Author: nakedcitiesjournal

Naked Cities Journal attempts to bring together a number of passions that have captivated me over a lifetime: a love of exploring the urban landscape and its extraordinarily diverse range of places and spaces; a love of journeys both internal and external; a love of keeping writer’s notebooks; and a love of Urban Studies an intellectual discipline – Marcus D. Niski
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“You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless…”

– Georges Perec in Species of Space and Other Pieces

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Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it ‘creative observation.’ Creative viewing.

– William S. Burroughs

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Virginia Woolf: A ‘Street Haunting’

Have you ever walked along a street and imagined the lives of the strangers that you pass?

In Virginia Woolf’s 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting’, the narrator explores this imaginative act of dipping in and out of people’s minds as they move through the city’s wintry, twilight streets. From prime ministers to the homeless, the narrator examines the city’s inhabitants and the spaces they occupy. ‘What greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality’, the narrator asks, to feel ‘that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others’.

Source: The British Library, 20th Century Literature Collection Items as found at: http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/street-haunting-an-essay-by-virginia-woolf

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Writing About Place and Space

By Marcus D. Niski

One of the things that I have long been captivated by are the elements of place and space. How we ‘see’ the world around us, and how we ‘react’ to it. The pictures we create in our minds that surround our daily lives and how we interpret them. How we react to ‘mundane things’, ‘objects’ and ‘occurrences’ that shape our reality.

My thesis has long been that the increasing pace of our society puts us less in touch with the simple mundane things that are so present in our everyday reality (or should be!). Our media, entertainment, and lives in general have been ‘dumbed down’ to accommodate such rapid exponential change.

Some of the greatest writers – in my opinion – are those who are able to ‘slow us down’ to really focus in on what most people miss: detail through studied observation.

Observation is a skill that can and must be practiced in good literary writing (and in life in general): William S. Burroughs argued that the trade skills of the writer are very similar in fact to the trade skills of the detective or the spy. I think there is a very strong analogy here between the two skill sets.

– Marcus D. Niski,  September 2017

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What is important, it seems to me, is not so much to defend a culture whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract, from what is called culture, ideas whose compelling force is identical to that of hunger.

 – Antonin Artaud

[As quoted in Paul Auster’s The Art of Hunger, Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles, 1992]

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What is an Arcade?

What is an arcade? In its classic sense, the term denotes a pedestrian passage or gallery, open at both ends and roofed in glass and iron, typically linking two parallel streets and consisting of two facing rows of shops and other commercial establishments – restaurants, cafés, hairdressers, etc. “Arcade” is the English name: in French the arcades are known as “passages”, and in German as “Passagen”.

The modern arcade was invented in Paris, and, while the concept was imitated in other cities – there are particularly fine mid-nineteenth century examples in Brussels – the Parisian arcades remain the type of the phenomenon. Benjamin quotes a passage from the Illustrated Guide to Paris, a German publication of 1852, which sums up the arcades’ essence:

“These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble- panelled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of the corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need”.

– Christopher Rollason, The Passageways of Paris: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Contemporary Cultural Debate in the West as found at: http://www.yatrarollason.info/files/BenjaminPassagesYatraversion.pdf  as accessed on 22 September 2017.