Confessions of a Flâneur

Or "The Art of Farting Around"

There sometimes comes a time on a weekend afternoon when I feel antsy and bored. I’ll have run through my to-do list and Mi Esposa will have things she wants to do at home. “I’m going to flânuer,” I’ll say, using a word I heard on NPR, as I grab my keys with no particular place to go.

Usually, I’ll end up at the Goodwill checking out the book selection, maybe I’ll stop at an estate sale or two, then have a banh mi and pho at Lee’s Bakery.

It turns out that my act of wandering has deep literary roots. Flâneur is a French noun I’ve spent years incorrectly twisting into a verb and refers to “a type of urban “stroller”, “lounger”, “saunterer”, or “loafer.”

Me, heading off to Goodwill

To lift a whole paragraph from Wikipedia:

Sainte-Beuve wrote that to flâne “is the very opposite of doing nothing”. Honoré de Balzac described flânerie as “the gastronomy of the eye”. Anaïs Bazin wrote that “the only, the true sovereign of Paris is the flâneur”. Victor Fournel, in Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris (What One Sees in the Streets of Paris, 1867), devoted a chapter to “the art of flânerie”. For Fournel, there was nothing lazy in flânerie. It was, rather, a way of understanding the rich variety of the city landscape; it was like “a mobile and passionate photograph” of urban experience.

(Even though I now know the verb is actually “flâne,” I’m still going to use “flâneur” because:

1. I’m still an ugly American only slightly ashamed of my ignorance,

2. If I say I’m going to flâne, Mi Esposa will expect that I’m heading out for a Cuban custard, and

3. I’m trying to learn a modicum of German right now and learning a French declension is just too far for me.)

Of course, the streets of 19th-century Paris were overrun with philosophers like Balzac and Baudelaire, so every stroll, lounge, saunter, or loaf carried deep philosophical and historical weight and required an essay or three. Don’t worry, though, Kathleen Rooney carries on the tradition of documenting the importance of the flâneur at the Poetry Foundation with her essay, Don’t Forget the Flâneur.

Ok, Forget the Flaneur

Fo us more trivial folks, Kurt Vonnegut just calls it “farting around.” His advocacy for farting around has become a popular meme and shows up in Facebook feeds fairly often. For him, it is our highest purpose. Here he is trying to convince us to spend an hour buying an envelope.

Vonnegut farted around in New York City, though he was so practiced at it that he could pull it off anywhere. I was once in a house in Sagaponack Bay that he wandered in while farting around. Here’s some proof:

If you had this picture, you too would pull it out every chance you got.

For the rest of us, a good flâneur requires a certain type of place. It’s easier in Manhattan than any other American city, but it’s still a bit of a challenge. Mainly because New York is so damned busy. Tourists wander around “The Big Apple,” but New Yorkers are always late on their way somewhere. They do not flaneur. (To be fair, a resident of an well-educated, international city like NYC would defintely flâne, not flaneur.)

A Flaneur in the City Too Busy To Walk

The best thing Atlanta has to offer a flâneur is The Beltline. The Beltline is glorious, but there’s not much randomness involved, and randomness is key to a good farting around. On the Beltline, you go one direction and then turn around and go back. And that walk on the Beltline is often packaged as “exercise.” Atlantans are too busy to fart around on the Beltline, but we will go out and close our rings.

Mi Esposa and I strung together a nice day of flâneuring in Atlanta a few weeks back. We wandered through the Halcyon development in Alpharetta, and I was impressed by how many of the businesses were local. That requires a real effort on the planner’s part. We had a nice lunch at Gu’s dumplings there, then drove over to Alpharetta, where we walked, had a rooftop cocktail, and popped into some shops. In true flaneur fashion, nothing was purchased. Finally, we ended up in Roswell for dinner and wine. It was a good day. Of course, there were many miles of driving between these little clusters of pedestrian-friendly spaces.

So it goes.

Let’s Do It Right

Flâneuring really only works in a metropolis that invites people to get lost in its tangled streets. This is why a thriving altstadt is a key when I look at retirement destinations. The altstadt, or old town, is core to traditional European cities. Most of these cities allow only limited motor vehicle access in these areas, and the businesses spill onto the streets and sidewalks with flowers, kiosks and café tables. This, of course, is what every American developer has been trying to pull off for the past half century or more. Avalon or Atlantic Station in Atlanta are what we get when we try to build an altstadt but the investor wants Lenox Mall.

For many Americans, the altstadt is the part of a European trip that they enjoy the most. Yes, there’s the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, but a trip to Paris is about just “taking in the city.”

“I just love wandering around the city—all the little shops and cafés,” they say.

Yeah, that’s farting around. But since we’re talking about Paris, they can say they are flâneuring.

Song of the Week

Despite the existence of Dionne Warwick, Dion DiMucci can still get away with just being “Dion.” After an entire post about the art of wandering, and mention of Dion, you’d expect this week’s song to be a certain 1962 hit that made number two on the charts. Nope, here’s the far superior King of the New York Streets.