Feeding the Flaneur

Philip Trager.
Changing Paris: A Tour Along the Seine.
Arena Editions, 2000.

Jacques Hillairet
Connaissance du Vieux Paris.
Rivages, 1993 (re-issue)

Jacques Hillairet
Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris.
Editions Minuit, 1985. (two volumes)

Hoarding & the Lifehack: Les Bouquinistes

This photo finds yours truly perusing a 1745 edition of Voltaire found in one of the bookstalls along the Seine. Paris, of course, has its own particular name for the place and its pursuits: Les Bouquinistes.

Another Cool Cat Turns 50

What a week for cake and candles! Longfellow turned 200. Elizabeth Taylor turned 75 – whatever happened to National Velvet, anyway? And today the Cat in the Hat turns 50. If you’re a child of a certain age (and who isn’t?), you will hear one of the Cat’s catchy rhymes, then long-forgotten neural pathways will be firing all day long. The same warning goes for the Cat’s animated musical birthday card. I was thrilled to find it, then I couldn’t turn it off.

As you’d expect for any 50-something cultural icon these days, the Cat in the Hat has his own Wikipedia page. But who knew the book has a scholarly edition, The Annotated Cat? According to the publisher’s blurb, “The Cat in the Hat and its sequel operate on many levels. The books teach reading, but they also teach about poetry, politics, ethics, comics, history… even conartistry.”

NPR celebrated this morning in its comprehensive audio-historical way. The NPR web page is loaded with additional content and links to other sources. Here’s the skinny:

John Hersey of Hiroshima fame had a hand in the book’s inspiration. He prompted publisher William Spalding to bring out an engaging children’s book that would solve the urgent question of the day, “Why can’t Johnny read?” That was the 1950s version of a pedagogical crisis as old as Socrates. The publisher asked Dr. Seuss to produce a reading primer with a 200-word vocabulary that was entertaining enough to replace Dick and Jane. Dr. Seuss chaffed at the word restrictions. The book took a year and a half to write, and in the end it deployed a 236-word vocabulary. It made Dr. Seuss a rock star among children’s authors, but it was too “subversive” to gain acceptance as a school primer. Like the Cat himself, Dr. Seuss knew how to break the rules and get away with it.

Keeping Up with the White House Book Club

First it was Camus. The NYT reported last August that President Bush was reading The Stranger on his month-long vacation at the ranch. Hmmm, wouldn’t it be better as a beach novel? It’s plausible, if far-fetched, to think he actually read it for an afternoon’s relaxation. As millions of college students know, it’s a mercifully thin book, almost a quick read. I figured the President’s favorite passage was the action climax where Meursaul guns down the Arab on the rocks. If he read Dick Cheney’s loaner copy, he might have gone right to the dog-eared page, skipping all the jail cell meditation about the meaning of existence.

Then it was A Savage War of Peace, the classic account of the French debacle in Algeria. In a 60 Minutes interview in January, the President claimed to be reading this tome, along with half the colonels in the Pentagon. Judging from the unremitting Bush debacle in Iraq, that claim sounds a little like jumping the shark. After that primetime plug, author Alistair Horne gave crusty interviews to Chris Lydon on Open Source and Maureen Dowd in the NYT (sorry, this one is behind the pay wall; Smirking Chimp has a bootleg).

Lydon asked what the historian’s advice would be for Tony Blair. “I don’t want to be excessively rude about my Prime Minister,” the octogenarian answered, “but I’d say he’s a man of small stature who is impressed by important people and likes going to the White House. His input, it seems to me, is absolutely nil, and he’s got nothing back.”

Dowd asked Horne what the president could learn from his book. ''The depressing problem of getting entangled in the Muslim world,'' he replied. ''Algeria was a thoroughly bloodthirsty war that ended horribly and cost the lives of about 20,000 Frenchmen and a million Algerians. There was a terrible civil war. De Gaulle ended up giving literally everything away and left without his pants.''

If Bush is reading Dick Cheney’s or Karl Rove’s loaner copy, Savage War’s insights about torture have probably been redacted with a black highlighter pen. Let’s hope he didn’t go straight to the heavily dog-eared chapter about the French Army’s plan to invade Paris from Algeria, the threatened right-wing coup that returned Charles de Gaulle to power in 1958. Reading history is a good thing, Mr. President, but don’t get any more wing-nut ideas about the grandeur of presidential power.

Now the White House Book Club is buzzing about King Leopold’s Ghost, a history of Belgium’s colonial misdeeds in the Congo. This week’s On the Media features an interview with author Adam Hochschild, who says Belgian King Leopold was a media spin-meister of “Karl Rovian proportions.” Haven’t read that one yet. I’ll never catch up.

Pole-Dancing Parties Catch on in Book Club Country

From the headline I expected this NYT article to reveal a new spin on the nerdy book nook crowd. Consider this: “She wrapped herself around the pole in intriguing ways, then flowed onto the floor like fast honey.” That’s not exactly Wuthering Heights. Oh, Heathcliff!

But the piece reads more like The Theory of the Leisure Class than The Story of O:

Now the pole — think ballet barre turned vertical — is the new star at racier versions of Tupperware parties in well-heeled (if high-heeled) areas like this one in the northwest hills of Morris County, about 33 miles from Manhattan. Billed as “femme empowerment,” such at-home pole dancing lessons are taking place in the realm of book clubs, with mothers — and grandmothers — learning slinky moves for girls’ nights in, bachelorette send-offs, even the occasional 60th birthday celebration.

More on that Great American Folk Dance.

NOTE TO POLE-DANCERS (and CALAMARI LOVERS) EVERYWHERE: Settings are fixed and Comments are On. Still not easy to use in this blog template. Click on 0 Comments at the bottom of the post. It’s lonely musing/ranting all by myself.

BOOK NOOK BONUS: The NYT story quotes the authors of Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show and Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk About Sex After Sixty.