a blind flaneur

Passage des Panoramas, Paris. [Photo by deneux_jacques]
Thanks to deneux_jacques for sharing this image in the Creative Commons. See his superb photo set, Ah, Paris!
Imaging Paris documents places in the city and the images that inhabit them. “Just as every tried-and-true experience also includes its opposite, so here the perfected art of the flaneur includes a [...]

I’ve alluded several times to Walter Benjamin’s 1937 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” I cited it as a kind of shorthand for several ideas that I want to explore in a blind flaneur. After mentioning it at the end of Georgia on My Mind, and Yours, [...]

Photo portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz, 1918. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
In my day job I’ve always regarded network administration with a certain suspicion. It’s a sprawling university network and you have to arm-wrestle with an army of geekish bureaucrats to get anything done. So I didn’t expect to have fun when I began [...]

As I have lost eyesight over the past thirty years, walking has been the simplest and most dependable solution to the functional limitations of my disability. When I stopped driving cars at age eighteen, walking was the mode of transportation most accessible to me. This sounds reasonable enough – a problem to be solved , [...]

François Bouchot. Maria Malibran. Louvre, Paris [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
She was a Spanish diva who was born in Paris. She debuted in London and introduced the first Italian operas performed in New York. In her brief, tempestuous life (1808 -1836), mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran achieved an international celebrity unimagined before her time. It was the very dawn [...]

My friend and teacher Nancy Mack invited me to visit her seminar on Lev Vygotsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and the social nature of language. When I took her course ten years ago, it was the most stimulating subject I encountered in graduate school. It tapped my long-standing interest in Russian literature and led eventually to the [...]

Two 19th-century illustrations depict Place de la Bastille in the years before and after Victor Hugo ’s description of the Elephant in Les Misérables IV.6. 2: [above left] Elephant caparaconne d’or by Alvoine, from the time of Napoleon; [below left] La Colonne de Julliet, from the time of Louis-Phillippe.
The source for these illustrations is [...]

[Photo by gadl]
Art is everywhere in Paris. You don’t have to stand in line or pay 10 euros to enter the museum. As the flaneur knows, the museum is the street. You pay with your attention.
This image represents a gritty, in-your-face genre of street art meant to catch the eye when you least expect it. [...]

Illuminations (1968) is the most-widely read anthology of Walter Benjamin’s writing in English. The essays gathered there, including “Unpacking My Library” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” were chosen by Hannah Arendt. She also contributed a 50-page essay on Benjamin that is at once authoritative and [...]

[Photo by Ms. Modigliani]
When I’m in Paris I cross the river at least once to walk up Rue Vivienne, which runs north from the Louvre and Palais Royale. Compared to the grand boulevards, Rue Vivienne feels like a narrow, unassuming street, but it crosses the heart of a thriving financial district. Here one finds the [...]