A collection of writings about place space writing and art …
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
The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.
From: Michel Foucault: Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias
Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité , October, 1984 (“Des Espace Autres,” March 1967), Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec)
By Marcus D. Niski
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
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.
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
By Marcus D. Niski
“Think about Benjamin, the writer or the thinker, and he has almost always been there first, and written ahead of you…”
– Brian Hanrahan, From ‘For Future Friends of Walter Benjamin’, Los Angeles Review, July 26, 2012.
Walter Benjamin’s classic manifesto One Way Street: The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Thesis is a pure crystalline gem that summarizes Benjamin’s approach to his writing craft in a highly original, quirky, and novel way which explains some of the classic hallmarks of Benjamin’s writing be it in his descriptive, theoretical or philosophical musings on a truly kaleidoscopic range of subjects, or his film criticism, travel memoir or critical theory essays.
Benjamin revelled in the minutiae of everyday life as Susan Sontag writes in her Introduction to One Way Street –
Much of the originality of Benjamin’s arguments owes to his microscopic gaze (as his friend and disciple Theodore Adorno called it), combined with his indefatigable command over theoretical perspectives. “It was the small things that attracted him most”, writes Scholem. He loved old toys, postage stamps, picture postcards, and such playful miniaturizations of winter inside a glass globe that snows when it is shaken…
Best known for his massive unfinished opus The Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk), Benjamin emerged from almost complete obscurity – save those few who were familiar with his intellectual and philosophical writings – to become a true literary comet that illuminated all of those subjects which he touched upon.
Benjamin is undoubtedly one of my favourite literary writers and One Way Street undoubtedly one of my favourite ‘self-observational’ Benjamin pieces.
Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street
Post No Bills
The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses
I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.
II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.
III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.
IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.
V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.
VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.
VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.
IX. Nulla dies sine linea – but there may well be weeks.
X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.
XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.
XII. Stages of composition: idea – style – writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.
XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.
From, One Way Street and Other Writings, Surkampf Verlag, Frankfurt.
Marcus D. Niski, May 2017
The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes.
His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to self up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world – such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family…
– From, Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” trans. Jonathan Mayne, in The Painter of Modem Life and Other Essays (London; Phaidon, 1964).
When I first read Walter Benjamin and his writings about Baudelaire, the whole notion of the flaneur was a revelation for me. That was one of the most important books of my life.
– Philip Lopate
Naked Cities Journal 