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Buttonholes Yes, 1,074,000,000 of them.

Moon-like

[Life, February 14, 1964. Click for a much larger view.]

Paying a little more attention to the moon made me think about the moon-like flavor of the supper in a Ritz ad that I clipped some time ago. Is it wrong to see a suggestion of the moon and its phases in the egg and crackers? I think not.

But a bowl of soup, a slice of egg, and five crackers: does that assemblage really count as a meal? About supper they were always wrong, the old magazine ads, or at least sometimes wrong.

A related post
“Moon in the afternoon”

“Moon in the afternoon”

Italo Calvino, “Moon in the afternoon.” In Mr. Palomar, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1985).

Mr. Palomar, as his name suggests, is an observer. Reading Italo Calvino had prompted me to pay a little more attention to the moon. See also “Is cognac waning, Papà?”

Our moon was full last night, a full moon of many names. I like Sugar Moon, which I think would be a fine name for a tune. And, lo — there is one, by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Its Sugar Moon falls in, well, of course, June.

Related reading
All OCA Italo Calvino posts (Pinboard)

Hip-hop Moleskine

“See I’m notebook totin’, I always got the Moleskine”: K.O. Stratt, “The Moleskine.”

I say /mōl-uh-SKEEN-uh/, so I’d have to change the rhyme and the rhythm: “See I’m notebook totin’, Mina, I got the Moleskine.” Alternative alliteration: Tina.

Related reading
All OCA Moleskine posts (Pinboard)

[There is no official prounciation of Moleskine.]

The New York Times, or The Onion ?

Can you identify which headlines come from which?

In alphabetical order:

Everything We Learned from Oprah’s Weight Loss Special

I Never Cared About Pepper Until I Got This Century-Old French Pepper Mill

I Use This Mini Food Processor So Much More Than My Full-Size Cuisinart

Pros and Cons of Banning Asbestos

Quiz: How Much Do You Know About Trump’s Court Cases?

The answers are hidden away in the comments.

Ben Stern (1921–2024)

He led the fight against a Nazi rally in Illinois. The New York Times has an obituary (gift link).

[I’m chagrined to realize that the URL preserves a mistake: I had the name of the photographer Bert Stern in my head when I wrote this post earlier today.]

How to improve writing (no. 120)

One way to avoid glaring mistakes: be clear on which word is the subject in a sentence. From a Washington Post article (gift link) about NBC’s ill-considered decision to hire Ronna McDaniel as a political analyst:

And despite [Chuck] Todd’s pushback, there appears to be no plans to change course with this hire.

There is not the subject of that sentence (though as a word being named, it’s the subject of this sentence). The subject is plans. Revised:

And despite [Chuck] Todd’s pushback, there appear to be no plans to change course with this hire.

Better still would be for NBC to rescind this hiring.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 120 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Buttonholes

Not long after posting a Garment District tax photograph this morning, I happened to read a New York Times obituary (gift link) for the tailor Martin Greenfield:

The traditionalism of the shop’s techniques is embodied by several century-old buttonhole-cutting machines still in use. A year ago this month, a rusted dial on one of the contraptions indicated that it had cut about 1,074,000,000 buttonholes.

*

That number does seem dubious. A machine operating for a century would have cut 10,740,000 buttonholes a year. With a six-day workweek, that’s roughly 30,500 buttonholes a day. With an eight-hour workday, that’s 3812 buttonholes an hour, or sixty-three a minute. And even if the machine were running around the clock, that’d be twenty-one buttonholes a minute.

*

March 26: I wrote to the Times and received a reply with a photograph. Yes, 1,074,000,000 buttonholes. And the machines may be well over a century old.

In the Garment District

[592 8th Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Today we’re in the Garment District. The first floor of no. 592, formerly the 8th Ave. Remnant Store, is waiting for a new tenant, still with a display of ties in the window. The barber shop, Ben Klein, Louis Jacoby, Benjamin Sklar, Sam Kupferman are now long gone. As the poet said, there is no permanence.

Benjamin Sklar was a name in buttonholes and eyelets as early as 1918 and as late as 1958. What does it mean to manufacture buttonholes anyway? Are they little pockets of nothingness, to be sewn onto garments? Did Benjamin Sklar spend his life making nothing? No, of course not.

The Simplex name — “since 1918” — is still around, attached to machines for cutting rubber and other materials. And no. 592, that small building between giants, is still there. Today it houses a Western Union outlet.

Here’s a better view of the no. 592 and the giants.

[No. 592 in a larger context. Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[Google Books gave me Benjamin Sklar’s first name. The 1940 telephone directory gave me the rest of Jacoby’s and Kupferman’s names. Kupferman sold woolens and dress goods.]

Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024)

The poet Lyn Hejinian has died at the age of eighty-two. The New York Times has an obituary. It’s respectful and detailed, and it calls Hejinian a “central figure” and “leading light” of “the Language poetry movement.” They got that right.

But it has to be said: the Times published not one review of Hejinian’s poetry in her lifetime. The paper did reprint a published poem in 2023, and it published a snarky review of The Best American Poetry 2004, a volume that Hejinian edited: “‘People are writing poems!,’ each volume cries. ‘You, too, could write a poem!’”

Two sentences from Henjinian’s My Life (1987) that I like:

Long time lines trail behind every idea, object, person, pet, vehicle, and event.

And:

But a word is a bottomless pit.