ref “On the whole North America’s Anglo-Saxomania has had a withering effect”: Rudofsky, Streets for People, 19.
ref “Who often walk’d lonesome walks”: Walt Whitman, “Recorders Ages Hence,” Leaves of Grass (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), 99.
ref “City of orgies, walks and joys”: Ibid., 102.
ref “Passing stranger!”: Ibid., 103.
ref “the fruited plain”: Ken Gonzales-Day, “The Fruited Plain: A History of Queer Space,” Art Issues, September/October 1997, 17.
ref “dragging themselves through the negro streets,” “shoes full of blood”: Allen Ginsberg, “Howl,” in The New American Poetry, ed. Donald M. Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 182, 186.
ref “Strange now to think of you, gone”: Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish and Other Poems, 1958–1960 (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1961), 7.
ref “where you walked 50 years ago”: Ibid., 8.
ref “It was the most extraordinary thing”: Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 217.
ref “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass”: Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency,” in The Selected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 87.
ref “I’m becoming”: O’Hara, “Walking to Work,” ibid., 57.
ref “I’m getting tired of not wearing”: O’Hara, “F. (Missive and Walk) I. #53,” ibid., 194.
192–94 “Some nights we’d walk seven or eight hundred blocks”: David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 5; “long legs and spiky boots,” 182; “I had almost died three times,” 228; “I’m walking through these hallways,” 64; “I walked for hours,” 67; “man on second avenue,” 70; “I walk this hallway twenty-seven times,” 79.
12. PARIS, OR BOTANIZING ON THE ASPHALT
ref “Now a landscape, now a room”: Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 156.
ref “Not to find one’s way in a city,” “it had to be in Paris”: Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” in Reflections, 8, 9.
ref holding an alpenstock before some painted Alps: On mountains, alpenstocks and Benjamin, see his letters of September 13, 1913; July 6–7, 1914; November 8, 1918; and July 20, 1921; and Monme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography (London: Verso, 1996): “finally a crudely daubed backdrop of the Alps was brought for me. I stand there, bareheaded, with a tortuous smile on my lips, my right hand clasping a walking stick” (12), and “Another taken-for-granted feature of the boy’s day-to-day life were the frequent lengthy journeys with the whole family: to the North Sea and the Baltic, to the high peaks of the Risengebirge between Bohemia and Silesia, to Freudenstadt in the Black Forest, and to Switzerland” (13).
ref “I don’t think I ever saw him walk”: Gershom Sholem, cited in Frederic V. Grunfeld, Prophets without Honor: A Background to Freud, Kafka, Einstein and Their World (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979), 233.
ref “old Scandinavian”: Priscilla Park Ferguson, “The Flâneur: Urbanization and Its Discontents,” in From Exile to Vagrancy: Home and Its Dislocations in 19th Century France, ed. Suzanne Nash (Albany: State University of New York, 1993), 60, n. 1. See also her Paris as Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
ref “Irish word for ‘libertine’ ”: Elizabeth Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur,” New Left Review 191 (1992): 93–94.
ref “The crowd is his domain”: Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” Selected Writings on Art and Artists (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1972), 399.
ref “goes botanizing on the asphalt”: Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1973), 36.
ref “Arcades,” “The flâneurs liked to have the turtles”: Ibid., 53–54.
ref he did not exist: On the nonexistence of the flâneur, see Rob Shields, who, in “Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin’s Notes on the Flâneur,” in The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester (London: Routledge, 1994), remarks, “In truth, it must be acknowledged that nineteenth-century visitors and travelogues do not appear to reference flânerie other than as an urban myth. The principal habitat of the flâneur is the novels of Honore de Balzac, Eugene Sue, and Alexandre Dumas.”
ref Gerard de Nerval famously took a lobster on walks: Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 213.
ref “Narrow crevices”: Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. Charles E. Wilbour (New York: Modern Library, 1992), bk. 12, Corinth, chap. 1, 939–40. See also Girouard, Cities and People, 200–201: “All visitors commented on these streets, which had no sidewalks, so that pedestrians were constantly in danger of being run down or spattered with mud by fast-moving traffic. ‘Walking,’ wrote Arthur Young in 1787, ‘which in London is so pleasant and so clean, that ladies do it every day, is here a toil and a fatigue to a man, and an impossibility to a well-dress woman.’ ‘The renowned Tournefort,’ according to the Russian traveller Karamzin writing in 1790, ‘who had travelled almost the entire world, was crushed to death by a fiacre on his return to Paris because on his travels he had forgotten how to leap in the streets, like a chamois.’ In this ambience, browsing in shop windows was not likely to flourish.”
ref “which I reached without any other adventure” and following: Frances Trollope, Paris and the Parisians in 1835 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836), 370.
ref “In Paris there are places where people take walks”: Muhammed Saffar, Disorienting Encounters: Travels of a Moroccan Scholar in France, 1845–46, trans. and ed. Susan Gilson Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 136–37.
ref “long walks and constant affection!”: Baudelaire to his mother, May 6, 1861, in Claude Pichois, Baudelaire (New York: Viking, 1989), 21.
ref “Whenever I had stopped”: Nicholas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, Les Nuits de Paris or the Nocturnal Spectator (A Selection), trans. Linda Asher and Ellen Fertig, introduction by Jacques Barzun (New York: Random House, 1964), 176.
ref “virgin forest”: Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique 39 (1986): 119: “The popular literature of flanerie may have referred to Paris as a ‘virgin forest’ (V, 551), but no woman found roaming there alone was expected to be one.”
ref “What are the dangers”: Benjamin, Baudelaire, 39.
ref “Mohicans in spencer jackets”: Ibid., 42.
ref “on the Paris pavement”: George Sand, My Life, trans. Dan Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon, 1979), 203–4.
ref “Multitude, solitude”: Baudelaire, “Crowds,” in Paris Spleen, trans. Louis Varese (New York: New Directions, 1947), 20.
ref Haussmann’s project: On Haussmann I have been guided by David Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), and to a lesser extent by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Schivelbusch insists that Haussmann—“the Attila of the straight line”—was entirely utilitarian in his street designs: “It is obvious that the avenues and boulevards were designed to be efficacious army routes, but that function was merely a Bonapartist addendum to the otherwise commercially oriented new system” (181).
ref “Paris is changing!”: Charles Baudelaire, “Le Cygne,” The Flowers of Evil, trans. David M. Dodge for the author.
ref “My Paris, the Paris in which I was born”: Jules and Edmond Goncourt, The Goncourt Journals, ed. and trans. Lewis Galantiere (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1937), 93.
ref “For the promenaders, what necessity was there”: Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 185 n.
ref “evenings in bed I could not read more”: Benjamin, quoted in Susan Buck Morse, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walt
er Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 33.
ref “I still recall the extraordinary role”: Andre Breton quoted in the introduction to Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change, 1994), viii.
ref “spoke to this unknown woman”: Andre Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 64.
ref “Georgette resumed her stroll”: Philippe Soupault, Last Nights of Paris, trans. William Carlos Williams (Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change, 1992), 45–46.
ref “Everything is so simple when one knows all the streets”: Ibid., 64.
ref “Whenever I happen to be there”: Ibid., 80.
ref “famously proposes a detailed ‘interpretation’ ”: Michael Sheringham, “City Space, Mental Space, Poetic Space: Paris in Breton, Benjamin and Réda,” in Parisian Fields, ed. Michael Sheringham (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), 89. Older metaphors of the city as a body existed, but not as a sexual body: in the nineteenth century, parks were often called the “lungs” of the city, and Richard Sennett, in Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), writes of the bodily metaphors that metaphorized Haussmann’s sewers, waterways, and streets as various organs of bodily circulation, necessary for health.
ref “rapt and confused”: Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 1946), 59–60.
ref “a man who has, with great difficulty”: Benjamin, quoted in Grunwald, Prophets without Honor, 245.
ref “No one knew the path”: Ibid., 248.
ref “whereupon the border officials”: Hannah Arendt, introduction, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 18.
ref “In Paris a stranger feels at home”: Ibid., 21.
ref “could set for itself the study”: Guy DeBord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 5.
ref “The point . . . was to encounter the unknown”: Greil Marcus, “Heading for the Hills,” East Bay Express, February 19, 1999. Marcus writes about situationism far more extensively in his Lipstick Traces (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
ref “practitioners of the city,” “the walking of passers-by”: Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 93, 100.
ref “under threat from the tyranny of bad architecture”: Jean-Christophe Bailly in Sheringham, “City Space, Mental Space, Poetic Space,” Parisian Fields, 111.
13. CITIZENS OF THE STREETS: Parties, Processions, and Revolutions
Some of the material here comes from my essays “The Right of the People Peaceably to Assemble in Unusual Clothing: Notes on the Streets of San Francisco” published in Harvard Design Magazine in 1998, and “Voices of the Streets,” Camerawork Quarterly, summer 1995; and my essay on Gulf War activism in War After War (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1991).
ref “the ideal city for riot”: Eric Hobsbawm, “Cities and Insurrections,” in Revolutionaries (New York: Pantheon, 1973), 222. Elizabeth Wilson in The Sphinx in the City and Priscilla Parker Ferguson in Paris as Revolution also make astute links between the social space and revolutionary potential of a city.
ref “Urban reconstruction, however”: Hobsbawm, “Cities and Insurrections,” 224.
ref “I take my desires for reality”: Angelo Quattrocchi and Tom Nairn, The Beginning of the End (London: Verso, 1998), 26.
ref “The difference between rebellion at Columbia and rebellion at the Sorbonne”: Mavis Gallant, Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews (New York: Random House, 1988), 3.
ref the market women . . . had grown accustomed to marching: There are many conflicting versions of the market women’s march. I relied on Shirley Elson Roessler’s Out of the Shadows: Women and Politics in the French Revolution, 1789–95 (New York: Peter Land, 1996) for the sequence and details of events, though I also used Michelet’s history of the French Revolution (Wynnewood, Pa.: Livingston, 1972), Georges Rude’s indispensable Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), Simon Schama’s Citizens (New York: Knopf, 1989), and Christopher Hibbert’s The Days of the French Revolution (New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1981).
ref “at the discipline, pageantry, and magnitude of the almost daily processions”: Rude, Crowd in the French Revolution, 66.
ref “she delivered such a blow with her broom”: Roessler, Out of the Shadows, 18.
ref “their decorated branches amidst the gleaming iron of pikes”: Hibbert, Days, 104.
ref East Germany was next: On Germany I relied on Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolutions of 1989 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (New York: Random House, 1990), and John Borneman, After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
ref arrested just for being in the vicinity of disturbances: Borneman, After the Wall, 23–24: “In one example . . . a demonstrator was sentenced to six months imprisonment for calling ‘No Violence’ about fifteen times.”
ref “the people acted and the Party reacted”: Ash, Magic Lantern, 83.
ref “Prague . . . seemed hypnotized, caught in a magical trance”: Michael Kukral, Prague 1989: A Study in Humanistic Geography (Boulder, Colo.: Eastern European Monographs, 1997), 110.
ref “The government is telling us”: Alexander Dubček, quoted in Time, December 4, 1989, 21.
ref “The time of massive and daily street demonstrations”: Kukral, Prague 1989, 95.
ref “Secrecy . . . was a hallmark”: Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1994), 30.
ref “Much later . . . they described their walks”: Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood, 70.
ref “They tell me that, while they are marching”: Marjorie Agosin, Circles of Madness: Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Freedonia: White Pine Press, 1992), 43.
ref “People lived in public”: Victor Hugo, 1793, trans. Frank Lee Benedict (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1988), 116.
ref “The revolutionary posters were everywhere”: George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), 5.
ref “Revolutionary moments are carnivals in which the individual life celebrates its unification with a regenerated society”: Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, quoted in Do or Die (Earth First! Britain’s newsletter), no. 6 (1997), 4.
14. WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT: Women, Sex, and Public Space
ref “I used to go out walking”: James Joyce, “The Dead,” Dubliners (New York: Dover, 1991), 149. Anne Wallace, in her Walking, Literature and English Culture, pointed me to this use of the term in this text; the Oxford English Dictionary also has a nice section on the phrase.
ref “You have been telling the truth”: Glen Petrie, A Singular Iniquity: The Campaigns of Josephine Butler (New York: Viking, 1971), 105, where the other details of the Caroline Wyburgh story also appear.
ref “being born a woman”: Sylvia Plath, quoted in Carol Brooks Gardner, Passing By: Gender and Public Harassment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 26. Re gender and travel, see Eric J. Leed, The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 115–16: “The ‘double standard’ constructs the spatial domains of interiority (female) and exteriority (male) as domains of, respectively, sexual constraint and sexual freedom. The chastity of women is a technique of inclusion and exclusion, which decrees memberships, rights, and relations between males as well as sanctifying the male line of descent. Women’s identification with place in conditions of settlement has been regarded as ‘natural,’ a result of reproductive necessities that require stability and protection by men; thus the genderization of space. . . . The antithesis between the exteriorizations of men and the interiorizations of women, the superfluity of the sperm and the parsimony of the ovum
, has been mapped upon human mobility and come to be considered an element of human nature. But the immobilization of women is a historical achievement. . . . It is this territorialization that makes travel a gendering activity.”
ref “who go out onto the street,” “Domestic women”: Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 134, 135–39.
ref “were confined to houses”: Sennett, Flesh and Stone, 34. Pericles and Xenophon quotes are on pages 68 and 73.
ref “In Greek thought women lack”: Mark Wiggins, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 335.
ref “The young men strolling on the streets”: Joachim Schlor, Nights in the Big City (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 139.
ref “shopping in Les Halles”: Petrie, A Singular Iniquity, 160.
ref “I asked what the crime was”: Ibid., 182.
ref hounded into suicide: The woman was a Mrs. Percy of Aldershot: see the preface and pages 149–54 of Petrie, A Singular Iniquity, and Paul McHugh, Prostitution and Victorian Social Reform (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 149–51.
ref Lizzie Schauer in Glenna Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman: Woman’s Power and Woman’s Place in the United States, 1630–1970 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3.
ref force-feeding the prisoners: My sources were Midge Mackenzie, Shoulder to Shoulder (New York: Knopf, 1975), on British suffragists, and Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom: American Women Win the Vote (1920; new edition, edited by Carol O’Hare, Troutdale, Oregon: New Sage Press, 1995). Djuna Barnes volunteered to be force-fed so she could report on the process.
ref “that women will not feel at ease”: B. Houston, “What’s Wrong with Sexual Harassment,” quoted in June Larkin, “Sexual Terrorism on the Street,” in Sexual Harassment: Contemporary Feminist Perspectives, ed. Alison M. Thomas and Celia Kitzinger (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997), 117.
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