Flanerie

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Did you solve the Montreal Mystery in my last blog post? Did you guess which Montreal mansion was the location for our decadent brunch?

Plaudits to Steph Sirois (@StefS31) and Linda Coffin who answered correctly that the mysterious Montreal mansion in the video is Mount Stephen Club! Both Steph and Linda have personal connections to the property, one from college reasearch and the other from growing up two blocks away... Bravo, Montrealophiles! (Shoot me your mailing addresses, and a prize will help you celebrate your smarts.)

The Mount Stephen Club occupies the late 19th century mansion of George Stephen, the co-founder of Canadian Pacific Railway. This extravagant home in Montreal's Golden Square Mile was architecturally inspired Italian Renaissance palaces. The interior is extravagantly finished in detailed Cuban mahogany, English walnut and exotic woods and boasts many marble mantles, stained glass glass windows, and grand staircase fit for royalty.

Clipped from: www.empireavenue.com (share this clip)

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What is that? Gobble-di-gook. Of the Empire Avenue variety...

Unlike other avenues I'm prone to probe, this one is different. No smells. No found poetry. No dog crap to sidestep. Well, not literally, at least.

You see, Empire Avenue is a digital avenue. Actually, it's more like a digital universe. I wandered in a couple of months back out of curiosity. A digital flaneur meandering a newly discovered digital avenue. A couple of days exploring, and I was hooked. A bit spooky, really.

So I left.

Well, not totally. I kept me account open with an eye to returning when the sublime summertime non-digital world stopped distracting. But the emails, the notices, the reminders continued. People kept buying stock in me. And some began to worry that my stock price was falling, rising, erratic.

And yet I was too absorbed in Rosslyn Redux and Redacting Rosslyn, in gardening and windsurfing, to venture back into the digital avenue.

Until this morning. And once again, I'm intrigued.

There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell's dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency,