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 […]

Édouard Manet. Olympia. 1863. Musee d’Orsay, Paris.

[Source: NYT, Jolly nad Green, With an Agenda]
Dear Santa,
I’d love to stroll along the Seine and browse the bookstalls on Dec. 25. Will any be open for business? There is no better gift for a bouquiniste and blind flaneur than a musty old book. Any French book printed before 1900 would thrill me. AbeBooks.com […]

For many years I carried in my head an unfinished project that I called Gutenberg’s Exile. That phrase was shorthand for the complex relationship I have with books and reading. I was cut off from the printed word, expelled from the Gutenberg Revolution. A little twist of fate in my own DNA […]

Wooster Collective. www.saw-b.be [Photo by wanshot]

[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 […]

Édouard Manet. Portrait of George Moore. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]

Stéphane Mallarmé with Méry Laurant. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
George Moore remembers Méry and Manet in Memoirs of My Dead Life:
Were she not dead I might stop at her little
house in the fortifications among the lilac trees. There is her
portrait by Manet on the wall, the very toque she used to wear. How
wonderful the touch is; the […]

Méry Laurant. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
THe Irish writer George Moore considered Méry Laurent “the epitome of the witty, charming woman of fashion, an embodiment of the spirit of liberation from hypocrisy.” He asked her once why she did not leave her benefactor, Dr. Thomas Evans, for Manet. Evans was a rich American expatriate who secured his […]

Édouard Manet. Woman in a Bathtub. 1878-79.pastel on paper 55×45cm. Musee d’Orsay, Paris.
Méry Laurent was the model for Odette, the actress who married Swann in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. She also was Manet’s lover and muse for a time, when she modeled for this pastel.
Jeffrey Meyers writes in Impressionist Quartet (p. […]

[Photo by vitostreet]

Rainier Maria Rilke works at his writing desk in the Hôtel Biron, Paris [Source: Requiem for a Friend]
I found this photo yesterday as I jumped from Rainier Maria Rilke to Paula Modersohn-Becker and back again. It comes from a web site supporting a 2005 independent film (The Greater Circulation) about the writing of Requiem for […]

Paula Modersohn-Becker. Selbstbildnis als Halbakt mit Bernsteinkette II. 1906. Kunstmuseum Basil.
Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) was a young German artist who created 600 paintings and over 1000 sketches in her brief career at the beginning of the 20th century. She lived and worked in Worpswede, an artist enclave in rural Germany that resisted artistic domination […]

Paula Modersohn-Becker’s portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke was painted in Paris in 1906 [Source: Wikimedia Commons]. After her untimely death a year later, Rilke wrote the haunting masterpiece, Requiem for a Friend, in her memory.
Rainier Maria Rilke on Wikipedia
Ranier Maria Rilke: Letters To A Young Poet
This site publishes all ten of Rilke’s letters […]

[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]

Robert F. Willis (May 12, 2023 - November 3. 1987)
For Bob Willis, All My Love
I remember walking through snow to Long’s Bookstore
two men not at work on Wednesday morning
with time to kill before going to the clinic.
The father says tentatively
pushing hands into coat pockets:
I don’t know what poetry is
I work with my hands
I’m awkward with […]

Père-Lachaise Cemetery, Paris [Photo by novella78]

Amedeo Modigliani. Anna Akhmatova. c. 1911. Pencil on paper. Apartment-Museum of Anna Akhmatova. St. Petersburg, Russia. [Source: Olga’s Gallery]
From Poem without a Hero
Paris is in dark mist
And probably again Modigliani
Imperceptibly follows me.
He has a sad virtue
To bring disorder even to my dreams
And be the reason of my many misfortunes.
Anna Akhmatova
[Source: Olga’s Gallery]

Lee Miller, Surrealist muse, photographed by Man Ray, Paris ca. 1930 [Source: NYT]

[Photo by cormac70]

[Photo source: NYT]

L’Amour Has Little to Do With l’État - NYT 102207
THE French — on the right and on the left — have embraced the news that President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Cécilia, have divorced with a surprising amount of sang-froid and a collective shrug.
It’s partly that the French no longer treat marriage […]

Auguste Rodin. L’Illusion soeur d’Icare. 1895. Musée Rodin, Paris. [Photo by Dave Rytell]
This sculpture beguiled me when I saw it at the Musée Rodin. I so much wanted to touch her wing. It was marble but it looked like a living thing. It had the delicacy of feathers, the muscularity of pulsing blood, the […]

[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.

[Photo by Bill Cunningham, NYT]

The Sunday Style section of the New York Times includes a regular feature called “On the Street,” a gallery of candid, “F8 and be there” photos that provide a funky foil to the stylized glamor shots in the surrounding ads. The grainy half-tones in the print newspaper look like smudges […]

[Photo by peterhoneyman]
Soccer may supercede kissing everywhere else on the planet, but not in Paris. Most of the crowd outside this café at the foot of Rue Mouffetard are fixated on watching France trounce Togo in the 2006 World Cup. Not the couple on the left. Someone has to safeguard the city’s reputation.

[Photo by THEfunkyman]
“By Kashink.See the whole painting “

[Photo by roboppy]

Gavroche’s sleep inside the Elephant is interrupted by a whistle from the thug Montparnasse. He needs the gaman to help rescue one of his gang who has escaped from prison and is stranded precariously on the edge of a high wall not far from Place de la Bastille. Chapter IV.6.3 describes the prison break in […]

[Photo by gillesklein]

In Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo’s characters do not exchange  dialog. They declaim at one another, often histrionically.  The novel was written immediately after the tempestuous debut in 1829 of Hugo’s play, Hernani. Dramaturgy in one guise or another was paying the bills, and it sustained the young novelist as he scrambled to satisfy a […]