Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Is the contrary flâneuse back or not?

To blog or not to blog? These are the questions. Also, what the hell is a contrary flâneuse anyway? I was about to add identifying locator but remembered plan not to peg this particular blogging persona to a named location. Suffice it to say that our flâneuse lives in a remote rural village, cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, somewhere in the mountains of the Western US. The Place or rather Un-place is as pseudonymical as the persona.

When the pissing & moaning, bitching & issuing of (absurd) directives commence, the contrary flâneuse will claim deniability. Alas, 'tis but fiction. Go suck a cactus. Nobody's claiming she's going to be polite. Fer cryin' out loud, can't you read: she's contrary.

As a chronic contrarian, said flâneuse wishes to take this opportunity to thank the civic minded local publican not just for inspiring this resurrection and also requests that said publican share blame and/or credit equally with the flâneuse.

Definition of flâneuse (to confuse matters):
The feminine of the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer"—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll". Poet and decadent social observer Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of flâneur—that of "a person who walks the city in order to experience it". Because of the term's usage and theorization by Baudelaire and numerous thinkers (notably Walter Benjamin) in economic, cultural, literary and historical fields, the idea of the flâneur has accumulated significant meaning as a referent for understanding urban phenomena and modernity.

A flâneur is a detached pedestrian given to observing and commenting on milieu - critically and analytically to be sure but not without bemusement, even fondness.

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