I learned a new word this week

I feel like I've finally recovered from a trip I took last weekend. I had some frequent flyer miles sitting around, so I scheduled a weekend trip to San Francisco, my first time in the city. Wow, what a gorgeous place. I did a little bit of playing, a lot of walking, and a whole lot more nothing. I got way too little sleep, and left the city, on Monday (missed the blizzard--yay!!), feeling refreshed, but not really rested.

When I go to a new city, I walk. I love to watch life in the city. The best time is in the morning, when the night people are heading to bed as the city prepares for the day. The residue from the previous night--a syringe here, a baggie there--is still visible, but not for long. Homeless people, those who were't woken up and shuffled off by the police, are waking up. Those that were awake all night sit in small groups talking, or fighting by a fountain. I love to see how the city lives. So, I walk and watch.

I was talking about this with a colleague when I got back, and she said, "Oh, you're a flâneur." I had never heard of the word before. Here's part of the wikipedia entry:

"FlÃ¢neur" is a French word. A flÃ¢neur is a detached pedestrian observer of a metropolis, a 'gentleman stroller of city streets', first identified by Charles Baudelaire. The word has no exact equivalent in English....Around 1850, Baudelaire began asserting that traditional art was inadequate for the new dynamic complications of modern life. Social and economic changes brought by industrialization demanded that the artist immerse himself in the metropolis and become, in Baudelaire's phrase, 'a botanist of the sidewalk', an analytical connoisseur of the urban fabric. Because he coined the word about Parisians, the 'flÃ¢neur' (the one who strolls) and the 'flÃ¢nerie' (the stroll) are associated with Paris and the kind of pedestrian environment which accommodates leisurely exploration.

Walter Benjamin adopted this concept of the urban observer both as an analytical tool, and as a lifestyle. From his Marxist standpoint Benjamin describes the flÃ¢neur as a product of modern life and the Industrial Revolution, unprecedented in history and definitely of a certain social class, parallel to the advent of the tourist. His flÃ¢neur is an uninvolved but highly perceptive bourgeois dilettante.

OK, I'm not sure how I feel about being described as a dilettante, but the concept fascinates me. It's pretty much the standard way i travel, particularly when in a new city. Whenever I go to a new place, people are surpised by how little I "do." My parents called me on Sunday night, in part to see if I'd gotten caught up in the blizzard (I wasn't scheduled to return to Boston until Monday, so it didn't have any effect on my travels). My mother was surprised when I said how little I'd done: "But I thought you were going to a few museums."

"So did I," I replied. Instead, I'd just been walking. And looking.

Looks like I need to read some Benjamin.

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Submitted by Jeffrey Langstraat on 17 February 2006 - 6:31pm.
Travel/Tourism

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I swear, we are soul mates

Submitted by liza on 17 February 2006 - 9:29pm.

One of the things I miss more than anything in the world since having kids and basically blogging almost full time is walking around New York City after midnight. It's a thought that frightens most people but it's the time of the day I get to share the city with only a few people as opposed to millions.

It's particularly awesome to walk around midtown or the financial district because that's where it gets eerily quite.

There was a time when I thought that we as a family would be doing a lot of traveling but, alas, I live with a man that hates it. I on the other hand would love to rent a winnebago and travel across the country with only a map and travel book but no plan. The thought of doing that frightens the beejeebus out of my kids' father and, well, it's a HUGE sticking point in our relationship.

It's not just going somewhere that I like, but going somewhere with no plan, with no pressures and just walking, hanging out and taking it all in. That's what I love the most.

Sigh.

The Painter of Modern Life is one of the most important essays not just to understand the creative explotion that was Modern and Modernist art but it is one of the foundational texts for post-structuralist literary theory :

In a unity we call a nation, the professions, the social classes, the successive centuries, introduce variety not only in gestures and manners, but also in the general outlines of faces. Such and such a nose, mouth, forehead, will be standard for a given interval of time, the length of which I shall not claim to determine here, but which may certainly be a matter of calculation. Such ideas are not familiar enough to portrait painters; and the great weakness of M. Ingres, in
particular, is the desire to impose on every type that sits for him a more or less complete process of improvement, in other words a despotic perfecting process, borrowed from the store of classical ideas.

In a matter such as this, a priori reasoning would be easy and even
legitimate. The perpetual correlation between what is called the soul and what is called the body is a quite satisfactory explanation of how what is material or emanates from the spiritual reflects and will always reflect the spiritual force it derives from. If a painter, patient and scrupulous but with only inferior imaginative power, were commissioned to paint a courtesan of today, and, for this purpose, were to get his inspiration (to use the hallowed term) from a courtesan by Titian or Raphael, the odds are that his work would be fraudulent, ambiguous, and difficult to understand. The study of a
masterpiece of that date and of that kind will not teach him the carriage, the gaze, the come-hitherishness, or the living representation of one of these creatures that the dictionary of fashion has, in rapid succession, pigeonholed under the coarse or light-hearted rubric of unchaste, kept women, Lorettes.

The same remark applies precisely to the study of the soldier, the dandy, and even animals, dogs or horses, and of all things that go to make up the external life of an age. Woe betide the man who goes to antiquity for the study of anything other than ideal art, logic and general method! By immersing, himself too deeply in it, he will no longer have the present in his mind's eye; he throws away the value and the privileges afforded by circumstance; for nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that impresses upon our sensibility.

To Baudelaire the flaneur is a like a painter. By observing and expressing his observations creatively, he is painting the unfolding of ideas, discoveries, new customs and new ways of being that is modern life.

Baudelaire, is said, used to have carried notebooks with him wherever he went. Nietszche was another philosopher (just as his 'forefather' Kant) who would take long walks before writing. Nietzsche, btw, was also preoccupied with the critic's work as art all throughout his work. His Untimely Meditations are like a blueprint of that --and very similar to Baudelaire's work.

I honestly believe that, would they be alive today, they'd totally be into blogging. Blogging is, in a sense, like being a digital flaneur.

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We may just be

Submitted by Jeffrey Langstraat on 17 February 2006 - 9:47pm.

It's not just going somewhere that I like, but going somewhere with no plan, with no pressures and just walking, hanging out and taking it all in. That's what I love the most.

This so describes the way I travel, and it's one of the reasons I love to travel alone. In getting ready for this trip, lots of people were like, "I know someone..." and didn't understand that I wanted zero commitments on this trip...I just wanted to do what I wanted when I wanted. That's part of the reason a weekend just isn't enough time. I spend several days walking, and then decide what to "do."

Amsterdam is a fantastic city for this. God, I want to go back.

I always end up with sore legs and hips after travel, though.

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