Star Turns

The commemorations began on the mezzanine of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture. They continued downstairs in the foursquare atrium, later spilling out into corridors where guests queued up for incongruous helpings of cheese and sushi rolls against the shimmying accompaniment of light jazz. Around the corner from the victuals, spectators to a PowerPoint presentation pressed against the wall to let people pass by. Amiably lo-fi and awkwardly situated, the projection paid witness to “Spitzer Shining Stars” Marshall Berman and Michael Sorkin, the honorees of the evening. Their likenesses—Berman’s a prodigious cross between Marx and a shaggy dog; Sorkin’s wryer, stubbly, and scraggly by comparison—stood out from the celestial sky.

Berman, a professor of political science who died from a heart attack in 2013, and Sorkin, a professor of architecture and urban design who was among Covid’s earliest notable victims, were City College fixtures. They were also friends, sharing a belief in justice in all its forms, Marxism in certain of its forms, the city, the necessity and elucidating power of criticism, and good repartee. “The relationship between him and Michael,” remarked City College’s VINCENT BOUDREAU on the night, “it sounds like it really should be a screenplay or a Broadway show.”

The occasion at Spitzer marked the donation of the two men’s personal libraries by their widows, SHELLIE SCLANBERMAN and JOAN COPJEC. Whereas the Berman collection has been bestowed on the school library, Sorkin’s has been deposited in a reading room designed by architect and faculty member ELISABETTA TERRAGNI.

Sclan-Berman and Copjec closed out the evening with remarks of their own. Copjec, a prominent Lacanian theorist, described Sorkin as “not simply a ‘word man’ but also a ‘syntax man’” and cited letters he exchanged with the uncompromising LA critic Esther McCoy; to her younger peer McCoy wrote, “Your writing is written from you—no one else could have written it. It skips from A to H to get down to the things that are important.” Why that clipped alphabetical range, Copjec recalled wondering, before being hit by the epiphanic realization: it meant “ah.”

Sclan-Berman, the writer’s literary executor, spoke about her own discoveries, made while combing through the bibliographic piles at home. In a bottom drawer, she found an unfinished novel (“kinda trashy”) Berman had penned in the mid-1960s, involving romantic love and the Weather Underground. She also relayed the details of their first meeting (“Like everyone, I loved All That Is Solid Melts into Air, but I’m the one who married him”) and teased the forthcoming reissue of an out-of-print 1974 text called “Sympathy for the Devil.” In retrospect, it’s ironic that Berman was working on an essay about the Genesis story when he died.

It had been nearly three hours, and, wary of the hour-plus train ride home, I slunk out of the auditorium. Spitzer’s Shining Stars were still playing on an intergalactic loop in the hallway. “To be a human is not to have a beginning and an end but to be exposed to infinity,” Copjec had said moments before, not at all incongruously.