A guest series at PANK Blog, curated by Jeffrey Condran

In 2001 Bloomsbury inaugurated a series called The Writer and the City. In the first book, Edmund White wrote about Paris.  The title was The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris.  White provides a helpful definition of flaneur: “A flaneur 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 for adventure, aesthetic or erotic.”  It is an idea that has always held for me an air of romance and mystery, and puts me immediately in mind of Henry Miller, who in his frequently impoverished state, wandered the Parisian streets in search of diversion and inspiration.   And so writers walking a place and gaining inspiration serves as the theme for the blog posts during the next two weeks at PANK.  Contributors Stewart O’Nan, Elise Levine, Andrew Ervin, Michelle Bailat-Jones, and William Lychack will join me in taking readers on an international tour of places where being a flaneur has had an impact on a particular writing project or on their careers as writers.  We will visit Prague, Paris, Toronto, an island in Scotland, a Japanese village, and Dracula’s castle.  Enjoy the ride! 

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Prague is Silent

by Jeffrey Condran

The moment I emerged from the subway in Wenceslas Square, I understood that Prague was a city meant to be seen on foot.  Perhaps it was the human scale of the place—no breaking your neck looking up at skyscrapers as in New York—what Henry Miller called those “beautiful white prisons.”  No, Prague’s architecture is 500 or 1000 years old, mostly, miraculously, untouched by the 20^th century wars that destroyed so much of the rest of Central Europe.  It has a time capsule feeling about it, even now, despite the ravages of two decades of capitalism.  You feel it’s almost possible to take a good running leap and hover just a few stories—a handful at most—off the ground and see everything.  Continue reading →