Berger’s Deli

[From the Naked City episode “Go Fight City Hall,” October 31, 1962. Click for a larger street.]

Here’s another instance of what I’ll call the Naked City effect, turning Manhattan into a small town of immediately recognizable locations. That’s Berger’s Deli, at 44 West 47th Street, in the Diamond District. You might know the street from Marathon Man. You might also know it as the longtime home of the Gotham Book Mart, which stood at no. 41. My friend Aldo Carrasco and I once had lunch at Berger’s after a visit to the Gotham. My fambly had lunch at Berger’s somewhere in the 1990s after visiting an exhibition of Edward Gorey’s work at the Gotham. And when I made a trip to New York in 2002 to see a Henry Darger exhibit and hear John Ashbery read from his work, I had lunch at Berger’s after what turned out to be a final trip to the Gotham. Here’s the menu — I took a copy.

Proust reminds us that “houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.” Yes, it’s true. The Gotham is gone, and Berger’s is now at 2 East 39th Street. Here’s the current menu.

You can see the Gotham’s “Wise Men Fish Here” sign and Berger’s at 0:25 in this clip from Marathon Man.

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[From Swann's Way, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002).]

“Rheumatism rather than literature”

The narrator wants to be a writer. M. de Norpois, former ambassador, knows of a friend’s son with the same ambition:

Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002).

I had planned to end my sentence-a-day posts with the end of Swann’s Way. But I had to share this sentence.

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Dwight D. Ritz

[Nancy, December 30, 2020. Click for a larger view.]

Aunt Fritzi has said that Nancy better have “some kind of justification” for writing on the window. Nancy offers that justification in the form of an Eisenhower matrix. Of course she’s replaced important/unimportant/urgent/not urgent with her own terms.

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“Memory’s pictures”

When young, the narrator regarded the Bois du Boulogne as “an artificial place and, in the zoological or mythological sense of the word, a Garden.” But everything changes. From the final paragraph of Swann’s Way :

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002).

This post concludes one-Proust-sentence-a-day. I’ll post passages from the remaining volumes now and then. Onward!

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[Translator’s note: “In Dodona, in Epirus, the priests of Zeus’ sanctuary gave oracles by interpreting the sound of the wind in the sacred oaks.”]

Nancy Dunning-Kruger

[Nancy, December 29, 2020.]

For a better 2021, read Nancy every day.

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A 2021 calendar

Free to good home: a 2021 calendar, three months per page, Gill Sans, with minimal holiday markings. It’s a PDF, right here for downloading.

I’ve been making calendars in Pages since late 2009. Good cheap fun.

Here comes Gilberte

Gilberte Swann makes an appearance on the Champs-Élysées:

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002).

The narrator’s early meetings with Gilberte are strange stuff, combining elements of childhood (marbles, governesses, snowballs down the back) with talk of the theater and an out-of-print book about Racine.

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Word Matters

An excellent podcast: Word Matters, with Merriam-Webster editors Emily Brewster, Neil Serven, Ammon Shea, and Peter Sokolowski. I’ve especially enjoyed the sixth and seventh episodes, one looking at the changing meaning of matriculate, the other busting the myth that Shakespeare invented x number of words.

In college, I never understood matriculate, and it never occurred to me to look it up. Every semester at registration I’d see the question: “Are you matriculated?” Sometimes I’d check Y. Sometimes, N. It didn’t seem to matter. I suspect that the coach who borrowed matriculate for football purposes didn’t understand the word either.

Edward M. Stringham’s archives

“The papers of Edward M. Stringham fall roughly into three categories: diaries; notes on literature, music, and art; and correspondence.” Mary Norris writes about the extraordinary archives of a New Yorker collator: “The Archives of an Unfulfilled Genius” (The New Yorker ).

Swann, dreaming

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002).

The young man in a fez is Swann himself: “like certain novelists, he had divided his personality between two characters, the one having the dream, and another he saw before him wearing a fez.”

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