Tag: Writer’s Notebooks

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Lime Tea and a Heineken with Uncle Ho: Some Reflections from my Notebooks *

By Marcus D. Niski

A South East Asian city …

Bui Vien Street, Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam

Morning: 7.30 AM: I arise, groggy having slept off-and-on in the humid atmosphere of my narrow-walled room. Wiping my face with a moist towel, I turn on the TV for my morning dose of satellite news. Deutsche Welle news flashes on as Gerhard Schroeder visits Kenya promising assuredly there will be more German aid money for Kenya.

Out on the street the throng of motorcycles, taxis, cyclos and pedestrians begins to intensify as a new day of toil begins.

Making my way down the Minihotel’s three flights of narrow stairs, I pour myself onto the street still in a fog of disorientation as I make first contact with the street and the shape of the outside world.

Backpackers queue to catch their morning buses, tourists leisurely eat along the sidewalks cafes, cyclo drivers mill about casting a wary eye for a first passenger, shopkeepers tidy their wares in preparation for the days’ trading, and old men play cards squatting in shopfront doorways.

Later, uptown, I meet my driver the gentle Mr Tay who will skilfully guide me through the miasma of city streets, all the while instructing me as to the secret history lying beneath each and every cultural treasure. The Revolutionary Museum and so-called War Remnants Museum are the first two important destinations to trawl before the day becomes unbearably hot.

The traffic – that ever present thick automotive syrup – wends its way through narrow passes and out into the city’s wide boulevards as we speed towards the sights.

Two sweaty hours on the job and its time for a break and cool bottled water. I head for the street corner stall across the road hoping to avoid a dozen of so more offers to take ‘motobike’ downtown at good price. Drawing breath, I succumb and haggle for a decent deal. Later I’ll be back to soak up the atmosphere and make a plan to catch the sights I’ve missed.

Uptown …

Afternoon 4.30 pm: a city of contrasts is suddenly still. High above, a bright red ball sun glows through the thick haze of smog and clouds. There’s a hush as the city breathes in and prepares for night.

Dogs piss, old men hawk and spit, women lay sprawled out on their shop-floors and foreigners amble along the narrow streets. I make my way uptown for a lime tea and a Heineken with Uncle Ho.

My favourite outdoor café lies but stones throw from the bronze statue of Uncle Ho – Bach Ho – that sits in a small park across the way from the famous Hotel De Ville along the wide and impressive Le Loi Boulevard.

At the café, situated in an immaculate square garden manicured within an inch of its life, I can sit, relax, drink lime tea and soak up the atmosphere of the city. The waiters mill around joking, kidding and play tag with each other like a bunch of bored schoolchildren.

High above where the city skyline hovers over the gardens, starlings swirl in the late afternoon sky, while around the edges of the square traffic squirms and swarms as the hours draw nearer to the celebration of Tet night.

Afternoon is a time for reflection, gathering ones thoughts and making sense of the day. Afternoon seems easy where morning was hard, a time of day where one may feel in synch with the city rather than moving against it.

Night …

Night: I take a motorcycle taxi to the outdoor restaurants at the Ben Thanh Market. Seas of hungry faces devour rich offerings. The night air is warm and pleasant. Behind me the market is a thronging hive of activity. Police and government officials control the thoroughfare along where the main eating area is situated so as to block rogue motorcycles from passing through and causing chaos. The food is fresh, cheap and exquisitely tasty.

Still, I feel like the solo foreigner, the only western face in the crowd of locals all gazing inquisitively, politely, inquiring, quizzical, and yet not intrusive.

Night… weaves its magical air through the city as the noise of a hundred thousand motorcycles waiting at the one tiny red light howl as that light changes to green. On the street a throng of local traders ply their wares, stallholders accost potential customers and weary beggars thrust their conical hats.

Night is where this city lives, commits its sins and rises to its famous reputation. Night is where colour and movement are most intense and the people are at their most gregarious.

Tet is but a day away now and the air of expectancy continues to build. A carnival atmosphere surrounds the city and its uptown boulevards. Fairy lights don the tree-lined streets along part of Dong Khoi and thoroughfares are blocked with potted flowers where pedestrians may roam free from the fear of hindrance by mad motorcyclists. Shops buzz with activity as the tourists clamour. Couples saunter and make their way back to their hotels edging their way through the crowds of locals gathered to jostle and talk.

Later, Minihotel Downtown, Bui Vien: One AM and I’m having trouble sleeping. Overwhelmed, my room fan struggles to puff out its meagre stream of air. The temperature moves towards an ever more unbearable state. Outside a sudden shattering of glass a motorcycle rider loses his load and a couple of dozen 7 Up bottles hit the pavement. A momentary hive of activity and chaos erupts as the locals discuss the scene before resuming their chit-chat and housekeeping duties. From high above on the third floor I am able to leap up to my window and gaze down to observe the action.

Startled at first by the harsh sounds of shattering glass, I am relieved to see that no real harm has come to the rider, although the crates of lemonade bottles lie in a sadly irretrievable state.

Uptown, in the small hours of the morning, street urchins wander, cyclo drivers gain their fitful rest and bars pump until a new day dawns.

Tonight will be Tet night when the city explodes in a shower of flamboyance amongst the fireworks and hoopla that the New Year celebration promises to bring.

Meanwhile, I manage to catch some sleep amidst this anticipation and the noises that invariably invade the thin walls of my room

Life along Bui Vien swirls amongst an endless stream of comings and goings, a sea of human transactions in the ordered chaos that is Vietnam.

Written in my notebooks, Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), January 2004.

© Marcus D. Niski 2004-2017

* Postscript: 

My original ambition for this piece of writing was to embark upon a form of structured  observational exercise [à la Georges Perec] whereby I would go to a fixed location at each point of the day – morning, noon, and night – and make my observations as the principal departure point for the piece.

My impressions were immediate: I was completely captivated by the challenge of attempting to reconstruct street scenes in a narrative way that would accurately reflect the street life taking place all around me – while at the same time trying to avoid any aspect of confabulation as to what would become the ‘storyline’  (or linear narrative) that would hold the piece together. Indeed, this attempt at using some of the key techniques of Creative Non Fiction was a most satisfying and rewarding exercise and one that all writers can learn a lot from in terms of improving their powers of observation, understanding the mechanics of storyline and ‘times shifts’, as well as learning to carefully ‘tune in’ to the environment that they are writing about. All writing is a learning process and I really learnt a great deal from attempting this piece.

Originally written in 2004, I later returned to Ho Chi Minh City in 2015 to find a dramatically changed place: one far less welcoming, far more aggressive, and frankly, very disappointing in that its charm and character seemed sadly degenerated in the wake of rapid gentrification, urban population pressure, and rampantly exploitative traders and restaurateurs. What came out of this was an interesting and salutatory lesson about place: it reinforced the fact that we can never assume that our memories of a place will be validated in the same way once we return to it – they may be reinforced, be elevated by positive new change, or destroyed by new impressions in the face of change that we find unacceptable in our subjective view of the world. At times, we all have a romantic or naive expectation that a place will remain relatively unchanged over time – but that assumption is a dangerously ill-conceived in a world that is changing so rapidly and major cities are facing ever greater destructive incursions into the fabric of their built environment and history.

[MN] Salzburg, Austria, October 2017

PPS:  If any readers are interested, I would be happy to put together a reading guide to some excellent Creative Non Fiction writing resources on style, technique and related issues. [MN]

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Albert Camus — The Vale of Soul-Making

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies […]

Albert Camus on the therapeutic joys and benefits of walking via Albert Camus — The Vale of Soul-Making

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On Keeping a Writer’s Notebook

By Marcus D. Niski

My love of keeping writer’s notebooks as both a practical endeavour and aesthetic pursuit features heavily here, as does a range of information and insights as to how to get started with keeping your writer’s notebooks and how to maintain the habit as a regular ritual.

Our writing heroes and icons shape our thinking and provide a wellspring of imagination, insight and motivation. In celebrating them, we continue to push forward with our own insights as well as attempt to spur ourselves on towards new heights of discovery.

The pursuit of ‘writing for writing’s’ sake’ – most particularly in my notebooks – has provided me a lifetime of pleasure in absorbing and reflecting upon the world around me. I hope this site will inspire you and similarly urge you to explore the maximum depth of your creativity in whatever field of writing that you engage in.

– Marcus D. Niski,  September 2017

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Huncke’s New York City

By Marcus D. Niski

Huncke began to rap.  Huncke raps beautifully, the sound of his magnificent voice—all that seems intact in his devastated body—as tantalizing as the content.  He has so much to rap about, the days with Burroughs, the trials and woes of Ginsberg, the gilded gossip about the beats a decade ago and last week.  It is all that he has, his memories and a talent for recalling them.  It is not quite enough, but he gets by.
– Don McNeill, Huncke The Junkie  (from Moving Through Here) cited at: www.huncketeacompany.com

 

Herbert Edwin Huncke undoubtedly ranks amongst one of the most fascinating yet underestimated figures of the ‘Beat’ world.

Street urchin, raconteur, hustler, and chronicler of New York’s street life, Huncke was a unique figure in New York’s literary scene whose presence was reluctantly – but ultimately – acknowledged as a testament to the power and simplicity of his storytelling. Huncke’s notebooks also serve as a testimony to his attempts to document his many encounters at street level and are indeed fascinating original chronicles that capture elements of his often turbulent but always colourful life.

Born into a middle class family in Greenfield, Massachusetts, Huncke’s colorful life was shaped early on. A restless child and “chronic runaway,” Huncke hit New York City permanently in 1939 at the age of 24, immediately gravitating to Forty-Second Street where he began hustling for sex.

Widely immortalized in the literature of his confrères — William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and John Clellon Holmes — Huncke served as a model for literary characters such as Elmo Hassel in Kerouac’s On The Road and Herman in Burroughs’ Junky (amongst many other literary characterizations).

As a “Virgilian guide” to New York’s underworld, Huncke would skilfully guide Burroughs into the subterranean world of narcotics, as well as provide a great degree of source material for his literary adventures. Yet Huncke’s own creative endeavors have often taken a back seat to those of his contemporaries.

Throughout his long and often tumultuous life, Huncke wrote his observations, reflections, and vignettes in a series of notebooks [1]. This stock of tales undoubtedly underpinned the Huncke mythology. As long time friend and confidant Raymond Foye recollects:

There remains an indelible image of Herbert Huncke the writer, frozen forever in time: homeless and alone, couched in a Times Square pay toilet with notebook on knees, furtively composing his latest tale from the underground.

– Raymond Foye in The Herbert Huncke Reader, William Morrow & Co, New York.

Huncke’s notebooks also form an evocative record of his trials and tribulations as a sage and survivor on New York’s often brutal and unforgiving streets. Huncke’s notebook revelations also provide an insight into “a way of life, a vocabulary, references, a whole symbol system” (as Burroughs put it in Junky) that has now largely disappeared. The world of “crash pads, speakeasies, [and] all-night jam sessions with Charlie Parker or Dexter Gordon” were part of the “carnie” world that informed Huncke’s reflections on an often chaotic, always kaleidoscopic culture. Indeed, the frustrations of Huncke’s itinerant existence are eloquently expressed in this entry in his notebooks:

lost to the streets — lost completely to a life I once knew — stealing — junk– all night wandering– thru the streets — lost completely to a life I once knew – — stealing — junk all night wandering thru the city — no pads– no friends — no way of life – almost convinced prison is a solution — shriveling within at the mere thought — wishing for death — willing death… [Untitled MS Page, Notebook and Diary excerpts, 1959-1960] [2]

A master storyteller, raconteur and polished performer, Huncke would often use his considerable verbal skills to cadge money, drinks and other necessities from his often wary and weary friends. In this vivid passage from Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man, McCourt describes a typical encounter with Huncke on one of his visiting rounds cadging whatever spare change he could towards his version of what he saw as ‘the necessities of life’:

I stepped into the hallway for one of our brief occasional conferences where he explained he happened to be in this neighborhood and he was thinking about me and wondered how is was doing. Also, he happened to be caught short for necessities and wondered if I might have any spare change about me. He appreciated past kindnesses and even though he saw little possibility of repayment he would always remember me warmly. It was such a pleasure to visit me here and to see the youth of America, these beautiful children, in such capable and generous hands. He said thanks and he might see me soon at Montero’s Bar in Brooklyn, a few blocks from his apartment. In a few minutes the ten dollars I slipped him would be passed to a Stuyvesant Square drug dealer.

That’s Huncke, I told them. Pick up any history of recent American writing or the Beat Generation and in the index you’ll find Huncke, Herbert.

Alcohol is not his habit but he’ll kindly allow you to buy him a drink at Montero’s. His voice is deep, gentle and musical. He never forgets his manners and you’d rarely think of him as Huncke the Junkie. He respects law and obeys none of it.

He’s done jail time for pickpocketing, robbery, possession of drugs, selling drugs. He’s a hustler, a con man, a male prostitute, a charmer, a writer. He is given credit for coining the term Beat Generation. He uses people until he exhausts their patience and money and they tell him, Enough Huncke. Out, out already. He understands and never carries grudges. It’s all the same to him. I know he’s using me, but he knew everyone in the Beat movement and I listen to him talk about Burroughs, Corso, Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg. R’lene Dahlberg told me that Ginsberg once compared Huncke to St. Francis of Assisi. Yes, he’s a criminal, an outlaw, but he steals only to sustain his drug habit and makes no profit out of his activities.

– Frank Mc Court’s portrait of Herbert Huncke in Teacher Man, Scribner, New York, 2005 (p 250-251).

Huncke’s literary legacy lives on in a number of works that were published in his lifetime [3] as well as a definitive collection of writings – The Herbert Huncke Reader – collected together by Benjamin G. Schafer with an Introduction by Raymond Foye as well as a superb Biographical Sketch of Huncke written by Huncke’s Literary Executor Jerome Poynton. [4]

William S. Burroughs acknowledged the “extraordinary” nature of Huncke’s experiences that were “quite genuine” in his Forward to The Herbert Huncke Reader in the following brief remarks –

In ‘The Thief’s Journal’, Genet says there are very few people who have earned the right to think.  Huncke had adventures and misadventures that were not available to middle-class, comparatively wealthy college people like Kerouac and me:  “Some write home to the old folks for coin.  That’s their ace in the hole.”  Huncke had extraordinary experiences that were quite genuine.  He isn’t a type you find anymore.

– William S. Burroughs in The Herbert Huncke Reader, William Morrow & Co, New York.

Huncke was undoubtedly a unique character in the history of Times Square lore [5]: a “genuine” character of the streets who wielded far more influence over the imaginations of the founding fathers of the American Beat movement than he is often given credit for.

Marcus D. Niski, August 2017

 

[1] In 2010, I had the privilege of visiting the Columbia University’s Butler Library in New York to view their deposit of Huncke’s papers and notebooks. My analysis of Huncke’s notebooks, as well as selected images of them can found in my realitystudio.org article –  ‘The Writer’s Notebooks of Herbert Huncke’ by Marcus D. Niski at: ‘http://realitystudio.org/criticism/the-writers-notebooks-of-herbert-huncke/

[2] Ibid.

[3] Huncke’s Writings: A Select Bibliography

Guilty of Everything: The Autobiography of Herbert Huncke (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1990), Edited by Don Kennison, foreword by William S. Burroughs. ISBN 1-55778-044-7

The Evening Sun Turned Crimson (Cherry Valley, NY: Cherry Valley Editions, 1980), ISBN 0-916156-43-5.

Huncke’s Journal (Poets Press, 1965). Edited by Diane Di Prima. Foreword by Allen Ginsberg.

The Herbert Huncke Reader Edited by Benjamin Schafer (New York: Morrow, 1997), ISBN 0-688-15266-X

Again–The Hospital (White Fields Press, Louisville, 1995). 1/50 copies. (Broadside; single sheet, measuring 12 by 22 inches, illustrated with a photograph of Huncke.)

Herbert E. Huncke 1915-1996 (New York: Jerry Poynton 1996). (Limited edition of 100 copies of the program for the Herbert Huncke memorial at Friends Meetinghouse, New York City. Includes original texts.)

From Dream to Dream (Dig It! 567912-2, Music & Words, Netherlands, 1994, CD)

Herbert Huncke – Guilty of Everything. Double-CD of Huncke’s 1987 live reading at Ins & Outs Press, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Co-production released by Unrequited Records, San Francisco (2012).

[4] The full text of Jerome V. Poynton’s biographical sketch of Hunkce can be found at http://huncketeacompany.com/about/ which celebrates Huncke’s life and Centennial Year (1915–2015).

[5] Huncke’s Obituary in The New York Times by Robert McG. Thomas Jr. (Aug. 9, 1996) can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/09/arts/herbert-huncke-the-hipster-who-defined-beat-dies-at-81.html

Huncke’s Dirty Seedy New York