Amherst, MA: Bertucci’s

Chicken Marinara Sandwich – 1 star
about $8 with pasta salad
July 31, 2005

In addition to all the usual excuses for not posting to my blog, there are two others: first, I have been traveling less over the past two months and, thanks to my move to California, I am now on my last trip back to the office for a year; and second, due to my newfound obsession with eating at least seven fruits and vegetables a day, my sandwich consumption has declined precipitously.

But in the course of saying our farewells to our favorite places in Western Massachusetts, Sylvia and I stopped by Bertucci’s today for lunch, even though the South Beach Diet (hers, not mine) put our favorite margarita pizza (really, the closest I’ve found in this country to the original pizza of Naples) beyond reach a long time ago. At its center, the Chicken Marinara Sandwich features a tender, flattened, lightly breaded chicken breast, topped with Bertucci’s (how do you make a possessive of that?) fruity, fresh-tasting tomato sauce. All of that was good, but it was delivered in a somewhat spongy mock-focaccia roll with caramelized onions that absorbed more flavor than it provided. The side pasta salad had a nice lemony dressing, but underneath was a distinct core of blandness.

While preparing for the move, I also repeated the periodic ritual of going through my old boxes of various souvenirs I hadn’t opened since the last move and tossing out everything that seemed less important now than it did four years ago: notebooks from previous jobs, magazines recording French football games that no longer seemed that important, readings from courses that I will never teach again – and all of my notes and research files from my dissertation. Although the possibility had not occurred to me in years, now it really will be impossible for me to convert my dissertation into a book.

By sheer coincidence, I recently read Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy, by Peter Gordon, my closest friend and colleague among my graduate school classmates. Peter and I started together, shared the same advisor and field, did research together in Paris, etc., and now he is a tenured professor at Harvard (and he got tenure early, no less). Reading his book was intensely disconcerting, first because it exists in a completely different intellectual universe than the one I currently inhabit – and second, because I used to live in that universe. So at the same time that I was only partially understanding what I was reading, I could remember the younger version of myself who did understand Weimar-era German philosophy. Reading about Heidegger is a kind of experience that I first encountered when reading Derrida’s Of Grammatology in college: you make a leap into another conceptual framework, and then everything makes sense, but otherwise it is just words on a page. So here I was, sitting on a plane back from the wedding of the person I lived with in graduate school (someone completely different), thinking that I could understand this book if I really wanted to, but not sure it was worth the effort. But I read it for Peter, and I understand it’s an excellent book, so if you do care about Weimar-era philosophy, let me know and I’ll lend you my copy.

Dauber update

Apart from a little unexplained vomiting, Dauber continues to be in fine health – so much so, in fact, that my doctor friends at the wedding (I lived with medical students for a few years in grad school) said that it was highly unlikely that he actually has pancreatic cancer at this point, two months after the diagnosis. So in all likelihood, he will be making the trip with us to California, although it’s anyone’s guess if he’ll make the trip back in a year.