Constructor: Joe DiPietro
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: TANKA (25A: 31-syllable Japanese poem) —
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This was a weird and often unpleasant puzzle. It's got a few surprising bright spots, but mostly it was just hard, and hard for the wrong reasons. The longer answers, the grid-spanning 15s that cross the grid three times, were all a cinch. Just needed a few crosses to get the top and the bottom ones, and wouldn't have needed any to get the middle one: GAME SHOW NETWORK (36A: Its slogan "Get Smarter Now" matches its initials). Those 15s are all good answers, and they make a nice trellis to hang the rest of the grid on ... but the trellis was too often ratty, and what made the solving experience dreary was that the difficulty didn't come with any payoff because it all came around short, gunky stuff. I spent most of my time in two very small areas, unable to come up with 3-, 4-, and 5-letter answers because a. names, of course, or b. deliberately tenuous cluing, but again the real problem wasn't just the difficulty (it's Saturday, after all), it's that when I overcame the difficulty, I was rewarded with ... AVI? The bird prefix? And ACTII? Oof. There was no "ooh" or "aha," just "ugh, well at least that's over." So while there are some definite high points to the grid, it mostly seemed crosswordesey (ABET ERNST STENO the unwelcome return of ALERO etc.), and hard in all the wrong places, for all the wrong reasons. So I'm left not thinking "wow, GRAWLIX, that was cool!" but instead "how ... is OVER ... [During]? ... oh ... like, 'OVER the weekend,''OVER Christmas break,' that kind of [During]? ... [sigh], OK."
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Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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He's been astonishingly prolific, over a long career. Lots of political cartoons, lots of New Yorker covers. As for [Philosopher Georges] ... I got nothing. Apparently there is also a French historian named SOREL—Albert SOREL. He was the preferred SOREL of the Maleskan era. I also see that there is apparently a Canadian city named SOREL—Maleska liked that clue too. But Maleska wasn't done there. He would like you to know that SOREL is also a type of cement (!?!?) and that Agnès SOREL was a "favorite of Charles VII" (whoever that is). The protagonist of Stendahl's Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) is named Julien SOREL. So those are some SOREL facts for you today. Since 1998, Shortz has made the cartoonist his go-to SOREL clue, but he also brought in today's "philosopher," Georges, and has kept him around as his secondary, tougher SOREL option. Wikipedia tells me that "Sorelianism [!!!] is considered to be a precursor to fascism," so that's fun. Basically I'm saying please give me cartoonists, every chance you get. Thank you.
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Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging
Word of the Day: TANKA (25A: 31-syllable Japanese poem) —
Tanka (短歌, "short poem") is a genre of classical Japanese poetry and one of the major genres of Japanese literature. // Originally, in the time of the Man'yōshū (latter half of the eighth century AD), the term tanka was used to distinguish "short poems" from the longer chōka (長歌, "long poems"). In the ninth and tenth centuries, however, notably with the compilation of the Kokinshū, the short poem became the dominant form of poetry in Japan, and the originally general word waka became the standard name for this form. Japanese poet and critic Masaoka Shiki revived the term tanka in the early twentieth century for his statement that waka should be renewed and modernized. Haiku is also a term of his invention, used for his revision of standalone hokku, with the same idea. // Tanka consist of five units (often treated as separate lines when romanized or translated) usually with the following pattern of on (often treated as, roughly, the number of syllables per unit or line):
- 5-7-5-7-7.
The 5-7-5 is called the kami-no-ku (上の句, "upper phrase"), and the 7-7 is called the shimo-no-ku (下の句, "lower phrase").
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It also seemed kinda oldish. The STENO ALERO SKAT-type short stuff was a big part of that, but very few of the longer answers seemed of-this-century either. The GAME SHOW NETWORK is built on nostalgia for the mid-late 20th century. POT BROWNIEs still exist, I assume, but I associate them with a similarly bygone era, for sure (8D: Delectable made with grass). Very 70s / 80s. The cultural center of gravity here is somewhere around when the Sex Pistols were popular. Or when "ALFIE" was popular. ALFIE is my cat's name, so I love ALFIE, but you get my point—the puzzle seemed like it was for someone sitting around eating POT BROWNIEs and watching OATERS on late-night TV. But the retro vibe isn't a problem, exactly, and I might not even have noticed it if the short fill had been stronger, and I might not even have noticed that the short fill wasn't that strong if I hadn't been forced to spend so much time with it. As I said, the bulk of my time was spent trying to figure out tiny sections that ended up containing precisely zero in the way of satisfying payoff. The first such section was the very first section, right at 1A: Certain archaeological site (BOG). Of course I wrote in DIG. This is what I don't get: designing traps so that the solver will have to linger over gunky stuff like AVI- (14A: Flying start?). Anyway, BOG over AVI, just brutal, and much more brutal before I finally got GIVEN NAME, which ... I don't really see what that clue has to do with "Americans" (scores of other countries have first names as GIVEN NAMEs). That "Americans" just felt cheap. Could just as well have been "among the French" or something, what the hell? And of course GIVEN gave me the "G" which "confirmed" DIG, so I wrong in DING (DING!) for 1D: When doubled, attention-grabbing (BANG). I also had WENT DIM before GREW DIM at first, but that was one of the first things about the section I actually managed to fix (20A: Faded). When I finally put in BOG, I didn't feel a whoosh of success; I felt like I'd been conned.
The other small section to absolutely bring me to a halt was at the bottom of the grid. Speaking of last century ... BROWSER WAR? The first one? How many were there??? I lived through that period of tech history and yet had no idea, even with BROWSER in place, what might come after. BROWSER ... W- ... BROWSER WEB? Just no clue on those last three letters (eventually two letters), and unfortunately those letters went right into the very hardest part of the puzzle for me: some soccer name I've never heard of (in fact, a name I've never seen at all, in any context) underneath a [Musical segment] that looks technical and maybe Italian but ends up just being the dumb common answer ACT II. As with "Americans" and GIVEN NAME, here we have a seemingly narrow clue being used to define an exceedingly general thing. There are ACT IIs in lots of works. [Musical segment] is so vague it's stupid. You can't tell it's a stage musical (which is probably the point), but even then ... ugh. It's like having [Part of a 1995 Lamborghini Diablo] and having the answer be TIRE or AXLE. In that same section, I had ARCH before ARTY (53D: Affected), and it took me forever to understand what (or who) the "toaster" was in the STEIN clue (50D: A toaster might hold one) (toaster = one who gives a toast, so the STEIN is ... full of beer ... I guess). So what sticks with me about this puzzle is almost exclusively BOG/AVI and ACTII/REYNA—not the greatest aftertaste. It's not that I didn't know stuff that bothers me. I didn't know TANKA, and felt only too happy to learn about it. Why? Why did TANKA play sweet and REYNA sour? Because the puzzle didn't use TANKA to bog me down in a tiny corner of the puzzle. I got it as part of the puzzle flow. You solve, you hit difficulty, you work around it. Flow! BOG/AVI and ACTII/REYNA, by contrast, made me feel trapped and suffocated. Backed into an airless corner. It was like the puzzle wanted me to learnTANKA, but wanted to make it torture for me to even get close to REYNA.
JETÉ before LUTZ (10D: Leap with a twist) and GOING FAST before GOING ONCE (33D: About to be sold). The rest of the puzzle was (I'm recalling, as I look over it now) pretty decent. I really liked HARD PASS (4D: "That's a big 'no thanks'"). That and GRAWLIX are my favorite answers of the day (GRAWLIX is a debut) (23D: String of typographical symbols like @%$&!, to represent an obscenity). I think I might be an outlier, not only in my love for the word, but in my even knowing what the word means. I teach a course on Comics, so it's right in my wheelhouse, but it's a pretty technical term (or so I thought). I have no idea how well-known it is, generally. I remember being so happy to learn that there was even a term for the swearing symbols in comics! I later learned that expressive lines that emanate from a cartoon character (like wavy stink lines) are called EMANATA, and the "drops of sweat that spray outwards from a cartoon character under emotional distress" are called PLEWDS. I doubt you'll ever see either of those in the grid, but now you know.
P.S. Speaking of comics, I wish today's SOREL had been Edward SOREL (13D: Philosopher Georges). You've seen his work a lot, probably. Here's his cover for the 1966 Esquire that contained Gay Talese's famous essay, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold":
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