Moleskine: seventy-five words

From Roland Allen’s “Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era” (The Walrus ), a brief commentary on the the prose in the little leaflet that comes with every Moleskine — which apparently ran to seventy-five words in the original Italian. The leaflet’s prose, in translation:

The Moleskine is an exact reproduction of the legendary notebook of Chatwin, Hemingway, Matisse. Anonymous custodian of an extraordinary tradition, the Moleskine is a distillation of function and an accumulator of emotions that releases its charge over time. From the original notebook a family of essential and trusted pocket books was born. Hard cover covered in moleskine, elastic closure, thread binding. Internal bellowed pocket in cardboard and canvas. Removable leaflet with the history of Moleskine. Format 9 x 14 cm.

Allen’s commentary:

The leaflet opened with a lie (the new Moleskines were not “exact reproductions of the old”) then immediately veered toward gibberish, but that didn’t matter. Pound for pound, those seventy-five words proved themselves among the most effective pieces of commercial copywriting of all time, briskly connecting the product’s intangible qualities — usefulness and emotion — to its material specification, thereby selling both the sizzle and the steak. [Maria] Sebregondi and [Francesco] Franceschi picked an astutely international selection of names to drop: an Englishman, an American, and a Frenchman encouraged cosmopolitan aspirations. “Made in China,” on the other hand, did not, so they left that bit out.

This piece is an excerpt from a new book, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper . I’m looking forward to reading it.

As I have confessed in these pages, I am a prisoner of Moleskine.

Related reading
All OCA Moleskine posts : notebook posts (Pinboard)

Labor Day

[“Commuters, who have just come off the train, waiting for the bus to go home, Lowell, Mass.” Photograph by Jack Delano. January 1941. From the Library of Congress Flickr pages. Click for a larger view.]

They also work who only stand and wait.

That’s Union Station, “Lowell’s main railroad station from 1894 to the 1950s.”

[“They also serve who only stand and wait”: John Milton, sonnet 19.]

“False balance” in the NYT

Margaret Sullivan, a former public editor of The New York Times, writes about “an ugly case of ‘false balance’” in that newspaper. It’s in a story about Kamala Harris’s and Donald Trump’s plans to increase afforable housing:

The story takes seriously Trump’s plan for the mass deportation of immigrants as part of his supposed “affordable housing” agenda.

Here’s some both-sidesing for you, as the paper of record describes Harris’s tax cuts to spur construction and grants to first-time home buyers, and Trump’s deportation scheme....

Stories like this run rampant in the Times, and far beyond. It matters more in the Times because — even in this supposed “post-media era” — the country’s biggest newspaper still sets the tone and wields tremendous influence. And, of course, the Times has tremendous resources, a huge newsroom and the ability to hire the best in the business. Undeniably, it does a lot of excellent work.

But its politics coverage often seems broken and clueless — or even blatantly pro-Trump.

When crosswords try to do jazz

I saw the answer coming Caleb Madison’s Atlantic crossword, but I couldn’t believe it: 8-D, eleven letters, “Basie handle.” Answer: KINGOFSWING.

Count Basie was was known as the Kid from Red Bank. But it was Benny Goodman who was known as the King of Swing.

See also the Los Angeles Times crossword and Duke Ellington, the New Yorker crossword and Jelly Roll Morton, and the New York Times crossword and Mel Tormé.

Empire of signs

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

Can you spot the wingback chair?

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

[Post title borrowed from Roland Barthes’s book about Japan. La Marseillaise (dir. Jean Renoir) was released in 1938. I don’t know when it arrived in the States. Swanee River (dir. Sidney Lanfield) was released on December 30, 1939.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by the puzzle’s editor, Stan Newman. Its distinctive feature: five (count ’em, five) fifteen-letter answers. Yow!

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note, including those five:

2-D, fifteen letters, “Graze, say.” Hilarious, at least to me.

3-D, five letters, “King’s claim to musical fame.” I like that.

6-D, three letters, “Tall character in Son of Godzilla.” Quite a stretch.

11-D, fifteen letters, “‘Finally...’” I imagine a meeting going on and on. And on.

12-D, six letters, “Becomes a waiter, with ‘up.’” Didn’t fool me.

16-A, fifteen letters, “Kicks back, as boxes.” The first two words misdirect nicely.

21-A, four letters, “Capital consonants resembling two vowels.” I got it, but I need an explanation.

22-A, five letters, “Where rock bands hang out.” See 12-D.

26-A, five letters, “Multination org. named for its first five members (its ’23 summit included da Silva, Lavrov, Modi, Xi, and the ANC leader).” I suspect that the prolix clue is an acknowledgement that most solvers will have no idea what the answer is.

31-A, fifteen letters, “PVC product.” I didn’t see this answer coming.

34-D, eight letters, “Candide’s mentor.” I hadn’t thought of him in years.

49-A, fifteen letters, “‘Old Ironsides’ is the Army’s oldest.” Note: Army.

My favorite in this puzzle: 27-A, five letters, “Possible response to ‘Don’t know.’” Coming after 26-A, it’s appropriate.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Bacon, wind

[The Guardian, August 30, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

This headline alone makes me think that I should be supporting The Guardian.

University library or storage room?

The firing of librarians at Western Illinois University has drawn the attention of Washington Post book critic Ron Charles:

I hate to break it to the bean counters, but a university library without academic librarians is called a storage room.

A related post
Firing the librarians

NYT, sheesh

[The New York Times, August 30, 2024.]

From an article in today’s paper. Elaine saw it via someone else who’d seen it. Thanks, Elaine.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

Smells

From a novel in the form of a college application essay: “Characterize, in essay form, your high school experience. You may use additional sheets of paper as needed.”

Daniel Pinkwater, The Education of Robert Nifkin (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998).

Young Nifkin is applying to St. Leon’s College, Parnassus on Hudson, New York. Get it? That’s a pseudonym for the college Pinkwater attended.

This passage brings back to me the smell of my elementary school’s basement, a smell still there when I visited the school in 1987 and 1998. As I wrote in a 2018 post, “I always thought of the smell as years of spilled soup.”

I am the only person to have borrowed The Education of Robert Nifkin from my university library — twice in seventeen years. Sigh.

Other Pinkwater posts
“Nice, heavy notebooks” : “Pineapples don’t have sleeves” : The Snark Theater

[The college? Think Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson. President since 1975: Leon Botstein.]