are the two combined.  Yet the ability to think about a book visually, in terms of its graphic and material design, is key to the successful communication of its ostensible content—your writing—to the reader.

As I explain in this video, I’ve been making books since I was a little boy.  It’s what I always wanted to do, so it’s perhaps natural that I should be able to think in both dimensions.  And certainly sharing your work in a supportive environment with an editor who is not just a fellow writer, but is someone who understands the total process of self-publishing your book thanks to long experience of his own, gives you confidence that all aspects of your performance will ultimately do you justice.

I’ve been to the summit of that mental Everest five times now, and I’m slogging my way up the slope for a sixth pass.  As a genuine introvert and someone with a reputation for being a ‘perfectionist’ when it comes to grinding out diamond-cut words, what I find the most ‘performative’ aspect of being a writer is releasing my inner Flaubert momentarily, swallowing my stage fright and allowing you to see inside my Artisanal Desktop Publishing process in some of my videos.

In Brisbane and at Docklands I shared with you a couple of excerpts from my current work in progress, words which are less than perfect by comparison to future versions of same I may share with you in revised drafts.  But I think it’s interesting as a document, particularly in the video format, to see how those impalpable and ethereal things, words, evolve into a plastic object you can hold and weigh in your hand.  I plan to bring you a third instalment shortly, exposing yet another sin-tillating aspect of the erotic (mis)adventure I’ve been tantalizing you with.

What do you think?  Do you find it hard to share what you are working on?  Do you feel as though you will never get to the summit?  Or are you looking forward expectantly to the day when you can finally hold your thoughts in your hand?

I look forward to hearing how you’re going with your own writing in the comments below.

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The Skipping Girl, Abbotsford, photographed by Dean Kyte.
The Skipping Girl, Abbotsford.  Shot on Ilford XP2 Super 400 film.

One of the icons that Melbourne is known for is “The Skipping Girl”, Australia’s first animated neon sign, which formerly advertised the Skipping Girl Vinegar brand.

From the Art Deco rooftop of a converted factory in Victoria street, Abbotsford, she jumps rope over 16,000 times per night, and one of the most romantic things to do in Melbourne at night is to take the route 12 or 109 trams to Victoria Gardens and watch this 84-year-old icon repeat her nightly performance.

An icon is an image, a symbol which substitutes for an absent other whose spirit is supposed to reside in the icon, animating it, and receiving the adoration which would otherwise go directly to the sacred personage, if they were present.

It’s interesting, therefore, to reflect that the Skipping Girl, who was once the icon associated with a brand of vinegar which is no longer manufactured, has become the genius loci of Melbourne.  But when I took the ‘flânograph’ above with my vintage Pentax K1000, she did not represent for me so much a symbol of ‘old Melbourne’ which had disappeared, but someone who had disappeared, an absent other I will always associate with the Skipping Girl.

As I explain in the video below, the first time I encountered the Skipping Girl, I was stepping off the 109 tram with a Dutch girl I had picked up eight hours earlier.  We were about to go upstairs to her apartment, across the road in Richmond, and make love.

When I saw that neon icon beating time against the night, it was like seeing an X on a treasure map: this icon of Melbourne would always be, for me, a perpetual monument to a personal conquest, marking the spot of my greatest victory in Daygame.

In his essay “The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape” (1982), documentary filmmaker Patrick Keiller describes the flâneur as a literary motif signifying two types of experience.  Following Schiller’s distinction between the naïve and sentimental poet, I think we can summarize Keiller’s two types of flâneur as likewise being ‘naïve’ and ‘sentimental’.

The ‘naïve flâneur’ is more like the classical, nineteenth-century dandy conceived by Baudelaire.  As Keiller says, he ‘takes the city as his salon’.  He’s a romantic adventurer—a Daygamer, in essence—whose ‘chance encounters are largely with people’ rather than with those architectural citizens of a city, buildings and monuments.  Whatever dreamlike quality there is in the encounter between this flâneur and the city derives from ‘his surrender to the randomness of urban life.’

The ‘sentimental flâneur’, en revanche, is a solitary dériveur who drifts through the city as though it were a petrified dream, experiencing the ‘long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens’ which renders the banal street marvellous.  As Keiller says, this flâneur ‘may meet others, he may fall passionately in love, but this is not his motive, it merely enhances his experience by enabling it to be shared.’

As a Melbourne flâneur, I have always felt like a synthesis of these two figures, but tending more towards the latter.  I can ‘do’ Daygame, I can take adventitious advantage of the randomness of urban life to seize a romantic encounter; but, being a genuine introvert, I am more constitutionally inclined towards solitary drifting through the externalized ‘Forms’ of my thought which streets, parks, statues, monuments and buildings seem to symbolize for me.

Keiller cites Surrealist poet Louis Aragon, who, in Le paysan de Paris (1926), describes this paradoxical sensation of seeming to experience the platonic forms of things embodied in the constitutive elements of the city.

‘The way I saw it,’ Aragon writes, ‘an object became transfigured: it took on neither the allegorical aspect nor the character of the symbol, it did not so much manifest an idea as constitute that very idea.  Thus it extended deeply into the world’s mass…’

For Aragon, this sensation was a presentiment of ‘a feeling for nature’, but it would be more specific to say that it was a feeling for the ambiguity of urban nature.

‘I acquired the habit of constantly referring the whole matter to the judgement of a kind of frisson which guaranteed the soundness of this tricky operation,’ Aragon writes.

This ‘frisson’, as Keiller observes, is not dissimilar from that feeling of ‘rightness’ a photographer intuitively senses immediately before he presses the shutter release button.  This sensation is the moment when a swatch of street cuts itself out of the banal tableau of urban nature and quadrates itself in the abstract frame of a mental viewfinder as an ‘image’, as something marvellously photogenic.

The sentimental flâneur, Keiller contends, carries a camera to record these marvellous transfigurations.  But, sentimental soul that I am, when I went back to photograph the Skipping Girl, nearly a year after my conquest of the Dutch girl, I was not photographing the Skipping Girl and her miraculous transformation of the night.

I was attempting to photograph the absence of the Dutch girl, for whom she was an icon.

In his book with Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling: A Possible Theory of Photography (1982), John Berger writes that ‘[b]etween the moment recorded and the present moment of looking at the photograph, there is an abyss.’  It is an abyss of absence, of ambiguity, which carries with it ‘a shock of discontinuity’.

‘The ambiguity of a photograph does not reside within the instant of the event photographed,’ Berger writes.  ‘The ambiguity arises out of that discontinuity which gives rise to … [t]he abyss between the moment recorded and the moment of looking.’

In my ‘flânograph’ of the Skipping Girl, that abyss was doubled:—for there would be an abyss between the moment of looking at the developed photograph and the moment I was now recording, just as there was, for me, an abyss between the moment I was recording and the moment the photograph was intended to record, some ten months earlier.

As a writer, I have long played with the idle idea (impossible to realize) of writing a book completely without words.  The flânograph of the Skipping Girl was one of a series of photographs I took with my battered Pentax for a ‘picture book’ I intended to compose for my little niece, a wordless collection of black and white images of things and places I had encountered in my flâneries, and which, in their silent ambiguity, might give a child an ineffable, inenarrable sense of the life of an uncle she had never met.

Was there an enduring, impalpable resonance of the unseen, unknown and unknowable event sensible, apprehensible by the viewer of the photograph of the Skipping Girl, démeublé of its ostensible subject, the Dutch girl?  Could the feeling—menacing; enigmatic; melancholy—of this particular square of urban nature—what we might call ‘the Spleen of Melbourne’—‘speak for itself’, eloquently and without words?

These were the questions I wanted answers to.  And like Eugène Atget, of whom Walter Benjamin said that he photographed the empty streets of Paris as though they were ‘scenes of crime’, I went back and photographed the scenes of my Melburnian conquests—the Skipping Girl, a sodden Windsor place, a certain tree in the Carlton Gardens—now eerily empty of myself and the lovers of a moment who had left mortal wounds in my heart.

This feeling for the menacing, enigmatic, melancholy ambiguity of urban nature which precedes the click of the shutter; this ineffable, inenarrable frisson is what I call ‘flânography’, and it’s something other than photography—something more than merely ‘writing with light’.

It’s a sensitivity to the absent, the invisible, the unspeakable.  It’s the poetic cry of the silent image which establishes historical evidence of the ‘baffling crime’ which is the  personal ‘situation of our time’, and which the asphalt jungle gives colour and cover to.

If there is a ‘noirishness’ in the flânograph of the Skipping Girl, it is because, when I look back on my brief encounter with the Dutch girl over that abyss of ambiguity which it records, I feel (as I do after all my amours) like the victim of a ‘baffling crime’ at the hands of a femme fatale.

Like a consummate con artist who gets his pocket picked, I gamed her and ended up getting gamed by her.

When writing with light starts to become ‘poetic’ instead of merely prosaic; when the weak intentionality that a photographer possesses to express himself through a box is leveraged to the maximum, such that the urban landscape is transfigured and transformed into an image that is personally expressionistic, then photography starts to become ‘flânography’.

If you are a photographer and would like to explore how I can provide you with bespoke assistance in sensitively curating your work into an artisanal-quality book through provision of my Artisanal Desktop Publishing service, I invite you to download this brochure, or to contact me directly.

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Do you crave the personal, intimate experience of curling up with a good book?  How much does the tactility of a book, the pleasure you get from turning its pages, wafting their peculiar perfume, add to the intimacy of hearing its author’s voice whispering in your ear?

How much more connected do you feel to the author when you see his signature on the flyleaf and a personalised message to you in his handwriting?  This book—your personal copy—has passed directly from his hands to yours.

Suppose you knew, moreover, that, in addition to all this, not just the words you are savouring, but the very book you are holding—right down to the choice of the fonts, format and layout—was the effort of one mind and one pair of hands:—How much more intimate and authentic would the experience of enjoying that book be?

Well, when you purchase a book by Dean Kyte, you experience this additional frisson—the delicious knowledge that you are purchasing an ‘artisanal book’ directly from its author, one that comes with an implicit guarantee of ‘artistic authenticity’.

As a writer, my approach has always been to work by hand: as I explain in the video above, I not only write my books by hand, but in my Artisanal Desktop Publishing service, I transform the self-publishing process into a handcrafted one—the craft of making books.

It’s as close as you can get to owning a ‘bespoke’ book, since I do all the work by hand, and there is only one imagination, one pair of eyes, and one pair of hands doing all the work associated with writing, illustrating, designing and publishing the book you hold in yours.

When something is ‘bespoke’, it’s made for one person alone.  Our richest reading experiences feel like this:—it’s as though the writer is crafting a bespoke experience for you alone, fashioning a rich article which clothes your vision to such an extent that when you look up from the page, for a moment you seem to see the world within yourself draped over the world without.

Why is the artisanal approach so important for me as a writer?  Books have always been luxury items.  For centuries, bookcraft was artisanal production, whether the book was a Medieval manuscript illuminated by monks or a Japanese scroll calligraphed by a scholar.

Writers are the noblest mastercraftsmen in that they fashion two objects simultaneously: an abstract æsthetic object, such as a novel or a poem, which also has a tangible, æsthetically pleasing form which human beings have enjoyed for centuries.  Books are perfectly designed to hold words the way a vase holds water.

If you’re a Melbourne writer who wants to know how to publish your own book in an æsthetically pleasing way, I can give you the benefit of my experience, bespoke to your needs, with my Artisanal Desktop Publishing service.

And if you’re a reader anywhere who wants to experience just how intimate the relationship between an author and a reader can be, I invite you to browse my Bookstore or check out my profile on Blurb.

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A few months ago in Brisbane, I shared an extract with you from the book I am writing.  This week on The Melbourne Flâneur, I flâne around Docklands, taking advantage of the warmer weather to sit by the Yarra and read you a new extract.

At this stage, I am approximately 60 per cent of the way through the second draft of the book—which is where the ‘real writing’ occurs.  I don’t write so much as rewrite.

I use a lot of metaphors to describe my approach to writing.  Sometimes I think of it as ‘architectural’, other times as ‘musical’, or even ‘painterly’.  But oftentimes when I think about my process of writing and publishing a book, I compare it to ‘sculpting’.

As demonstrated in the video above, ultimately I am writing thought.  The action of the scene is simple enough: walking downhill at night.  The thoughts that take place on that flânerie, however, are not simple to describe or make intelligible to the reader.

Michelangelo (some of whose sonnets I have translated), said that ‘every block of stone has a statue inside itself’, and that ‘to free the captive / Is all the hand which obeys the intellect may do.’

It is as though I am ‘hewing’ my thoughts out of a block of dense fog in my mind, and it takes several passes with the chisel and the file over successive drafts to sculpt those thoughts into their final, perfect form in words.

If you work from a plan or outline for your book (and you always should), this is like a sculptor’s maquette: it is a skeletal, bare bones structure which represents all the parts of your book and their relations to each other.

Writing your first draft is like modelling in clay: it’s a time to get your hands dirty and play.  I always write the first draft by hand because it allows me to explore the lineaments of my thought, probing and shaping its first vague outlines.

The second draft, as I said, is where the ‘real writing’ takes place.  It is the longest and most difficult part of the process because you have to ‘carve out’ what is vague and implicit in the first draft.

The second draft is about maximal amplification and clarification, so I rewrite my entire book, carving out every detail that I passed over lightly and summarily in the first draft until I’m satisfied that my thought is fully explicated.

In the extract I share with you in the video above, this is the point you find me at with regards to that walk downhill: all the implicit thoughts in back of that simple action are now explicit.

It’s perfectly acceptable to ‘overwrite’ in your second draft: as Michelangelo said, sculpture is the art of subtraction, of ‘taking away’—but you can’t take away words you haven’t written to begin with.

The third draft is about subtracting the inessential, and if you are writing a book for the first time, this is the point where you may consider engaging a professional editor to help you decide what to take away.

All editors have different methodologies, but as you might imagine, with my Artisanal Desktop Publishing service, I tend to regard your words as though they formed an object in space, something I can see ‘in the round’, like a sculpture, and I’m very good at discerning what is inessential and what is core to the structure of your book.

If you enjoy this video and would to see more ‘episodes’ in the future, as I update you on the progress of my next book, taking you inside my Artisanal Desktop Publishing process, I’d appreciate it if you like the video on Vimeo or leave an encouraging comment.  You can also share your own steps to writing a book with me in the comments below.

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Is Melbourne too cold for you right now?  Are you sick of shivering at your desk in Kensington, or feeling uninspired in Flemington?

Sometimes a writer needs new surroundings to feel inspired.  This week, the Melbourne Flâneur takes you on a vicarious visit to the Bendigo Art Gallery, narrating some notes he scribbled down there.

If writing is your hobby, you may often feel uninspired by the everyday.  A useful habit is to take your notebook to an art gallery and describe what you see and the thoughts that works of art inspire in you.

What you are practising here is the discipline of writing.  The trick is to be less concerned with writing sparkling prose than with describing as precisely as possible not merely what the artwork looks like, but the thoughts, feelings and associations it inspires in you.

When it comes to publishing a book for the first time, it’s developing and maintaining this discipline of writing over the long haul that matters—even when you feel uninspired.  A skilful and sensitive editor can always help you to shape the prose, but there must first of all be words on the page to work with.

Like the indefinable frisson you feel before a work of art which inspires you, the experience of working in real life with another writer to shape your words into their perfect form inspires you with the confidence that your book will look its best.

Through his Artisanal Desktop Publishing service, Dean Kyte offers you an authentic artisanal experience, the feeling of confidence that comes from collaborating with a craftsman who cares as much about the perfect presentation of your words as you do.

To experience the real deal and discover how Dean can help you to publish your own book, get in touch with him via the Contact form.

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Street art, Hanna lane, South Melbourne, by Dean Kyte.
Street art, Hanna lane, South Melbourne.  Shot on Kodak T-MAX 400 film.

‘Melbourne style’ is the dogleg laneway off the main thoroughfare of high-street fashion.  It doesn’t think outside the box: it takes the boxes out of the National Gallery of Victoria just up St Kilda road, glues them to a mechanic’s wall, and reimagines them as many pixels adding up to a graffito’d digital daguerreotype.

You don’t have to wander far off the beaten track of the tramline to find Melbourne style.  If you’re heading to South Melbourne Beach, you can roll off the No. 1, turn down a cobbled laneway off Sturt street, and à deux pas, find yourself in this plein air gallery of salon-hung street art.

I stumbled on this cobbled coin one dreary winter afternoon.  It had just rained and the sky was the same colour as the asphalt.  A stiff wind blew me capriciously along a route I hadn’t taken before in my flâneries.

I had four shots left on the roll and didn’t expect to have my æsthetic antennæ tweaked anymore that day when I twigged to this vintage gent redux.

I love it when you turn a corner and Melbourne surprises you with an unexpected spectacle which colourfully interrupts the grey livery.

Melbourne style takes couture out of Chapel street and plunks it in the laneway.

You may be a designer in fashionable Port Phillip looking to publish an elegant portfolio showcasing your couture.  If you’re in fashion, you already know that ‘the Book’ is key to getting through the door.

You require a presentation on paper as bespoke as your own image.  And if you’re used to getting your hands dirty, you know why the artisanal approach matters.  There’s an indefinable yet palpable quality you can’t get but by the skilful application of hand and eye working in unison.

With my Artisanal Desktop Publishing service, I can work with you mano a mano to design and craft a portfolio bespoke to your needs.

If you crave the rare and exotic, treat yourself to the novel experience of working side-by-side with an artisan who brings to the craft of book design the bespoke æsthetic of a tailor.  Contact me today to arrange a discreet and private measure.

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On location at South Bank in Brisbane, Dean reads an excerpt from his book Things we do for Love (2015), available in the Dean Kyte Bookstore.

An audio version of the story is available for purchase on Dean’s Bandcamp page. You can also purchase the eBook/audiobook combo in the Bookstore for the price of the eBook alone.

If you’re in Brisbane right now and would like to book a private measure with me to explore how I can help you to publish your own book through my Artisanal Desktop Publishing service, please send me a message via the Contact form.