I think I give up on flâneur as a word to describe myself. I was hoping to work with a newer meaning of the word, one which moves beyond the implications that a flâneur has privilege that allows them to be a conspicuous idler. I wanted to work it into a meaning defined by soul-searching and long walks in search of one’s self. But it’s not settling in like that, and I am less inclined to make long walks anymore unless in the interest of exercise. It doesn’t help that the word itself sounds sounds like a mix of custard and manure.

So I might dump this content back onto sorabji.nyc, or just give up this experiment altogether and go back to sorabji.com. It doesn’t matter, does it? This business of making myself invisible to the searchies has gotten kind of old.

I think I was irrationally inspired to use the word (flâneur ) when someone who has followed my sites since around 1998 said he happened to encounter it in a book and thought it was the perfect word to describe me. I did not deny it, adding that if I knew what I was doing I could probably build a brand around the flaneur.nyc domain name. The branding thing is probably true, but I do not consider myself to be the aloof man of leisure that seems to define the flâneur.

…

Rummaging, again, though the papers of my past. I am throwing away a stack of notes I took during a course on Gustav Mahler in college. I hated that class though I cannot remember why. I think the other students thought poorly of me for some reason. I don’t discard a lot of my handwritten scrawls but these class notes can disappear into the shredder.

Bah, I’ll keep them. It’s only a few pages, I thought it was 50 or 100.

Also found what must be 200+ copies I made of posters advertising a recital by Robert Helps, a concert I organized and would have paid for using money from the radio station. I say “would have paid for” because the concert never happened. A tick or some other kind of bug bit Bob and one of his hands swelled up to the size of a watermelon. It was unfortunate for a lot of reasons, not least of which was Bob was very interested in doing this concert and there would no doubt have been a quality turnout. Also unfortunate is what an excellent program he had lined up, playing his signature Sessions second sonata and what would have been a U.S., possibly even world premiere of Henri Duparc’s op. 1, Five Petit Pieces. I would think the conservatory could have even released the concert on CD if it went as well as I expected it to.

But it was not to be.

Come to think of it I think I ended up giving the premiere performance of those Duparc pieces, which are not especially memorable or even interesting save for the fact that few people associate Duparc with anything but his songs, and at the Time Bob claimed it was he who discovered those pieces.

I am remembering how precious paper used to be to me. I would pull stacks of papers out of the garbage cans next to the photocopy machines, just so I could have something to write on (the blank sides). This fixation continued through the years, as I salvaged a roll of what was said to be paper towels from the Parc Lincoln. This roll of paper was on the paper towel roll but these were no paper towels. The paper was so think you could type onto it, and I intended to do just that, feeding what I came to call the Parc Lincoln Scroll into a Smith-Corona typewriter and typing typing typing onto it until it was entirely covered with my words. I never filled the scroll, though.

Well, I need to do other things, as has been true for years now.