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
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
Who, or what, is a flâneur?
By Marcus D. Niski
The flâneur – or the notion of the flâneur – is a creation of the nineteenth century Parisian streets. The flâneur is, by definition, an ‘exemplary stroller’ who strolls though the streets at a pace at which observation becomes the centrepoint of his or her experience.
As Edmund White suggests in his stunningly observant account of the flâneur and the ‘paradoxes of Paris’ *, Walter Benjamin was probably one of the most acute observers of the idea of the flâneur and one of literature’s most important writers in documenting the activities of this unique Parisian creature.
For Benjamin, the flâneur ultimately, is –
“… In search of experience, not knowledge…’ [Edmund White, p47]
The flâneur is also by definition not a tourist or pedestrian eager to rapidly ‘consume’ the landscape, but one who is almost overwhelmed by the delectable possibilities of the urban landscape; so much so that he or she is not really sure where to start or where the journey will take them.
Marcus D. Niski (2011)
* Edmund White, The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris, Bloomsbury, London, 2001.
Ruin — Liminal Narratives
Ruins pose a constant negotiation between glory and dissolution; success and failure; substance and nothingness. They ’embody a set of temporal and historical paradoxes’ (Dillon, p.11). The abandoned warehouse or the tumbledown barn reveal a memory of the past and simultaneously a projection of our own futures. In the medieval motif of The four living […]
Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare.
– Georges Perec ‘Approaches to What?’ in Species of Space and Other Pieces
In the meantime we agreed to forget our cares for the night. We took a little money from our savings and walked to Forty-second Street. We stopped at a photo booth in Playland to take our pictures, a strip shot of four shots for a quarter. We go a hot dog and papaya drink at Benedict’s, then merged with the action. Boys on shore leave, prostitutes, runaways, abused tourists, and assorted victims of alien abduction. It was an urban boardwalk with Kino parlors, souvenir stands, Cuban diners, strip clubs, and late-night pawnshops. For fifty cents, one could slip inside a theatre draped in stained velvet and watch foreign films paired with soft porn.
– ‘Patti Smith’s “Forty Second Street Urban Boardwalk” in: Patti Smith, Just Kids, Bloomsbury, London, 2010, P 107.
The Automat (Defined)
An Automat, Mr. [Neil] Simon wrote in New York magazine, was “a large, rectangular hall, filled with shiny, lacquered tables surrounding a glass booth, where the nimblest fingers on earth dispensed change for a quarter or a dollar in nickels . . . endless nickels, shiny nickels, magical nickels that were slipped into slots on the wall, and before your very eyes, an Open Sesame roll came around the bend of a glass cubicle.”
Playwright Neil Simon describing an Automat in James Barron’s New York Times article, Last Automat Closes, Its Era Long Gone, April 11, 1991, as found at: http://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/11/nyregion/last-automat-closes-its-era-long-gone.html
Place/Space/Writing
How do we live in our cities? How do we meaningfully interact with them in a world ever-increasingly devoted to time-functional tasks and the economic engine that has become the driving force behind all of the world’s great cities?
Our challenge is to slow down, to see and notice our cities and engage with them at the microcosmic level to enjoy the myriad small things that go to make up the joys of urban environment as well as our own habitation within it.
My interest in these questions was profoundly inspired the work of George Perec, most particularly, his brilliant collection of meditations on place and space Species of Spaces and Other Pieces which take us from the street, to the apartment and even to the writing desk in an examination of how we interact with our spaces both public and private.
Perec was a master of what I call ‘writing the mundane’: through taking time to dig deeply into the everyday, to see and notice the world around us with acute attention to detail, Perec becomes a master of taking such seemingly mundane interactions – the objects on my work-table, what I can observe in a public square or street, what I can say about the private spaces that I live in – and turning them into some of the most insightful and imaginative literary depictions of the arts of everyday life.
From the village to the mega-city we live in a kaleidoscope of cultures that are as infinitely diverse as the stories of that diversity which emerge from the streets, lanes, gutters and built environments envelope them.
Naked Cities Journal is about sharing these stories of the minutiae of everyday life from different cultures and different storytellers from around the globe.
Marcus D. Niski, June 2017
The Camera Eye: II – by Marcus D. Niski
Blaise Cendrars: The Poet’s Camera Eye
[Travel Poems; Kodak series]
The camera eye is a technique that uses acute observation as a basis for writing. The camera eye implies taking visual snapshots of scenes from life and transferring those observations into immediate textual portraits of the observed phenomenon.
In its poetic form, the work of Blaise Cendrars is probably one of the best examples of poetry based on exceptional observational attention to detail from scenes observed in life.
In the typically flamboyant style that Cendrars would become famous for throughout his writing life, Cendrars embarked upon a series of poems known as the Kodak Poems (1924) that attempted to employ a technique of ‘verbal photography’ which, as Anne Reverseau* writes, was aimed at “… convey[ing] a cinematographic or photographic model [of poetry] … we are reading descriptive poetry and vignettes by a writer-reporter. The “documentary” aesthetic thus sets the “horizon of expectation” for these poems…”
Whilst Cendrars was controversially accused of in fact using a montage of cut-up texts plagiarized “…from the adventure novels of Gustave Le Rouge…” – the ruse later allegedly admitted by Cendrars himself (which is typical of Cendrars’ own mischievous self-mythologizing as a writer) – Cendars nevertheless demonstrates himself to be an uncanny master of the use of visual imagery or ‘cinepoetics’ in his texts whether using his own words or allegedly appropriating those of another writer (Kathy Acker is worth mentioning here as a contemporary reference point for similar controversies embroiling her work).
The Kodak poems saga no doubt represents just one of the many imbroglios that Cendrars was involved in throughout his charismatic and often turbulent career: indeed, he seemed to either specialize in, or actively court, controversy throughout much of his life. I have always been intrigued by Cendrars’ work as well as the scholarship surrounding it, and accordingly, I have extracted below an excellent piece of writing on the Kodak poems which deals with some of the fascinating mechanics of the Kodak poems controversy.
The Kodak Poems Saga…
In her highly engaging essay on Cendrars and the ‘Kodak saga’ entitled, Kodak Modernism: Avant-Garde Poetry in the Age of Popular Photography [1] Elena Gualtieri documents the essential dynamics of the saga involving Cendards and the Kodak company itself over the use of the trademark name ‘Kodak’ –
In June 1924 Blaise Cendarrs was visiting Brazil when he received the first edition of his latest collection of poems, Kodak. Published by Stock with a cover design by Frans Masereel and frontispiece portrait by Francis Picabia , Kodak comprised sixty-three poems that looked like the simple vignettes caught by the poet during his travels to the U.S and beyond, and put down with the apparent immediacy and directness of a tourist’s photographic record…
As Gualtieri goes on the explain, it was here that Cendrars unexpectedly felt the wrath of the Kodak Company in New York who, through their lawyers, took a different view of Cendrars’ creative exploits in using the name Kodak as a direct infringement of their trademark name [!]:
… The poems’ easy charm was, however, lost on the makers of the [sic] Kodak. At the publication of the book, Stock received ‘a notarized letter from the American firm of Kodak Co’ which objected to the unauthorized use of their trademark. The publishers replied that they believed it acceptable ‘to use a commercial name once that name has acquired the sense of an object in everyday language’, and that the company itself had made of the commercial name ‘the synonym of the photographic apparatus that accompanies the traveller’. Their position was that the appearance of Kodak on Cendrars’s title page was effectively proving free publicity for the company. For the Kodak lawyers, though, such unlicensed use of their trademark was ‘on the contrary detrimental to it, because it distracted customers form the precise uses the company’s products sold by their company’. While the company did have the legal power to request that the publication be withdrawn from sale, it eventually settled for the commitment that any subsequent editions of the poems would be published under a different title. **
Cendrars was undoubtedly an extraordinary admix of raconteur, provocateur, self-styled swashbuckling adventurer, but above all, a brilliantly observant poet. He is without doubt one of the great heroes in my literary pantheon and a source of endless inspiration in reading of his adventures both fictive and real.
He was a unique and spirited visionary that will unquestionably continue to inspire and confound many generations of new readers brave enough delve into his exotic and highly eclectic body of work.
*See: ‘Kodak or Documentaires’, Anne Reverseau as found at http://www.litteraturesmodesdemploi.org Viewed 31 May, 2017
** The title was in fact changed to Documentaires (Documentaries)
Editors Note: An excellent critical biographic profile of Cendrars’ kaleidoscopic and sometimes confabulated life can be found within Richard Sieburth’s review of Cendrars’ Oeuvres Autobiographiques Complètes ‘Blaise Cendrars in the sky’ in Time Literary Supplement, n.d [which sadly seems to have disappeared from open access online].
Details of the collection itself can be found at the publishers website at:
See also an excellent interview with Cendrars on The Art of Fiction as appeared in The Paris Review which can be found at: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4388/blaise-cendrars-the-art-of-fiction-no-38-blaise-cendrars
Marcus D. Niski, May 2017
The Camera Eye: I – by Marcus D. Niski
Imagine that you are now a Human Camera …
The Camera Eye
John Dos Passos’ [U.S.A]
John Dos Passos was justifiably lauded as one of the twentieth century’s great American writers. His U.S.A trilogy, in which the stream of consciousness technique known as The Camera Eye can be found, is actually a compendium of three separate novels – The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money — which form a ”collective portrait of America, shot through with sardonic comedy and brilliant social observation.”
Throughout the novel, as the Library of America editorial for the U.S.A trilogy suggests, Dos Passos employs –
A startling range of experimental devices [that] captures the textures and background noises of 20th-century life: “Newsreels” with blaring headlines; autobiographical “Camera Eye” sections with poetic stream-of-consciousness; “biographies” evoking emblematic historical figures like J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, John Reed, Frank Lloyd Wright, Thorstein Veblen, and the Unknown Soldier. Holding everything together is sheer storytelling power, tracing dozens of characters from the Spanish-American War to the onset of the Depression.
The Camera Eye, to me, represents a metaphor for exactly what it implies: the notion that the human eye can be used as a ‘recording camera’ in connection with reportage that is written down, either in the form of a stream of consciousness, or as a focused tool for delivering acute narrative descriptions of the world around us.
Often I have taken my students into the streets and laneways and asked them – poised at a fixed position – to SPONTANEOUSLY write down what they see in front of them and without THINKING about it too much, to try to RECORD as accurately as they can what they SEE, as well as to SLOW DOWN their mind as an enabling tool in the process.
Next time you have your notebook in hand try this simple exercise: you might be very surprised what springs from it. Indeed, the continued honing of your skills using this observational technique can sometimes lead to some remarkable results.
Marcus D. Niski, June 2017
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