Constructor: Joseph Greenbaum
Relative difficulty: Easy
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: JOHN DRYDEN (11D: England's first poet laureate (1668)) —
The Easy puzzle onslaught continues. I thought this was a lovely puzzle, but decidedly more Friday than Thursday. Now, I love Friday puzzles. Best day! But I mostly like them on Friday. If you give me one on Saturday, I'm not going to complain too much, but still, I wonder why the puzzle is being defanged across the board (certainly Tues.-Sat.). I entered the first dozen or so answers in this puzzle without any hesitation. In fact, the first four came so fast that I thought something must be wrong ... I also worried that maybe there was some terrible theme afoot ... some kind of "AP" theme:
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ASAP APP APSE in quick succession ... yes, that was briefly worrisome. But then the long answers got in on the act and I worried less. I could see the triple stack waiting for me there in the center of the grid, and my relationship to triple (and quad) stacks has, historically, been, let's say, fraught, so I approached with caution (that is, I tried to throw as much down into that stack section as I could before I even looked at the stack clues). Answers that are parts of stacks sometimes have the tendency to feel forced: awkward verb tenses or otherwise clunky phrasings. I figured the best way to deal with the potential disappointment of that center stack was to enjoy the top half of the puzzle as much as possible and see how many of those long Downs I could throw down into there. Answer: All Of The Long Downs. I got all six before ever really entering the middle of the puzzle in earnest. Better yet: those Long Downs were great! Well, for me they were.
Notes:
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Relative difficulty: Easy
Word of the Day: JOHN DRYDEN (11D: England's first poet laureate (1668)) —
John Dryden (/ˈdraɪdən/; 19 August [O.S. 9 August] 1631 – 12 May [O.S. 1 May] 1700) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who was appointed England's first Poet Laureate in 1668.He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Romanticist writer Sir Walter Scott called him "Glorious John". [...]
With the reopening of the theatres in 1660 after the Puritan ban, Dryden began writing plays. His first play The Wild Gallant appeared in 1663, and was not successful, but was still promising, and from 1668 on he was contracted to produce three plays a year for the King's Company in which he became a shareholder. During the 1660s and 1670s, theatrical writing was his main source of income. He led the way in Restoration comedy, his best-known work being Marriage à la Mode (1673), as well as heroic tragedy and regular tragedy, in which his greatest success was All for Love (1678). Dryden was never satisfied with his theatrical writings and frequently suggested that his talents were wasted on unworthy audiences. He thus was making a bid for poetic fame off-stage. In 1667, around the same time his dramatic career began, he published Annus Mirabilis, a lengthy historical poem which described the English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London in 1666. It was a modern epic in pentameter quatrains that established him as the preeminent poet of his generation, and was crucial in his attaining the posts of Poet Laureate (1668) and historiographer royal (1670). (wikipedia)
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This puzzle felt like it was built with my particular niche tastes in mind, from David Lynch films ("ELEPHANT MAN") to old westerns (SIX-SHOOTERS) to 17th-century poet laureates (JOHN DRYDEN), though with that last one ... I have a confession. A professor-of-17th-century-literature confession. I screwed it up at first pass. See, I got JOHN, saw the date in the clue (one year after the publication of Paradise Lost), and instinctively dropped in JOHN MILTON. Now, if you did that, well, of course you did, Milton is much more famous (and, ahem, better). That's a trap *you* are supposed to fall into. It's not one that *I* am supposed to fall into. But then I guess I knew well enough to yank MILTON quickly and install DRYDEN. Like, I knew DRYDEN was an option, at least. Still, that brief mistake felt like a personal failure. I teach MILTON all the time, whereas DRYDEN ... let's just say, I want my students to actually like 17th-century literature, so ... yeah, little if any DRYDEN on the British Literature I syllabus, I'm afraid. I do teach APHRA (5) BEHN (4) a whole bunch. She's an exceedingly important playwright and early novelist and I can't believe she hasn't benefited at all from the "we should put more women in the puzzles!" phenomenon, especially since her name parts are so short. BEHN has never been (!) in the NTYXW at all, whereas APHRA has ... but only back in Maleskan Times (and not since 1983).
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Anyway, by the time I looked at the stack clues, I was able to knock them all off 1-2-3, bam bam bam. They all seem fine. You do get that verb tense tinkering that I was talking about (past tense in the first one, third-person in the second), but that's just normal crossword stuff, and none of that tinkering makes these phrases feel clunky. The only real trouble spot I had in the whole puzzle was the far SW, where I couldn't come up with whatever word was supposed to follow MARVEL at 27D: Look at with awe (MARVEL OVER). I wrote in MARVEL UPON. But eventually I was able to back WORSHIPS into that space and everything became clear from there. Splashed down happily at the end of the WATER SLIDE and that was that. A fun day at the crossword water park.
- 19A: Nickname in 1950s-'60s TV (BEAV)— from BEAV to SNERD via SIX-SHOOTERS, the pop culture in this one did skew a little old, I'll admit
- 41A: Terence ___, Fields Medal-winning mathematician (TAO)— that's two times for this guy just this year. I feel like this clue is just an attempt to hide the fact that all you've done really is put a very very common three-letter answer in the grid again.
- 60A: Longevous (AGED)— that clue hurts even to look at. What in the world?
- 30A: Tease, with "on" (RAG)— I wrote in RIP. My favorite thing about RAG is that it completes an Across row that reads like the bold declaration of a bizarrely named supervillain: "I AM RAT WAX RAG! Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" You might say "but a RAT WAX RAG is not a real thing," to which I say, clearly you've never tried to get wax off a rat.
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