Posted in Paris Diaries, Photography, Quotes, tagged boulevards, Edmund White, Ernest Hemingway, Paris, Photography, the flâneur on November 6, 2011| 2 Comments »
Paris, 2011.
Paris, 2011.
Paris, 2011.
Paris, 2011.
Balzac called the boulevards of Paris what the Grand Canal was to Venice,
saying that whoever stepped onto them was lost to their charm:
“on y boit des idees.’ (here people drink in ideas).
Edmund White, The Flaneur
…
” If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man,
then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you,
for Paris is a moveable feast.”
Ernest Hemingway
Posted in art, Poetry, Writing, tagged books, derive, Edmund White, flaneur, flaneur a stroll through the paradoxes of paris, moleskine paris, Paris, pariswalks, quiet corners of paris, walks on October 3, 2011| 6 Comments »
For many travelers, Paris is Parisland. Here’s the Eiffel Tower. Let’s take aboat ride along the Seine. Ah, the Champs Elysees. Five museums on the list —
let’s whip through them. And, late at night, we’ve got to find that nightclub where the girls kick up their …heels.
Others — that’s my brood and me — go to Paris for the quiet. We sit in cafes for hours. We settle on parkbenches. We take long walks on nearly empty streets. It’s still Parisland, just another kind: an open-air library, a set for dreaming, an urban pillow for outdoor naps.
From a review of Quiet Corners of Paris
Here is a curated list for the flaneur/flaneuse to pack on your messenger bag.
And here, more on the The Flâneur: A Radical-Chic Icon
Posted in Architecture, art, Books, Collage, Cures for the Nothing, Digital Collage, Digital Manipulation, Drawing, Essay, History of Architecture, Le flâneur, Lectures, Link Love, Photography, Poetry, Quotes, Research, school, School Work, Situationism, sketchbook, sketching, The Situationist Internationale, Theory and Criticism, Writing, tagged 1840, 1977, a council of dads, absinthe, aimless wandering, American Flaneur: The Cosmic Physiognomy of Edgar Allan Poe, Architecture, awareness, Baraka documentary, bells, black and with photography, Boudelaire, boulevards, bruce feiler, buddhism, buildings are lessons, capitalism, cartoon, consumption, Cornelia Otis Skinner, critical attitude, criticism, crowd, dandy, derive, digital flaneur, dissertation, Drawing, Edmund White, familiarity breeds contempt, flaneuse, flâner, flâneuserie, french philiosophy, french poet, getting lost on purpose, guy deborde, hipster, Histories of Leisure by Rudy Koshar, History of Architecture, history of urban design, home in the street, homeless, how to get lost, Hunter S. Thompson, hyperactive city, icon, il flaneur che cammina con una tartaruga, images, ink on paper, Ink on trace paper, intellectual, Interview, Jack Kerouac, James V. Werner, khinkhin, la derive, le flaneur, lecture radical chich icon, leisure, library, living room, loitering, lounger, lounging, market, men strolling with a turtle, metropolis, mindfulness, modernity, moleskine, mookychick.com, most influential books since WW II World War II, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, NPR, On Photography, onewaystreet, Oscar Wilde, Paris, passion, pedestrian engagement, photographer, photographs, Photography, political satire, process of navigating erudition, psychogeography, Rumi, san francisco artist david blumin, sartorialist, scholar, Situazionismo, situazionismo internazionale, sketching, solitary, speed, st.loup secrets and lies, storify.com, streets, streets of Paris, stroller, surprise yourself, Susan Sontag, symbology of the turtle, taking a turtle for a walk, tartaruga, the arcades project, The Black Swan, the city, The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris, the flâneur, The Flâneur Walking With a Turtle, the gaze, the Nonist, the Situationist Internationale, thelemming.com, to stroll, turtle, urban design, urban essay Index, urban paradoxes, urban parasite, urban parasitism, urban planning density, urban stalker, urban voyeurism, virtualdavis, walk with a turtle and let him set your pace, Walking, walking meditation, walking witha a turtle, Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin's Arcade Project and Urbanism., wanderer, wandering the streets, ways to keep your soul alive, Why I Walk, zen monk on February 26, 2011| 16 Comments »
The Flâneur. Ink on trace paper. February 26, 2011
The Flâneur and his turtle in the streets of Paris. Digital collage. February 26, 2011. Background photo from San Francisco’s artist David Blumin. Click for his website.
Post updated 11.01.2021
Historical evidence of The Flâneur? Or just man waiting for his wife? Undated image from: storify.com/virtualdavis/flaneur
The Flâneur
The term comes from ‘flâner’, which means to stroll in French. From this verb Baudelaire coined the word flâneur, a person who walks the city in order to experience it. The flâneur is driven by an insatiable hunger for passion; he seeks the streets and the city life for they provide inspiration and cure him of the malaise and loneliness of being human. He practices mindfulness, or conscious dilly-dallying. In US they would call him a ‘loiterer’, surely shoo him away…or perhaps fine or even jail him (I always tell my students there is no such thing as the word ‘loitering’ in Italian….what else would we do in Piazzas!?). My friend Bruce and I were discussing the flâneur few days ago and he reminded me of the symbology of the turtle and this quote from Rumi:
The soul needs as much time to wander as the feet.
Rumi
Baudelaire writes of the flâneur:
The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes.
His passion and passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set 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
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, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not -‐ to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas.
A Process of Navigating Erudition
From Wikipedia: Flâneur is not limited to someone committing the physical act of peripatetic stroll in the Baudelairian sense, but can also include a “complete philosophical way of living and thinking”, and a process of navigating erudition as described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s essay on “Why I Walk” in the second edition of The Black Swan (2010). A Sunday Time review called The Black Swan one of the twelve most influential books since WWII.
Benjamin in his Arcades further describes the flâneur utilizes the city, which becomes an extension of his residence:
Some of the questions I have been thinking about are : Can the flâneur be a flâneuse? Must he or she always haunt the city aloof and alone, or is ‘Flâneurie’ an activity that can be enjoyed in small groups, maybe of separate actors, each with his or her own turtle?
In “American Flaneur: The Cosmic Physiognomy of Edgar Allan Poe“, James V. Werner describes how ‘ highly self-aware, and to a certain degree flamboyant and theatrical, dandies of the mid-nineteenth century created scenes through outrageous acts like walking turtles on leashes down the streets of Paris. Such acts exemplify a flâneur’s active participation in and fascination with street life while displaying a critical attitude towards the uniformity, speed, and anonymity of modern life in the city.’
Hmm…Sounds like The Situationists.
A new interpretation of the activities of the flâneur appear in the writings of Guy Debord, the dérive also being a protest against the processes of consumption and capitalism:
One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.
In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
–Guy Debord
While the flaneurs practiced ‘aimless wandering’, the Situationists devised processes to purposefully get lost.
There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell’s dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothinincluding his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city.
Cornelia Otis Skinner.
Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals, 1962
Watching is the chosen pleasure of flâneur. He is an ‘urban stalker’, as Susan Sontag defines him in her 1977 essay On Photography. Modern flâneurs, let’s arm ourselves with cameras or a moleskine . Let’s pretend we are all ‘The Sartorialist’ and many, many other envoys on particular missions. Would you enjoy the streets of your city if you thought you were spying on someone, an urban detective, privy to secrets no-one else can know? What would the intelligence gathered from today? What stories could you tell(or draw)? What stories would the city reveal to you. There is so much life out there. And buildings are lessons.
Delicious books on the subject:
And, finally, my very own books for Parisian flanerie.
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