![Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day (La Place de l’Europe, temps de pluie). 1877. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]](http://blindflaneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day_1877_wiki.jpg "gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day")
![Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]](http://blindflaneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/isle_royale_fog.jpg "Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]")
"Brendan, this is what the world looks like all the time to me. Just a little fog. It’s a fine day for boating on the Great Lakes.” Without missing a stroke he turned to dart a skeptical glance at me. Brendan the Navigator. When we named him I didn’t tell his mother everything the legendary Irish name implied. But I imagined him taking on the role of navigator for me. Growing up with Coastal Survey charts and tales of Great Lakes shipwrecks, he came to know Superior as another home. He never doubted the wisdom of canoeing there with a father who was half blind. ![President George H.W. Bush signs into law the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on July 26, 1990 as Justin Dart looks on. [Source: ucp.org]](http://fairuselab.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/ada_signing_072690_ucp_2.jpg "ada_signing_072690_ucp_2")
![Shepard Fairey’s “Barack Obama/Hope” image went viral during the 2008 election. Then controversy about the image’s source transformed it into the poster child for fair use in the public debate over copyright and free culture. Now FULAB takes “Hope” as its icon [Image source: Wikipedia]](http://fairuselab.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/shepard_fairey_hope_2008.jpg "shepard_fairey_hope_2008")
If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in 
The legendary Kiki of Montparnasse posed for Man Ray’s 
1
October 16, 2007 at 6:54am
by Mark Willis 
When I began quoting and commenting on Les Misérables in September — I’ll call it blog-reading — I didn’t know exactly why I was doing it or where it would lead. I needed content to work with to learn the ropes in WordPress. I was experimenting with text editors in pursuit of “pure text” uncorrupted by hidden Microsoft gremlins. I’d just finished reading Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture. It was a conversion experience, and I was fired with a zeal to work with texts in the public domain as an affirmation of the Creative Commons. Project Gutenberg’s Les Mis fit the bill on all those counts, and it led to sweet serendipities along the way.
Before I launch the blog-reading of another book, I should stop and take stock of what I learned from Gavroche in Les Misérables IV.6.1-3. First, what a character! If my karma leads to reincarnation, I don’t want to come back as Marius or Jean Valjean. I want to be Gavroche. He is the direct literary forbear of Huckleberry Finn. Said another way, Huck translates Gavroche into the American idiom. A graduate student who needs a dissertation project would find much grist to grind in a comparison of Gavroche and Huck, the gaman in Old World and New, Victor Hugo and Mark Twain, literary legends and filthy lucre in Third Empire and Gilded Age publishing. Second, the scene inside the Elephant in the Place de la Bastille is a proto-Surrealist marvel. I had the same response to sculptures at the Roodin Museum the last time I was there, notably a beguiling table-top marble titled “Sister of Icarus.” Rodin was a Surrealist before Surrealism was a movement or manifesto. Those we call Surrealists were descendants, not originals. And finally, Victor Hugo may sound like a titanic mono-didact much of the time, but he also crafted deft narrative substructures. There are technical subtleties in IV.6.1-3 that I missed the first time I read it and would have missed again without blogging the excerpts listed below.
In terms of text management, I realize now that blog navigation gives me several ways of following this thread, but only in reverse chronological order. That may work for “in the moment” reading at the top of the blog, but it’s no way to look back and get a sense of the whole. For convenience, I have hand-sorted the following list into the proper narrative sequence. When I master CSS coding, I hope to do this more efficiently.
- A Sou’s Worth of Bread
- The Elephant in Place de la Bastille
- Two Views of Place de la Bastille
- Storming the Bastille
- “The beasts had all these things”
- From Gavroche to Huckleberry Finn
- “Mice which ate cats”
- “The Paris brat ain’t made of straw”
[A Note on Sources: This text comes from the Project Gutenberg etext of Les Misérables, a 19th-century translation by Isabel F. Hapgood which is now in the public domain.]
1 Comments
#1. a blind flaneur 10.21.2007
[...] mentioned this sculpture in A Gavroche Retrospective, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. When I saw it and other marvels at Musée Rodin [...]
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