By starting Serge July’s “New York Love Dictionary” (1), we cannot help but plunge back into the great era of “Liberation”. “Serge” was passing through the services, he patted you on the shoulder, saying nonchalantly: “Today, you have to take such and such an angle” article. And very often, he was 24 or 48 hours ahead of the competition … His dictionary is as follows: precise, unadorned, full of passion but stripped of its external signs. It’s an ideal puzzle for New York, a city-collage too rushed to wallow in lyricism.
“Since the early 80s, confie July, I usually rush there once a year ”. We say to ourselves, a little annoyed, that it is a bit short for an inventory of nearly 800 pages. But precisely: July’s New York is a city of visitors, of perpetual tourists who are always curious. “I keep coming back to get lost again, he recounts. because I know that in the meantime this city which practices novelty as a combat sport will have changed ”.
A love dictionary is a Rorschach test: you read in it the hollows and bumps of a personality. July’s New York doesn’t evade billionaires and vanity-puffed up skyscrapers, it scrupulously ticks the boxes « Rockefeller » or “Robber barons” but we feel that he tastes little of these “Paradises shining like jewelery, and which reek of spawn and shit”. The record prowess of this city, which always claims to be the “biggest” or the “best” of this or that leaves him cold, to the point that some of its entries have an air of copy and paste, with a host of statistics balanced by ‘a distracted look.
His passion is elsewhere. First in the characters of New York, each more fascinating than the next and, for some, largely forgotten. Who remembers Gordon Bennett, “One of the inventors of modern journalism” but also one of the most scandalous men of his time, a speed freak driving his carriages like racing cars, capable of finding himself dressed in his only top hat after having abused absinthe? Or Edward Bernays, the “Father of spin doctors” whose opinion campaigns made “Dream of both the dictators, the democrats in the countryside and all the companies of the consumer society” ?
A big fan of jazz and crazy about Miles Davis, July pays tribute to her heroes, from Thelonious Monk to Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker. But he does not forget cinema, literature, contemporary art and of course journalism. We even learn that he took a memorable rake with Woody Allen he wanted to interview on “Manhattan” – ” a wonder “, certainly, but also a film that Woody had tried to buy to make it disappear.
The other hobby of ex-gaucho July, which gives a real originality to this dictionary, is the place it gives to social movements, strikes, counter-cultures that have shaped New York. We see unheard-of figures, such as the flamboyant revolutionary Emma Goldman, or burning neighborhoods, such as Five Points, this crossroads in south-eastern Manhattan which was found at the end of the 19th century. “At the heart of violence, hatred, prejudice, racism, xenophobia and epidemics”. In a New York that has become as secure as a Swiss canton, this furious past remains on the surface, like the DNA of violence. The difference is that today the only visible violence is that of the property owners, whose rapacity threatens to kill the city with grotesque inequalities.
By pecking at the other recently published New York dictionary, “The 100 words of New York” (2), another memory comes to the surface: that of Laure Watrin when she lived in the city, in the 90s. Journalist devoured with curiosity, she had a knack for making you discover the bar, the tribe or the fashion of which you still did not know everything . Her dictionary is intimate, it is that of an inhabited New York that she never really left, even after her return to Paris, to the point of devoting several tasty guides to it.
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In these “100 words”, we find classics like ” Staten Island “ or «The 5th Avenue », but it is on the soul and the tics of “Big Apple” that it is necessary to linger: a rough city, rude, in a hurry but also “Very friendly”, where the smile is “Always more pleasant than the legendary face of the Parisian waiter” (even if the « fuck you » is never far). The places of this New York are not only the MoMa or the Empire State building but the “Steps”, “cycle paths”, “emergency stairs” and other accommodations « condos » or «Co-op». Barely briefed on « hipsters » (“Bobos”) New Yorkers, you discover the « hicksters », contraction of hicks (“Péquenauds”) and hipsters, “Sort of bohemian farmers” who colonize “Upstate” (the region north of the city) on weekends.
Like July’s, Laure Watrin’s New York is “A city that is both familiar and exotic which, even when you think you know it, keeps reinventing itself”.
(1) “New York Love Dictionary”, by Serge July. Plon, October 2019. 27 euros.
(2) “The 100 words of New York, by Laure Watrin. Que sais-je?, September 2019. 9 euros.
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