A collection of writings about place space writing and art …
Where am I? An 8×10 square room with a feeling of no air. White walls with dirt marks caused by the edge of my dirty feet mirroring an eeriness inside my mind. The bright white light blinds me for a millisecond and then I see again. A table of inferior quality stands on its four […]
via [66] Writing Exercise: “In A Regretful Room” — Smoke words every day.
Back when Los Angeles was younger, at the dawn of the automobile age after World War I, tires, gasoline and cars were sold in buildings and displayed in a manner befitting a jewelry store. Among the rich archives of the USC Digital Library, are photographs of local businesses, who put extraordinary artistry into their signage and architecture […]
Sometimes you see a picture and you can tell that something’s missing, but you don’t know what it is …
Or you could try to fill the emptiness with something you love, as I love Walker Percy’s renderings in The Moviegoer:
The street looks tremendous. People on the far side seem tiny and archaic, dwarfed by the great sky and the windy clouds like pedestrians in old prints.
…
By Marcus D. Niski
From cradle to the grave we engage with places of differing kinds for differing reasons for better or for worse: places of horror and wonderment, places of joy and sorrow, places to rest, places to work, places that lift us up and places that bring us down, places of lightness and darkness: so many places inhabit our world…
Public Squares
Hospitals
Quadrangles
Churches
Prisons
Rooms
Universities
Cemeteries
Hotels
Asylums
Fields
Hills
Valleys
Dales
Laneways
Fjords
Escarpments
[MN] September, 2017
By Marcus D. Niski
In a dilapidated hotel famously dubbed The Beat Hotel by its colourfully eccentric inhabitants, a coalescence of some of the Beat generation’s most important protagonists came together under one roof to push forward the frontiers of literature, painting and psychic awareness.
In an extraordinary outburst of creative energy, Gregory Corso wrote some of his most important poetry there, Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville devised The Dreamachine , Allen Ginsberg worked on Kaddish (dwelling in Room 25), Burroughs and Gysin experimented with the ‘cut-ups’ and Sinclair Beiles – amongst many others who came and went – co-authored Minutes to Go with Burroughs and Gysin amidst a burlesque carnival of creative chaos.
Always seeking new paths of creative inspiration, Burroughs also devised a fascinating observational technique known as ‘taking the colour walk’:
“I was taking a colour walk around Paris the other day … I was walking down the boulevard when I suddenly felt this cool wind on a warm day, and when I looked out I was seeing all the blues in the street in front of me… blue on a foulard…a girls’ blue sweater…blue neon…the blue sky …all the blues. When I looked again, I saw nothing but all the reds…of traffic lights…car lights…a café sign…a man’s nose…”
Excerpt from The Beat Hotel, Barry Miles, Atlantic Books, London, 2000, p 157.
Located at 9, rue Git-le-Coeur and curated under Madame Rachou’s ever watchful eye (circa 1957-1963), The Beat Hotel was undoubtedly one of the great oasis’ of Parisian creativity at that time. Indeed, in this extraordinary interview below, Sinclair Beiles recalls some of the legendary ‘eccentricities’, excesses and antics that took place amidst the dilapidated digs of The Beat Hotel –
More biographical information about Sinclair Beiles – one of the Beat generation’s most neglected, if not tragically overlooked protagonists – can also be found at:
http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/beat/sinclair-beiles-a-man-apart/
– Marcus D. Niski, September 2017
A wonderfully atmospheric short documentary on legendary The Beat Hotel by Riccardo Cremon.
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
1. Knowing
2. Seeing
3. Observing
4. Feeling
5. Smelling
6. Sensing
7. Encountering
8. Absorbing
9. Engaging
10. Living
– Marcus D. Niski, 24 April 2017
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.
Placid small thought no 2
The passage of time (my History) leaves behind a residue that accumulates: photographs, drawings, the corpses of long since dried up felt pens, shirts, non-returnable glasses and returnable glasses, cigar wrappers, tins, erasers, postcards, books, dust and knickknacks: this is what I call my fortune.
–Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
Naked Cities Journal 
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