More candy store

[Click either image for a larger view. But it’s better to click on the links below for the full-size photographs.]

From the New-York Historical Society, two more views of a candy store at 4417 New Utrecht Avenue, Brooklyn. In keeping with the N‑YHS terms of use, I’ve posted low-resolution images. It’s worth clicking through to see the astonishingly zoomable originals: 1919, 1922. Look for the Parcheesi boards in the store window.

This address still housed a candy store many years later. In my 1960s Brooklyn childhood the store was known as Picholz’s. More on the location’s history in this post.

Thanks, Brian.

Four more Brooklyn candy stores
4302 12th Avenue : 4319 13th Avenue : 4213 or 4215 Fort Hamilton Parkway : 4223 Fort Hamilton Parkway

And one in Manhattan
94 Nassau Street

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Someone at Crossword Fiend mentioned that the Newsday crossword is now in ten-year-old reruns for the holiday season. I hadn’t even heard of the Saturday Stumper ten years ago, so today’s puzzle is, as they say of TV reruns, new to me. It’s by the puzzle’s editor, Stan Newman, no pseudonym, and it’s a good one — which means that it took me about twenty minutes to solve.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

1-A, seven letters, “See 23 Down.” Okay, what kind of puzzle begins with a clue like that? This one. 23-D, six letters: “With 1 Across, Baldwin’s mom on 30 Rock.” I think a better (non-giveaway) clue is in order, but I’m happy to see 23-D 1-A in the puzzle.

8-A, seven letters, “Now and then.” Clever. And have you heard John Lennon’s “Now and Then”?

11-D, five letters, “Net 26 Down.” And 26-D, six letters, “Scratch.” I am unreasonably proud to have gotten 26-D straight off, which somehow let me catch the trick in 11-D.

19-A, six letters, “It’s usually felt on the head.” A wonderful clue.

37-D, seven letters, “Put up or shut up!” The answer puts me back in my schooldays, early ones.

38-D, seven letters, “Loosen up, perhaps.” Terrific, and if you’re starting with the first two letters in place, you may be headed in a wrong direction.

43-A, eleven letters, “Food processors.” Okay. But the answer feels dated to me, maybe from a thirty-year-old puzzle.

46-A, five letters, “Host mail.” Technology makes this clue fun.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Breakfast with Nancy

[Nancy, March 17, 1949. Click for a larger view.]

Yesterday’s Nancy is today’s Nancy. But styles in children’s breakfasts have changed.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Drinking and defending

From Assignment Paris (dir. Robert Parrish, 1952). Sandy Tate (Audrey Totter) is an Eve Arden type, cracking wise and going it alone:

“I may not believe in what you say, but I’ll drink myself to death defending your right to say it.”

The statement spoofed here is usually attributed to Voltaire. Quote Investigator suggests that it is “probably” Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s characterization of Voltaire’s attitude toward another writer. Sandy Tate wouldn’t care one way or the other.

Frank O’Hara was kidding

About the claim made in a New Yorker piece that Frank O’Hara typed the poems of Lunch Poems on a store-display typewriter while on his lunch hour: Joe LeSeuer provides some context. The source for the claim is the blurb that O’Hara wrote for the book’s back cover. From Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara: A Memoir (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003):

It turned out that Ferlinghetti had nothing against — perhaps even wanted? — an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek blurb, since he immediately decided to go to press. Incidentally, it is Frank’s facetious reference to his pausing “at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations” that led later commentators to assert that he sometimes wrote his poems on an Olivetti showroom typewriter. The dumbbells — didn’t they know when they were being kidded?

I guess at The New Yorker they don’t know that O’Hara was kidding.

And yes, I’ve e-mailed the magazine.

Related posts
“Distraction-free devices” (Ralph Ellison, Frank O’Hara, and The New Yorker getting its facts wrong)
A review of Joe LeSueur’s Digressions

Distraction-free devices

In The New Yorker, Julian Lucas wonders whether “distraction-free devices” can change the way we write. I’m not sure. But I do think that they allow a writer to think about writing — and not tabs, fonts, margins, and app settings.

In 2005 I hit on my first version of what Paul Ford once called “Amish computing.” I used the Windows app Notepad2 (still available) and a spellcheck script. When I switched to a Mac in 2007, I began using TextWrangler (since superseded by BBEdit) and WriteRoom. I still stand by what I wrote in 2006: Writing is not word processing. And in 2011: I consider a word-processing window a hostile workplace. I consider Blogger’s Compose view and HTML view hostile workplaces as well, but they’re tolerable if I’m writing a short post.

I now do almost all my writing in iA Writer. For anything that’s to be printed (that is, a “document”), I still use Apple’s Pages app to “process” — ugly word — my words. For writing of any length, I still start with pen or pencil and paper.

[Two mistakes in the New Yorker piece: Ralph Ellison didn’t begin his second novel (published as Juneteenth and Three Days Before the Shooting . . .) on a computer. And Frank O’Hara didn’t write the poems of Lunch Poems on a sample Olivetti, not as what Lucas calls “a cute stunt,” nor as anything else. O’Hara’s claim to have written on a store-display typewriter is just a bit of urban pastoralism, part of the “blurp” the poet wrote for the book’s back cover. (You can see the blurp here, in a letter to City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti.) If you do take the blurp as factual, well, it also describes the poet on his lunch hour withdrawing to “a darkened ware- or fire-house to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, co-existence and depth.” LOL. Come on, fact checkers.]

The Greek alphabet and us

“Never did anything I learned as a drunken sorority girl prepare me more for the current world climate as learning the Greek alphabet”: from a Washington Post article about the Greek alphabet in our time.

My teaching experience makes me suspect that fraternity and sorority members learn only the capital letters of the Greek alphabet. But I could be wrong.

An odd detail from this article: a scientist who thought the names for COVID-19 variants should have “gravitas” and “familiarity” suggested using names of characters in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Gods help us.

A gang of six

“How a half-dozen right-wing members of Congress became key foot soldiers in Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the election“: just out from The New York Times, “Meadows and the Band of Loyalists: How They Fought to Keep Trump in Power.”

Andy Biggs, Mo Brooks, Louie Gohmert, Paul Gosar, Jim Jordan, and Scott Perry (that name is new to me): they’re fascists at work. Expel them from Congress and charge them with sedition.

From the carny world

In The New York Times, Brooks Barnes writes about Nightmare Alley and his life as the child of carnies:

People don’t quite know what to say when I mention my carny past. Some are fascinated, asking if I ever encountered sideshow performers. (Read on.)

Yes, read on.

I’m looking forward to seeing Nightmare Alley. But I doubt that it will outdo the 1947 original. (Elaine thinks that 1947 is our ideal year for movies. We watched thirteen in a row earlier this year.)

Almodóvar in the Times

“To find his American equivalent, you would have to imagine that the director of American Pie went on to make American Beauty and then a film that touches the ugliest aspects of the American Civil War”: from Marcela Valdes’s long profile of Pedro Almodóvar (The New York Times).

Our household is an Almodóvar-friendly zone. We’ve seen eighteen of his films. If I were ever to meet him, I would use the Spanish that remains to me to say “Gracias por sus películas, señor.”