1 – What is the story behind My Paris? I mean, how did it come to be?
I was living in a writers’ studio, having been granted a six month sojourn by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. I iniitially thought it would be fun to do touristy a pot-boiler, using Benjamin’s Arcades Project as a kind of guide. But the more I walked about Paris, this was in the 90s, the more I felt myself interested in what happends to the consécutive waves of avant garde militants and artists from Benjamin’s time to the present. So the book became a conversation with Benjamin and Gertrude Stein, among others, about these matters.