a blind flaneur

When I was imbibing the pinyon smoke and stacking the cord-wood yesterday, I felt as unconditionally happy as I did last summer in Paris when I walked down Rue Mouffetard with a freshly baked loaf of bread. Simple pleasures for simple people, I guess.
Two days earlier I learned with shock that the sawyer who […]

[Photo by Ms. Modigliani]
I remember the book I held in my hands that day. I remember the feel of its time-warped, water-stained pages. I remember its murky, moldy river smell, call it the book’s bouquet, suggesting years of storage on the banks of the Seine. Had I bought it then, I could feel and smell […]

[Photo by zola’s box]
In a Station of the Metro (1913)
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Ezra Pound

[Photo by Heliann]

[Photo by wallyg]
I heard these guys almost every afternoon as I crossed Place de la Contrascarppe, the heart of our Paris neighborhood. One time they were playing “On Green Dolphin Street” and I imagined one street  in New York while walking down another in Paris.

I’ve been thinking about my beloved Rue Mouffetard, one of the oldest streets in Paris. Two thousand years ago, when the Roman village of Lutetia spread along the Left Bank of the Seine, what is now Mouffetard was the road that led to Rome. Rue Mouffetard runs through time like the Street […]

I continue to marvel at the rogue Gavroche and see in him the prototype for Huck Finn. After explaining how he “borrowed” his bedroom furnishings from the beasts at the Jardin des Plantes, Gavroche adds insouciantly, “You crawl over the walls and you don’t care a straw for the government.” Victor Hugo pauses in telling […]

[Photo by wallyg]
My favorite Flickr posts combine photos with some text, always a richer context for a blind flaneur trying to see images. Here is what photographer wallyg said about the bouquinistes:
Les Bouquinistes, the riverside vendors who peddle used books, have set up shop along the Seine in the Latin Quarter since the mid-1500s, when […]

[Photo by Ms. Modigliani]
I remember the book I held in my hands that day. I remember the feel of its time-warped, water-stained pages. I remember its murky, moldy river smell, call it the book’s bouquet, suggesting years of storage on the banks of the Seine. Had I bought it then, I could feel and […]

[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. […]

For me, Friday afternoon means jazz. When I get home from work on Fridays, what I want most is to walk down the street with Ms. Modigliani to a funky little jazz club with a piano trio, bistro cooking, a coterie of variegated lounge lizards, and some amiable conversation. A place like the Village Vanguard […]