With his New York Love Dictionary, the journalist Serge July offers a travel guide through a sum of extraordinary stories.
When we get to town, we sing it first. In New York, “all the sounds, all the rhythms, all the riffs, all the melodies, all the voices, all the noises, all the cries for more than a century have been set to music there,” writes Serge July in the preface to his New York Love Dictionary (27 €), 120e volume of this tasty collection of Plon editions founded by Jean-Claude Simoën in 1997. Its own playlist (word referenced with the letter “P”) consists of seven titles, New York New York by Fred Ebb and John Kander at First We Take Manhattan by Leonard Cohen, through Empire State of Mind by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys. But not all decibels are melodic.
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“Damn town,” writes July in the title of his preface. Because “New York is a washing machine who tirelessly brews human clusters coming from everywhere and nowhere, a forge which consumes human energy and which exhausts, as much as it encourages”, we read from the first lines. The former director of the daily Release expresses a “vital need to immerse yourself” regularly in the American megalopolis, but he “has the desire to leave it after a month”.
New York has seen 12 million migrants pass through who feel more at home than in their country of origin
Serge July
“I like this city where everyone is foreign, insists Serge July. New York has seen 12 million migrants pass through, who feel more at home than in their country of origin. It is Babel, where most languages are spoken. A battlefield of 8.5 million inhabitants of which 5.5 million are single. No one comes here to start a family. It is an exemplary capital of the Métis born over the generations. But also a capital of inequalities, a city of violence today contained. ”
“New York is a standing city”
For a long time, July was deprived of New York. “I had the misfortune to go to Cuba in 1960. Until 1979, American customs refused me a visa,” he says. The cinema made it known to him before he went there. “Like many people, I had the impression of having seen such and such a street, such a neighborhood. Perhaps for this he dedicates his book to the filmmaker Martin Scorsese.
The verticality struck him. Its dictionary lists different ways of talking about it. That of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who wrote the shock of this position through his character of Doctor Destouches in the journey to the Edge of the Night, in 1932: “Imagine that their town was standing, absolutely straight. New York is a standing city. ” That of the German director Fritz Lang author of the masterpiece of the 7e art from the beginning of the last century, Metropolis.
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“I had seen the film. But I had not realized how much it was a vertical city, ”Serge July intervenes. Or that of Sempé, The Frenchman of the New Yorker whose words July made her own: “It’s not because I felt tiny in the middle of the skyscrapers that I felt crushed, no. I only felt tiny in the midst of the huge skyscrapers. ” July pretends to question: “We’re coming for this excess, aren’t we?”
By metro and bus
It was by taking the bus and the metro that he tamed it, following the advice of Jack Kerouac in Before the road, the book he devoted to his arrival in New York, also cited in the book. His dictionary is definitely not an encyclopedia but an invitation to travel. It flips through like a collection of news, stories, encounters, a guide. In a tight, alert and committed writing, its author shares his own experiences, his intimate perception of the Big Apple in literature, culture, politics, economy, declining from A to Z the feeling of “I love you neither me” that inspires him the city.
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It is a sum of 784 pages, 266 “entries”, words, proper names, hashtags, expressions which open on singular, but all extraordinary stories, of men and women who have left their mark on the identity of the city. Like Audrey Munson, this illustrious unknown who served as a model for twenty statues in the city. A curvaceous Venus, the story of which can be found on page 514. “DNA” is the first that imposed itself on him. “Reflections” – glass in architecture – the one he added. A literary carte blanche where each line is a new beginning.
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