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.
The Melbourne Flâneur
What is Melbourne style?
‘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.
Melbourne’s Parisian underbelly
Melbourne transforms itself into a foreign wonderland at night. Armed with my Pentax K1000, I venture forth after-hours to capture ‘a Brassaï moment’—the moment when Highlander lane, between Flinders street and Flinders lane, reminds me of the square Caulaincourt in Paris—the setting of my first book, Orpheid: L’Arrivée (2012).
As a writer, I move from obscurity to clarity. For me, writing is a flânerie through the chiaroscuro of consciousness and unconsciousness. I enjoy the frisson of venturing into dark places which are foreign to me—like alighting from a taxi in a cosmopolitan European locale late at night, not sure where you are, barely speaking the language, some menacing silhouettes in the milieu to greet you.
Before I was ever a Melbourne Flâneur, I was a flâneur in Paris, the Mecca of flânerie. In L’Arrivée I wrote about my experience of feeling both fearful and fearless, arriving alone, late at night, in a small Parisian square in Montmartre. Despite barely speaking the language, I had a strange sprezzatura, a strange confidence in myself—in my mission and message as an artist—going forward.
Do you speak the language of the land? If you are a writer in French, Italian or Spanish, can you make the obscurity of your message clear to readers in English, combining the formal and the vernacular with the bravura of the native-speaker?
With my Bespoke Document Tailoring service, I can help you translate the complexity of your experience into words which allow you to feel heard and understood by your readers.
To explore how I can help you communicate your message with a bespoke approach which complements your literary voice in your native tongue perfectly, go to my Contact form to arrange a discreet and private measure with me.
How a writer thinks
In today’s complicated and highly entangled world, problems are not solved by following straight lines, but by understanding the mysterious web of connections.
You may be a start-up entrepreneur in Carlton with a revolutionary app, but to ensure that your ideas are truly solid going forward, they need to be rigorously challenged by a mind competent to tease out the strands of complexity.
Dean Kyte brings a bespoke approach to the preparation of strategic documentation of high complexity for small businesspeople and individual entrepreneurs in Melbourne.
With his Bespoke Document Tailoring service, Dean will work with you in an intimate, face-to-face setting, helping you to test the architecture of your thought to ensure the logic is truly solid.
His serene and gentle exterior belies an incisive mind. Both a challenging critic and a tactful diplomat, if it doesn’t make sense, Dean will tell you so and work with you until it does. He brings a novelist’s skills to organizing an effective content strategy for you and the art of the poet to articulating your message with eloquent precision.
To learn how Dean Kyte can help you eloquently articulate the complexities of your vision, fill out the Contact form to arrange a private measure with him.
How to paint a picture with words
Persuading a client or investor to share your vision is like seducing a woman: you have to paint a clear picture by using vivid and evocative language which appeals to the emotions of your reader.
In this video, Dean Kyte demonstrates how to paint a vivid picture with words as he reads an extract from his latest work in progress. Still in Brisbane, the Melbourne Flâneur paints an impressionistic snapshot of his thoughts and feelings before Rupert Bunny’s Bathers (1906) in the Queensland Art Gallery, making the painting come vividly to life.
As Dean demonstrates, by tailoring the language of your message precisely to your intended reader, you can make even a restricted format like a text message as vivid and evocative as haïku, striking your reader with an emotional impact which allows her to enter into your experience and share your vision in a way which provokes her to enthusiastically respond.
To find out how Dean can help you distil your message to the same point of vivid clarity with his Bespoke Document Tailoring service, fill out the Contact form to arrange a discreet and private measure with him.
An excerpt from “Things we do for Love”
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.
Very far indeed from imagining
This morning I was re-reading Albertine disparue, by one of my chers maîtres, M. Proust.
One of those gems of perspicacity (either forgotten or unremarked in previous readings) which stand forth from the great forest of his text struck me with its elegant force and I was compelled to attempt the translation of it.
After watching the documentary about the fire at Notre-Dame on 4 Corners last night, the Monsieur’s observation reminded me of the places I knew well on the Île de la Cité and the Rive Gauche.
I never liked Notre-Dame when I lived in Paris: Kilomètre Zéro would always strike me as the epicentre of the touristic ‘cirque parisien’, the place we go to Paris ‘hoping to find’ and ‘giving ourselves such trouble in our attempts to discover’.
Yet when I saw the footage taken from behind the cathedral with the great plume of black smoke rising from the burning spire, I remembered a sketch I had dashed off one dark, overcast afternoon on the pont de la Tournelle.
It was hardly a premonition of future events. Yet life had given me ‘une vue de Notre-Dame de Paris’ which I was very far indeed from imagining.
Brunswick Noir
Mysterious goings-on darken the mean streets of Brunswick West at dawn in this short story written and read by Dean Kyte.
Où est le Flâneur de Melbourne?
Hard at work in Mornington. There is no rest for the wicked, but at least there is coffee.
In a lonely street
A short story in which I speculate on the fate of a character I wrote about as a much younger man—and who continues to haunt me still.
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