Another Good Read

The Flâneur by Edmund White

A flâneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic. Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the streets and avenues and along the quays, into parts of Paris virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many Parisians. Entering the Marais evokes the history of Jews in France, and a visit to the Haynes Grill recalls the presence—festive, troubled—of black Americans in Paris for a century and a half. Gays, Decadents, even Royalists past and present are all subjected to the flâneur’s scrutiny.

In his opinionated fashion, the flâneur visits bookshops and boutiques, monuments and palaces, providing gossip and background to each site, looking through the blank walls past the proud edifices to glimpse the inner human drama. Along the way he recounts everything from the latest debates among French lawmakers to the juicy details of Colette’s life. In this, the first book in The Writer and the City series, Edmund White lures the reader into the fascinating backstreets of his personal Paris. It is an exhilarating adventure with a most seductive companion.

This text was taken from Edmund White’s website which you can find here.

I really enjoyed reading this book. The flavour of Paris simply oozes from the pages. I highly recommend it.

Another Good Read

For more than a generation , Gertrude Stein’s Paris home at 27 rue de Fleures was the centre and of a glittering coterie of artists and writers, one of whom was Pablo Picasso. In this intimate and revealing memoir, Gertrude Stein tells us much about the great man (and herself) and offers many insights into the life and art of the twentieth-century’s greatest painter.

Gertrude Stein’s close relationship with Picasso furnished her with a unique vantage point in composing this perceptive and provocative reminiscence. It is indispensable to understanding modern art.

I bought my copy of this book from the best bookshop in the world, Shakespeare & Company, on the Left Bank here in Paris. I also happen to know someone who lives in the Boulevard Raspail in an atelier once occupied by Pablo Picasso so this book has a special resonance for me. I recommend it to you.

This book was published by B.T. Batsford, London, 1938

Another Good Read

This is another of my “good reads”. I have just finished reading for the third time, Ernest Hemigway’s “A Moveable Feast”. This is what Wikipedia has to say about it:

A Moveable Feast is a set of memoirs by American author Ernest Hemingway about his years in Paris as part of the American expatriate circle of writers in the 1920s. The book describes Hemingway’s apprenticeship as a young writer in Europe Paris during the 1920s with his first wife, Hadley. Some of the later prominent people who are featured in his memoirs include Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Hilaire Belloc, Pascin, John Dos Passos, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. The book was edited from his manuscripts and notes by Ernest’s fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, a respected journalist. It was published in 1964, three years after Hemingway’s death. The memoir has Hemingway’s personal accounts, observations, and stories of his experience in 1920s Paris. He provides specific addresses of cafes, bars, hotels, and apartments, some of which can be found in modern-day Paris. The title was suggested by Hemingway’s friend A.E. Hotchner, author of the biography, Papa Hemingway. He remembered they had a conversation about the city during Hotchner’s first visits there: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

I commend it to you.

A Good Read

I’ve just finished reading an excellent book - The Soundscape – Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World by R. Murray Schafer.

The Soundscape – a term coined by the author – is our sonic environment, the ever-present array of noises with which we all live. Beginning with the primordial sounds of nature, we have experienced an ever-increasing complexity of our sonic surroundings. As civilisaton develops, new noises rise up around us: from the creaking wheel, the clang of the blacksmith’s hammer, and the distant chugging of steam trains to the “sound imperialism” of airports, city streets and factories. The author contends that we now suffer from an over-abundance of acoustic information and a proportionate diminishing of our ability to hear the nuances and subtleties of sound. Our task, he maintains, is to listen, analyse, and make distinctions.

As a society we have become aware of the toxic wastes that can enter our bodies through the air we breath and the water we drink. In fact, the pollution of our sonic environment is no less real. Schafer emphasises the importance of discerning the sounds that enrich and feed us and using them to create healthier environments. To this end, he explains how to classify sounds, appreciating their beauty or ugliness, and provides exercises and “soundwalks” to help us become more discriminating and sensitive to the sounds around us.

The book is challenging but to anyone interested in our sonic environment it is well worth a read.