Constructor: Kareem Ayas
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging, as a Downs-only solve (Easy, I imagine, if you solved the regular way)
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THEME: SET (71A: Guinness world record holder for "English word with the most meanings")— SET appears in the grid a bajillion (i.e. 12) times, clued differently each time
The (remaining 11) SETs:
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This is a pretty fun puzzle ... if you ignore the theme entirely. I guess that it's mildly interesting that SET has so many definitions, but what's *not* (even) mildly interesting is filling in SET over and over and over and nine more overs again. There's the initial shock of "oh, we're going this?" and then the final "oh, that's why we're doing this?" and in between, yeah, just a lot of SETs. This probably seemed like a good idea, conceptually, but it's like no one thought about what it would be like to solve it. SET is a pretty boring answer to begin with, so ... let's do it a dozen times? It is kind of gutsy and avant-garde to flout convention this way, I'll give it that. And the puzzle really commits to the bit, with Every Single 3-letter answer in the Entire Grid coming in as a SET. Huge upside is that we aren't subjected to all the even more boring, or perhaps actively ugly, 3-letter fill that would've gone in those slots otherwise. 3-letter fill is never gonna make a puzzle interesting, why not turn it *all* to SET? So the puzzle gets high points for its artistic ambition and rule-breaking spirit. But I can't say entering SET after SET after ten more SETs was anything other than monotonous.
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging, as a Downs-only solve (Easy, I imagine, if you solved the regular way)
THEME: SET (71A: Guinness world record holder for "English word with the most meanings")— SET appears in the grid a bajillion (i.e. 12) times, clued differently each time
The (remaining 11) SETs:
- 1A: Theater backdrop
- 5D: Part of a tennis match
- 8D: Sink, as the sun
- 24A: Put (down)
- 31A: Prepare, as the dinner table
- 40A: Written in stone
- 35D: Having everything one needs
- 47A: Unit for a comedian or musician
- 57A: Like hard plaster
- 62D: Complete collection
- 64D: Adjust, as a watch
Patricia Lockwood (born April 27, 1982) is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. Her 2021 debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, won the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her poetry collections include Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a 2014 New York Times Notable Book. Since 2019, she has been a contributing editor for London Review of Books.She is notable for working across and between a variety of genres. "Your work can flow into the shape that people make for you," she told Slate in an interview in 2020. "Or you can try to break that shape."[1] In 2022, she received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for her contributions to the field of experimental writing.
Lockwood is the only writer with both fiction and nonfiction works selected as 10 Best Books of the year by The New York Times. At four years, she also holds the record for the shortest span between repeat appearances on the list.
Kirkus Reviews has called her "our guide to moving beyond thinking of the internet as a thing apart from real lives and real art,” and Garden & Gun: “goddess of the avant-garde.” (wikipedia)
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On the plus side, once I realized that All the 3-letter answers were gonna be SET, I had a lot of free access to Across answers (the clues for which I never look at on Mondays). Those six free SETs gave me desperately needed traction in a puzzle that had most of its longer answers running Down (most themed puzzles have the bulk of their longer answers running Across, and it's much easier to use short Downs to guess a long Across than it is to do the reverse (use long Downs to get at short Acrosses). May not seem like a lot, but I really needed those free SETs to have any hope of bringing down those long Downs, particularly in the SW. That free SET at 31A was probably the single-most valuable freebie, giving me the initial letters of EXISTENCE and TIPPYTOES, neither of which I could get a grip on without the assistance. My problems in the SW were compounded by the fact that (despite being a medievalist) I couldn't guess FEUDAL from the clue (44D: Like England between the ninth and 15th centuries). When MEDIEVAL didn't fit, I blanked. And I wasn't sure if areas where cigarettes weren't permitted were SMOKEFREE or SMOKELESS (in retrospect, it should've been obvious—SMOKELESS is a word I've only really heard as a modifier of "tobacco" ("smokeless tobacco" being another term for "chewing tobacco"). I also had -PE UP and decided the answer had to be PIPE UP (it was TYPE UP (52A: Put into a Word document, say)). Needed TIPPYTOES to get me out of that predicament.
The rest of the puzzle was pretty tractable, though "OK, GOOD" definitely caused me to spin my wheels (7D: "All right, that's fine"). Gonna add "OK" to the category of answer I've been talking about for days now (well, yesterday and Friday, for sure): the rapidly proliferating (or so it seems) "UH / OH / UM / (and now) OK" phrases—colloquial phrases that open with one of those two-letter units, which can be very hard to differentiate from each other. What's the difference between an "UH, OK" and an "UM, OK," or between either of those and an "OH, OK"? Somehow "that's fine" didn't evoke "GOOD" for me—"that's fine" means more "that'll do" than "GOOD")—and the "OK" part was not at all obvious either. The cluing needs to be spot on with these kinds of answers, and I'm not sure it was today. The adjacent YEN FOR wasn't a walk in the park, either. It's not a phrase I hear, ever. I think it's largely bygone. I've definitely heard of "having a YEN (n.) FOR something," but the verb phrase "YEN FOR" (in the sense of "pine for" or "jones for" or "ache for" or "long for""YEarN FOR"), that I don't hear so much. I know it's real, it just didn't come quickly to mind.
As I said up front, outside the theme, I found most of the grid pretty AGREEABLE. I don't love TIP OFF crossing TIPPYTOES (at the TIP!), but I love TIPPYTOES so much that I'm willing to overlook the TIP-TIP collision. Do WRIST PADS help with typing? (9D: Cushions in front of a computer keyboard). I've often thought of getting them because I type so much and my wrists have a tendency to get lazy and sit on the desk, which is probably not great for my wrists and seems quite possibly to cause more typing awkwardness (and typos) than I typically have when I can manage to keep my wrists properly elevated. But then I think I should not become reliant on rests—they'll make my wrists lazy and ruin me for ... other wrist-related activities? I dunno. Anyway, if you have strong opinions on this topic, you'll let me know. Hard to imagine anyone's having strong opinions on this topic, but you never know. Have a nice day.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. The "bunnies" in 25A: Cleaning implement for bunnies? (DUST MOP) are "dust bunnies"
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]