Tag: Follow Me, My Lovely…

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The Melbourne Flâneur returns to Bellingen, NSW, and, in this lyrical prose poem enhanced with Super 8 film footage, ponders a flâneurial figure in the landscape even more conspicuous than himself—‘the Mem Hall’.

When God decides my days are done, perhaps then He’ll allow me to settle in Bellingen.  Perhaps then He’ll permit me to be as permanent as that pile, the hall in Hyde Street whose peachcoloured walls, for a hundred years, have overlooked it all—even my errances and romances.

At times my eyes gloss the Memorial Hall with the memorious glaze des jours perdus, and the faded veneer of flâneurial souvenirs recover their lost colours.

For we have both been secret historians of this place, observant actors in the life of Hyde Street.  His soldierly, literary footprint is sole and secular and unerasable while mine have been many, mobile and cancellable.

A holy light dawns about his walls and whole falls of buried memory cascade out of obscurity for me.

I hear an aura lingering in Maam Gaduying, scene of solitary sittings in wintry dusks, of escalations of les dames, things I’ve written about or hidden histories I am yet to write, but which the Mem Hall, whole library of unfiled memories, has watched, his façade regarding me as I act out my hours of drama in the Meeting Place Park.

The pillared bras of his façade have embraced it all; the corniced brows of his windowed yeux have watched me curiously through the years.  I’ve read my Parisian poèmes on his scène, and opposite, au parc, I’ve acted out my Parisian vie de flâneur in Bello’s narrow boulevard de Hyde Street.  For there is une autre espèce de flâneur—rooted, loitering—and the Mem Hall, in his commanding prospect de la rue, epitomizes him.

Perhaps one day mes os, in Bello, will be as permanent as the Mem Hall’s walls.

— Dean Kyte, “The Memorial Hall”

When duty called me up to the North Coast for two weeks in February, it had been twenty months since I had last seen Bellingen and a lot had happened during that time—very little of it unambiguously positive.

I dare say that the lifestyle of flânerie, seeking to fly by the nets of society at every turn, made the pandemic a more uniquely painful event for someone like myself who is both a Melburnian by election and a flâneur by inevitability.

And while I seemed, despite my lifestyle of country-wide travel, to come through the pandemic without either the CV or the vaccine ever touching me, the years 2020 through 2022 seem to run together for me in a lasting mental fog, leaving a scar on my life from which I’m still recovering.

Hence Bellingen in June of 2022, at the time when the images above were shot on Super 8 and digital video, seemed a very distant place when I saw the Memorial Hall for the first time in its new blue-and-cream livery in February.

Now I am coming rapidly—sadly—to the end of two months spent at Urunga, the town next door to Bello, which has allowed me to get across on a few occasions to the little town which ranks easily for me with Paris and Melbourne as a world capital of flânerie.

There was one Sunday in June 2022, just before I was due to depart Bellingen, when I spent a cartridge of Kodak Vision3 50D Super 8 film on two visions typical of the years I lived in Bello, including the Memorial Hall—affectionately known by the locals as ‘the Mem Hall’.

I had mentally budgeted out the three-and-a-half minutes of film available on the cartridge and knew exactly what shots I wanted from the two locations. And as is my usual practice when working with Super 8, I took back-up shots from the same set-ups using my trusty Olympus Stylus digital camera and recording location sound with my TASCAM digital sound recorder.

The only issue with the Mem Hall location, shot from the corner of Maam Gaduying, the ‘Meeting Place Park’ in front of the Bellingen Library, is that, at the time of my holiday in June 2022, temporary fencing garnished with a dirty great banner advertising Coffs Harbour Demolitions was set up before the doors of the Mem Hall.

Were they going to pull down our beloved, historic Mem Hall?

Fortunately not.

It was about to undergo renovation—including a new paint job—and although I had to grumpily contend with the banner and fencing prophesying the Mem Hall’s imminent demolition while I was filming it, when, in February, I saw the most iconically ‘Bellingen’ piece of architecture in Hyde Street for the first time in twenty months, now cream and blue instead of the surreal shades of rosy peach and apricot I had always known it as, I was glad that I had had an opportunity, on my last trip, to shoot it on Super 8 as I remembered it and had always experienced it—banner, fencing, and all.

This is not to cast shade on the new façade: I was blown away by the cream and blue. It gives the Mem Hall a more ‘Mediterranean’—rather than tropical—feel, and I actually prefer the new colour scheme.

But on Super 8, cream and blue would certainly not have come out as spectacularly as that peachy orange directly taking the rays of a Sunday afternoon in winter, reminding me, under the hybrid digital treatment I give those shots in the video above, of afternoons I spent sunning myself—gelidly, it seemed—in the Meeting Place Park.

For all the pseudo-Moorish intimations of the Mediterranean the new paint job gives it, whether in cream and blue or a rosy peach and apricot, the most iconically ‘Bellingen’ building in Hyde Street still manages to be marvellously surreal.

We can see the resulting building, a weird exercise in inclusiveness, and an attempt to reconcile irreconcilable functions: a library, a cinema, a dance hall, a theatre, an auditorium, a kitchen, a tea room, toilets, a war memorial and whatever other use you can make of it. Perhaps, in an exaggerated way, it reminds us that all buildings are like this. But at various meetings or in preparation for them people must have sketched designs that included space for the Literary Institute and library, absorbed the functions of the old School of Arts, made ‘provision of exclusive rooms for the use of returned soldiers’, tried to placate the view that ‘there was no form of sacrifice whatever about a hall and picture show as a memorial’. And in these drawings they would have accommodated or got rid of existing makeshift structures like the picture theatre and the dance floor. Rather than the result of a collaborative process consummated by a set of architectural drawings, it seems like the Hall designed and built itself in a self-steering process that went on over the heads of the individuals involved, like a demented version of Adam Smith’s guiding hand.

— Ross Macleay, “The Memorial Hall”, On, in, from, over, Bellingen (2013, p. 149)

The prose-poetic commentary to the video above falls into that category of my œuvre I am now consciously styling as ‘flâneries’—literary peregrinations through sensibility, variously poetic, essayistic or fictional, which arise from my wider wanderings through this country, outside the Melbourne which forms the geographic basis for the prose poetry in The Spleen of Melbourne.

And though it probably sounds like a scoffable claim to mention the name of Bellingen (a town which, even in this country, few people have heard of) alongside such world-class centres of flânerie as Paris and Melbourne, I mean the claim quite seriously.

As much as Paris and Melbourne, Bellingen stands at the absolute centre of my literary life, and I would not be the writer and filmmaker I am today but for thirty months I lived there between 2014 and 2016.

While certain ‘regional writers’ become poetic spokesmen for a place, unofficial laureates of certain cities, communicating the genius loci to readers further afield, I am hard pressed to think of another writer for whom the specificity of place and time is as salient as it is to my work, and yet who has as wide an experience of geographically specific places and times.

Thus, while there was a ‘Gold Coast period’ of my literary life, and there has been ‘Parisian’ and ‘Melburnian’ phases, there has also been the ‘Bellingenian period’, and my years in Bellingen stand in respect to the Melburnian period as my years on the Gold Coast stand with respect to Paris.

Which is to say that Bellingen did not quite ‘complete’ me as a flâneurial writer and filmmaker, but that it is the place, like Paris, where I had the first opportunity to practically implement the evolving principles of my æsthetic lifestyle philosophy of flânerie—the praxis of a theory I had developed to a certain point of refinement in other landscapes, at other times of my literary life.

In the flâneurial video essay “On having left, but not yet having arrived”—also partly shot on Super 8—I say that Bellingen was ‘the scene of my longestlasting happiness’: splenetic, ennuyé, utterly Baudelairean soul that I am, never was I more consistently happy in my life than during the years I lived in Bellingen.

Only Paris approached it for the number of ‘jours parfaits’ I spent there.

Hence they are, though hemispheres apart, elliptically linked on the prime meridian of flânerie: these are the epicentres of a new and fruitful æsthetic life.

When I left Paris, I wept for weeks like a man who had lost the love of his life—and indeed I had, having seen—in the arms of a Parisienne—a vision of holy wholeness in my dying hours there which I have committed the rest of my life to prophesying and proselytizing.

When I left Bellingen for Melbourne, it was on account of a woman I could no longer bear to see in the Meeting Place Park, or at the IGA, in company of another man, and although I went forward with excitement to the next scene of my literary life, I carried as much buried mourning for the woman—and for Bello—as I had done for Paris and the Parisienne.

There are two paradoxical modes of Parisian flânerie, the wandering walk and the lingering loiter, both of which allow observation of the life of the street.

And as I say in the video above, if, in my years of living in Bellingen, I made a Parisian boulevard of Hyde Street in my dandiacal circuit up and down it, the Mem Hall, in its vantage-point overlooking a particularly animated corner of Bello’s main street, represented, in its outrageous livery of peach and apricot, the other pole of flânerie, observing the spectacle of the passers-by rather than being itself an active, ambulatory participant in that spectacular parade.

Equally, the Mem Hall observed me, many times a day, swanning past its portals in both directions. It had the privilege of observing me doing so at all hours of the day and night in those years, and not infrequently, in those endless hours of happiness, in the midst of some flâneurial experience—often with a woman—that would afterwards find its permanent record in my writing.

It was past the Mem Hall, for instance, that I marched the beautiful, enigmatic Emma in Follow Me, My Lovely… (2016), and it was within sight of the Mem Hall, at the corner of Bridge Street, that I first attempted to ‘mash a pash out of her’.

We set out, manoamano, shouldertoshoulder in the cold, clear air of 3:30 a.m. I built a little light rapport with her by laying out the thumbnail version of how I came to be in Bello, but I was tired of unwinding that yarn and didn’t do it as well as I might have. At the corner of Ford Street, we turned right onto the main drag and walked along the brickpaved sidewalk fronting the park.

…

In retrospect, it seems to me that there had been enough time in the space of that short block to build sufficient rapport with Emma in order for her to feel comfortable with me, yet I couldn’t say just when I had first become aware that I would have to make my move. I think I only became conscious that the moment of truth was fast approaching and I would have to physically turn her steps towards the river when we passed the Mem Hall.

— Dean Kyte, Follow Me, My Lovely… (2016, pp. 34-6)

In Follow Me, My Lovely… the Mem Hall plays a cameo rôle, having been, before the action of the story begins, the place where I first espied Emma at the Barefoot Boogie, a dance party that used to take place there on the night of the full moon during the years when I lived in Bello.

And in another reminiscence of my years in Bello, a longer work, as yet unfinished, called “Sentimental Journey”, the Mem Hall plays a more salient part. It’s the place where my tale begins, when, in the hours before I am due to get on an overnight train to Brisbane, I see Polanski’s La Vénus à la fourrure (2013) there, an event which, by obscure tangents among the degrees of separation in my rather extensive social network in Bellingen, leads me unexpectedly into the arms of another woman.

She plunged her arm into mine and we rounded the corner into Hyde Street….

While she jawed, I cast a cautious slant around as we stepped off the kerb in front of the post office: beside us, Bridge Street was an empty corridor of darkness illuminated by a solitary streetlamp at the other end of Lavenders Bridge.  Across Hyde Street, a lonely brother to it loafing in front of the Mem Hall craned its neck over the main drag, the rose façade lit a livid orange by its yellow glare.

If anywhere in the world was a more romantic playground for seduction than Bello at night, I hadn’t yet experienced it.

We forded Bridge Street and regained the kerb—the kerb where I had tried to mash a pash out of Emma and had told her to come back to my place.  We passed it, walking through those ghosts, and changed tracks, shunting onto the spur of footpath leading into the Meeting Place Park.  A trio of lamps, spaced out in a loping curve, followed the line of the wide brick path sweeping round to the library and council buildings.  Their ramrodstraight figures picked out among the trunks of the eucalypts, almost as straight, on the green sward made the park seem vaguely like an image by Brassaï, reminding me of Paris.

At a lonely hour in the early evening, I sometimes liked to sit here alone, watching the traffic roil around the intersection as I huddled against the cold on the pew in front of the historical museum.  I scoped it out now as a potentially discreet venue for escalation: a lampadaire planted in the Lunchbox Garden in front of the council offices cast an oblique, chiaroscuro glare on that corner.  It wasn’t mood lighting, but it did raise some harsh shadows, and if we huddled at one end of the pew, we should be reasonably protected from view of the street by the corner of the red telephone box and the extension of the Neighbourhood Centre.

— Dean Kyte, “Sentimental Journey”

As I say in the video essay above, both of us, the Mem Hall and myself, have been secret historians of Bellingen, memorious flâneurial observers of otherwise unremarked moments in the life of Hyde Street. The Mem Hall has watched me conducting my vie de flâneur just as I have watched the colourful characters in Bello’s streets.

And I think it is no geographic accident of synchronicity that the Mem Hall, the original ‘literary institute’ of Bellingen, faces the present town library, for as I intimate in the video essay, the building seems to me a vast cabinet of unfiled memories, leaves of time—so sheer as to be invisible—of all it has witnessed in its century of life, the secret history of the town which no one yet has had the soul and vision, the heart and spirit of service to properly write.

As I said in a previous article on Bellingen, a few well-known men of letters have, for a season of their lives, made a home for themselves in Bello, and by far the most famous of these writers is Peter Carey.

Carey, who lived here in the eighties as a tree-changing refugee from Sydney, sets Oscar and Lucinda (1988) in the vicinity of the Gleniffer Hall, but Carey’s historical novel lies well beyond what Henry James calls ‘the visitable past’—the rememberable history of one’s own lifetime and experience.

As the young James, flush from his first adult experience of the Roman relics, wrote his sister Alice, unless one’s mind is veritably sagging beneath the weight of material facts about the subject, historical fiction, for a novelist, is the least worthwhile pursuit: ‘The present and the immediate future seem to me the best province of fiction—the latter especially—the future to which all our actual modern tendencies and leanings seem to build a sort of material pathway.’

As far I know, the high-flying Carey has written nothing to commemorate ‘the modern tendencies and leanings’ of his time in Bellingen, one of the most artistically fruitful places on earth, the very Mecca, in my view, of a global ‘Vita Nuova’ towards which Bellingen, in its present and by its example, builds a material pathway.

I take it as a point of pride that, as the least well-known among the men the letters who have made a temporary life for himself in the landscape of this ‘Promised Land’, I have been the most committed to memorializing the visitable past of my experience in these climes.

And as an unofficial historian of the unnoticed hours of Bellingen life, I see a co-conspirator to my project in the architectural figure of the Mem Hall itself, who reminds me of the eponymous character in Jorge Luis Borges’ ficción “Funes, el memorioso” (1942).

Nosotros, de un vistazo, percibimos tres copas en una mesa; Funes, todos los vástagos y racimos y frutos que comprende una parra. Sabía las formas de las nubes australes del amanecer del 30 de abril de 1882 y podía compararlas en el recuerdo con las vetas de un libro en pasta española que sólo había mirado una vez y con las líneas de la espuma que un remo levantó en el Río Negro la víspera de la acción del Quebracho. Esos recuerdos no eran simples; cada imagen visual estaba ligada a sensaciones musculares, térmicas, etcétera. Podía reconstruir todos los sueños, todos los entre sueños.

Dos o tres veces había reconstruido un día entero; no había dudado nunca, pero cada reconstrucción había requerido un día entero. Me dijo: ‘Más recuerdos tengo yo solo que los que habrán tenido todos los hombres desde que el mundo es mundo’. Y también: ‘Mis sueños son como la vigilia de ustedes’. Y también, hacia el alba: ‘Mi memoria, señor, es como vaciadero de basuras’. Una circunferencia en un pizarrón, un triángulo rectángulo, un rombo, son formas que podemos intuir plenamente; lo mismo le pasaba a Ireneo con las aborrascadas crines de un potro, con una punta de ganado en una cuchilla, con el fuego cambiante y con la innumerable ceniza, con las muchas caras de un muerto en un largo velorio. No sé cuántas estrellas veía en el cielo.

At a glance, we notice three glasses on a table; Funes, all the stems and branches and fruits that make up a vine. He knew the shapes of the southern clouds at dawn on 30 April 1882 and could compare them in his memory with the grain of a book bound in Spanish leather he saw only once, and with the lines of foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho. These were not simple memories: every visual image was linked to sensations—muscular, thermal, and so on. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his dreams within dreams.

Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day. He had never hesitated, but each reconstruction had required a whole day. He told me: ‘On my own I have more memories than all the men since the beginning of the world have had.’ And also: ‘My dreams are like the insomnia you fellows have.’ And also this, towards dawn: ‘My memory, sir, is like a garbage dump.’ A circle on a blackboard, a right-angled triangle, a rhombus; these are shapes that we can fully visualize. To Ireneo, the same thing happened with a colt’s wild mane, with the very tip of a knife, with the protean flames and innumerable ashes, with the many faces round a dead man at a large wake. I don’t know how many stars he saw in the sky.

— Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes, el memorioso” (1942 [my translation])

Like Ireneo Funes, the Memorial Hall, to me, is infinitely memorious of Bellingen. It has seen—in the most exquisite detail—everything that has passed before it in its century of life.

It is truly a book of days.

And although, in its infinite discretion, it does not speak of what it has seen as I have privately journaled it, the Mem Hall remembers everything that has passed before or within it—including my presence on its stage, reciting my Parisian poems at the annual Poetry Slam, and upon the stage of the Meeting Place Park opposite, solitudinously sunning myself at dusk or making out with some dame after dark.

But I’m not entirely alone in this self-imposed project to be a flâneurial historian of Bello, the memorious recorder of its forgotten hours. One local writer I have respect for, and who seems to be involved in an analogous, albeit more ‘official’ project of public memoration, is Ross Macleay, one half of the North Bank Institute, Bellingen’s oldest—and smallest—think tank.

In “The Memorial Hall”, one of the essays in his collection On, in, from, over, Bellingen (2013), Macleay tells us that the ‘Soldiers Memorial Hall and Literary Institute’ opened to great civic fanfare on Wednesday 19 January 1921 with (among other visual confections) a presentation of Charlie Chaplin’s comedy “Sunnyside” (1919).

Describing the cinematic bill of fare on that night in his essay, Macleay explains how ‘the Mem Hall’ as Bellingenians know it today had not even been built on that fateful date, the ‘Grand Opening Night’ of the Bellingen Memorial Hall Pictures being a fundraising event to build the pile on Hyde Street.

The Memorial Hall began its life as a war between two motions passed at two meetings. At the first on 4 December 1918 a motion was passed to build a War Memorial in Bellingen at a cost of no more than ₤500, and a committee of twenty was formed. At the second on 6 June 1919 the original motion was cancelled, a substantial majority voted to build a memorial hall instead, and the committee, trimmed from twenty to seventeen, was given the job of raising funds. The building of the hall would be a war on two fronts, the first was against those who thought a monument was more fitting for military commemoration than the frivolity of a pleasure dome (plus easier and cheaper). The second was the long campaign to raise the money.

— Macleay (2013, pp. 147-8)

The money came, as Macleay tells us, from the showing of movies, and on 19 January 1921, the good burghers of Bello crowded onto the site of the present Mem Hall, under an open-air shed set up as insurance against the rain, to see Charlie Chaplin, Sessue Hayakawa, and a Pathé newsreel at ‘two shillings for a chair up the back, one for down the front on a log, and children [at] half price.’

Thus, from its inception, the Mem Hall, doing surreal double service as a perpetual monument commemorating local casualties in the Great War and as a meeting place for the celebration of living culture in a small town, secularly profaned itself as a picture show.

My first experience of the Mem Hall was when my friends dragged me along to see a John Pilger documentary in the great barn behind the façade—a fragrant experience spiced with the familiar scent of the chai tea concession set up on two trestle tables on the eastern side of the salle.

John Pilger, chai on the side, and barefoot kids running wild: that sums up both the experience of the Mem Hall and of Bello—of the Mem Hall’s significance to Bello life as a communal meeting place. It was at that screening, as I now recall, that I met several of the people who would become significant to me in those years, and among whose ranks, in my hats and suits, I would be the most unlikely ‘hippie’ by comparison.

As I have written in another of my flâneries, ‘the elevating experience of “enlightened” leftwing documentaries spiced with chai tea at the Memorial Hall’ is one of the typical memories I most cherish about Bello.

And that says so much about the centrality of the Mem Hall to Bello life. When I was in Euroa two years ago and attending a presentation of the documentary Happy Sad Man (2018) at the Euroa Community Cinema (which is also housed in the shire hall), the film’s Melbourne-based director, Genevieve Bailey, told the assembled townspeople that she had recently screened her doco at Bellingen, a little town in NSW, she said, not dissimilar to Euroa, and in a hall not unlike the Strathbogie Shire Council building.

As probably the only person in that room besides Ms. Bailey to have an experience of both venues—and then far more extensively, as regards the Mem Hall, than Ms. Bailey herself—I knew in my heart and my gut the visceral truth of the comparison she was making.

I love Bellingen as much as I love Paris—and I love these places as much, and in the same way, as some of the dearest women I have known.

And as I say in the video above, one day I hope my flâneries will at last be done and I can permanently rest my bones in Bello.

To read more about my flâneurial adventures in Bellingen, you can purchase Follow Me, My Lovely… in the Dean Kyte Bookstore. You can also support my work by purchasing the soundtrack of “The Memorial Hall” for $A2.00 from my artist profile on Bandcamp using the link below.

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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.