Puzzle #247: Four Last Things (Crossmess Parzel #3)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce's outline of his own early life through the avatar of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus. It begins with his childhood (announced by the opening words, "Once upon a time") and tracks his oscillations between periods of hedonism and deep religiosity. Perhaps the centerpiece of Portrait is the scene where Stephen listens to Father Arnall's sermon on the Four Last Things - death, judgment, hell, and heaven. This sermon is the impetus for Stephen to abandon sensual pursuits and return to the Catholic Church, but that return is short-lived; the confines of the church (and of Irish culture writ large) can't accommodate his artistic ambitions. When he sees a girl bathing along Dollymount Strand, he (in one of Joyce's characteristic epiphanies) experiences an intense urge to describe her beauty in prose. He becomes further alienated from both the church and from his homeland, realizing in the end that his aesthetic ambitions are incompatible with a life in Ireland.

But he still retains a deep love for his homeland, and hopes to help craft a new Irish identity through his writing. He concludes the novel by writing: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

Inspired by the Four Last Things, this puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) charts the four major aspects of Dedalus/Joyce's life in Portrait: childhood development, Catholic faith, sensualism, and finally aestheticism - an aestheticism that, as we will see in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, aims to radically break free from all sorts of strictures.

Made by Will Nediger with the online cross word maker from Amuse Labs

Indie puzzle highlights

June 22: Untitled (Sarah Sinclair, The Atlantic)

June 25: Spill the Beans (Olivia Mitra Framke and Sally Hoelscher, AVCX)

S

P

O

I

L

E

R

S

Untitled (Sarah Sinclair)

With people like Caleb Madison, Paolo Pasco, and Kelsey Dixon contributing, the Atlantic crossword has been reliably great. But they recently entered their open-submissions-for-themelesses era, and judging by this puzzle, it's going to be a fun era. I always marvel at the quality and quantity of original question-mark clues that tend to appear in Paolo's Thursday and Friday puzzles, and this puzzle achieves a similar feat on a 15x15 scale: [Forehead lines?] for FACE TATTOO, [Team covering the spread?] for CATERERS, [Smartest person in the room, perhaps] for FASHIONISTA, [Spotty coverage?] for PIMPLE PATCH, and [Images from a wanted poster?] for THIRST TRAPS are highlights.

The clues for short fill keep things interesting, too; [Word that distinguishes the title of an H. G. Wells novel from the title of a Ralph Ellison novel] is a fun way to clue THE and a great example of how duplicating the answer in the clue (twice, even!) can sometimes be perfectly fine. I particularly like the zaniness of the DURER clue, [Great Piece of Turf artist Albrecht whose last name is fittingly found in verdure rendered]. "Aptly hidden in" clues are often awkwardly strained, but "verdure rendered" is such a striking phrase that this one loops around to being delightful to me. Plus, Great Piece of Turf really is notable for being a masterpiece of verdure-rendering.

Spill the Beans (Olivia Mitra Framke and Sally Hoelscher)

It's not like this theme type (substrings of theme entries dropping vertically, in this case words for beans) hasn't been done many times before (it feels like the WSJ has this kind of theme every few weeks). But I'm stunned by the smartness of the execution here. Each spilled bean (LIMA in MUSLIM AMERICAN, COCOA in ROCOCO ARCHITECTURE, and SOY in JUST SO YOU KNOW) is split across words in a phrase that would be an asset in a themeless puzzle, which is a great start. But also, this kind of theme is very hard to fill cleanly around, because the theme words are intersecting and the "spilled" words can't be placed symmetrically even if the puzzle itself is symmetrical, which constrains the black square placement a lot. To keep the fill squeaky-clean in this kind of puzzle, grid patterns sometimes end up feeling cramped.

Here, we've got nice chunky stacks of 6s, 7s, and 8s, but placed in a way that allowed Olivia and Sally to come up with a clean, lively fill. The NE and SW corners are particularly canny, breaking up a stack of three 8s with a single black square so that the corners themselves are only 3x3, allowing for fun long stuff (TIRAMISU, ROOT BEER, RAINCOAT, OM NOM NOM) while retaining a lot of flexibility with the crossings. (And I'll note that I only now, while writing this up, noticed that the grid is slightly asymmetrical, with a black square on only one side of ROCOCO ARCHITECTURE in the center row. The grid still has the aesthetically pleasing features of a fully symmetrical grid, but allows the fabulous hidden COCOA find to take center stage.) Elsewhere, we've got the stacked 7s DANGLED and APPROVE and ANEMONE and REDEYES, again with the crossings all being unimpeachable. Just wonderful gridwork.

Puzzle #246: Epiphanies (Crossmess Parzel #2)

I don't know if James Joyce ever solved crosswords, though on at least one occasion he did enter a puzzle competition in an English magazine in hopes of earning some money. The competition, with a 250-pound prize, involved deciphering a set of 48 words in batches of six. Joyce, who was living in Trieste at the time, sent his complete entry to his brother Stanislaus in a registered envelope so he would have proof that he had completed it, with the plan to sue the magazine if they didn't award him the prize. The plan failed because of the slowness of the mail delivery from Trieste to Dublin, but I'm left to wonder about the alternate history in which Joyce became a word puzzle fiend.

He was, of course, a wordplay fiend, as is evident from his late novels. But in daily life, too, he displayed a penchant for the kind of wordplay that's the stock-in-trade of crossword constructors. An Irish writer friend of his, Frank O'Connor, recalled once visiting Joyce and remarking on a landscape that was displayed on his wall in an unusual-looking frame. He asked what it was, and Joyce replied "That's cork." O'Connor, who was a native of the Irish city of Cork, said "I know it's Cork, but what's the frame made of?" In reference to Joyce's visual pun, O'Connor later reflected that Joyce must have suffered from some sort of "assocation mania." The complex chains of wordplay associations in Finnegans Wake put me in mind of Freud's account of parapraxes - verbal slips that arise from an unconscious train of associations. Joyce apparently didn't think much of Freud, though in a characteristic bit of wordplay, he did note that his own name comes from joyeux and is thus the French equivalent of Freud (from Freude, meaning "joy"). Still, I think it's undeniable that there's a strong literary kinship between Joyce and Freud. (Lionel Trilling: "James Joyce, with his interest in the numerous states of receding consciousness, with his use of words as things and of words which point to more than one thing, with his pervading sense of the interrelation and interpenetration of all things, and, not least important, his treatment of familial themes, has perhaps most thoroughly and consciously exploited Freud's ideas.")

That use of "words which point to more than one thing" is the bread and butter of the crossword constructor. In that sense, one of the most cruciverbal puzzles in Joyce's work is the "man in the macintosh," a mysterious figure who pops up at various points in Ulysses. At one point, a newspaper reporter misinterprets this description and assumes that he's a man named M'Intosh. In his novel The House of Ulysses, Julián Ríos takes this wordplay one step further and reinterprets him as the man with the Macintosh, typing away on his computer.

This sort of thing was mostly to come later in his career, though. His early books, like Dubliners, were much less linguistically playful. At this point, Joyce was working out his concept of the "epiphany." He used this term for some of his early, very short prose pieces, which were either prose poems or sketches of overheard conversations. But he also structured several of the stories in Dubliners around the sort of epiphany that he defined as "a sudden spiritual manifestation," such as Gabriel Conroy's moment of self-understanding occasioned by his realization of the depth of his wife's feeling for her deceased lover in "The Dead." In Stephen Hero, an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen feels a duty as an artist to record these fleeting realizations for posterity. There's an affinity here with the epiphanic moment of hearing a phrase and realizing exactly how it can work as a crossword revealer, and the parallel epiphany that, hopefully, the solver experiences.

The epiphany is a small, crystalline moment, and it seems appropriate here to make a Dubliners-esque collection of such epiphanies. So this puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) is a series of revealers for which I haven't found enough theme entries to make a full theme - in each case, there's just one theme entry for each revealer. I couldn't turn any of them into full-blown puzzles, but, like Stephen, I also don't want to let them evanesce.

Created by Will Nediger with the online crossword creator from Amuse Labs

Puzzle #245: A Series of Gig Lamps Symmetrically Arranged (Crossmess Parzel #1)

In the essay "Modern Fiction," Virginia Woolf famously wrote that "life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." She charges English novelists of the previous several decades, particularly H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy, with failing to truly tackle the complexities of life, focusing instead on the ephemeral and material. Among her contemporaries who are valiantly attempting to represent the "blooming, buzzing confusion" of human experience (to borrow a phrase from William James), she cites James Joyce as the most notable. Joyce, she writes, is "concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain." (Mind you, she wrote those words before Ulysses was finished, and her later assessments were much less positive - when she finally read it, she called it "pretentious" and "underbred.")

The words "symmetrically arranged" naturally jumped out at me, since it's a standard rule of crosswords that the theme entries should, in general, be symmetrically arranged. A typical crossword theme, indeed, is little more than a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged. The theme can be elevated by the craftsmanship of the grid, but in a way perhaps that's even more pernicious - to Woolf, Bennett is the worst example of empty materialism precisely because he's such an excellent craftsman that there are no cracks for life to worm itself inside.

I generally think of myself as an excellent cruciverbal craftsman. I've been at this a long time, and I know how to fill a grid cleanly and smoothly without the seams showing. So I certainly know how to make a decidedly un-Joycean crossword. Over the next few puzzles, I'll be working my cruciverbal way through Joyce's major works, with one puzzle inspired by each of his books of fiction. But first, here's a puzzle that's nothing more than a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged (pdf, puz, pdf solution).

Made by Will Nediger with the free crossword puzzle builder from Amuse Labs

Indie puzzle highlights

May 30: Themeless "Off the Wall" (Ben Tolkin, Nautilus Puzzles)

June 1: Community Oriented (vidhya aravind and carly they themsen, A Trans Person Made Your Puzzle)

June 5: Nothing suspicious going on here! (jqzx, Puzzmo)

S

P

O

I

L

E

R

S

Themeless "Off the Wall" (Ben Tolkin)

"Off the Wall" is aptly chosen - there's such an eclectic mix of goofy stuff in this themeless grid. DEYASSIFIES (clued as [Makes plain?]), SHAQTIN' A FOOL, THIS IS SPARTA, RECESSION POP, GOSH DARN IT (and, indeed, GOOFIER). I love this kind of grid shape with criss-crossing long entries, where the marquee stuff isn't confined to stacks. They're very hard to fill, and this is an object lesson in why it can be worthwhile to have a couple of entries like AGCY and SHA and AFTS in the short fill if it enables such a delightful solving experience overall.

Community Oriented (vidhya aravind and carly they themsen)

In case you missed it, you should check out A Trans Person Made Your Puzzle, a pack of puzzles by trans and nonbinary constructors in support of transgender charities. This puzzle was my favorite of the bunch, with some striking grid art that somehow still caught me by surprise when I got to the revealer, T4T ([Dating initialism reflected in the shapes in this grid]). And indeed, three chunks of black squares cascading down the grid are shaped like a T, a 4, and another T. I love it when there's an unexpected numeral in a revealer! The rest of the grid is packed with trans-related clues and entries, from HYPERVISIBILITY and WACHOWSKI to IT'S A GIRL, clued as ["Surprise" for some trans adults hosting their own gender reveal parties]. Particularly elegant is the stack of 5s in the top right: LABEL, clued as [Identify, in a way some queer people avoid], ARIEL, clued as [Disney character who famously underwent a transition giving her a major vocal change], and BOOKS, clued as ["Nevada" by Imogen Binnie and "The Death of Vivek Oji" by Akwaeke Emezi, for two].

There's also just an assorted range of delights to be found throughout the puzzle, like the linguistically fascinating BAKA - ["Fool" in Japanese (literally "horse-deer," describing a guy who would confuse the two] - which I don't think I've seen in a puzzle before. Or the original clues for common entries, like [Part of the psyche grounded in reality, or a sense of smugness that isn't] for EGO.

Nothing suspicious going on here! (jqzx)

I've seen a lot of themelesses with 4x10 stacks lately - it's a form I particularly associate with Adrian Johnson, who's made some excellent ones. Having constructed a couple myself now, I really get the appeal: they look eye-popping in a grid, but they're surprisingly tractable to construct cleanly (helped, possibly, by the fact that the average quality of 4s tends to be higher than that of 3s). When you're making a symmetrical themeless grid, though, making one 4x10 stack means that you have to make another one on the other side of the grid, so sometimes you get one stellar stack and one that's not quite so good.

A key part of Puzzmo's editorial ethos, though, is that there are no strict requirements for grid dimensions or symmetry, which helps make sure that every grid is the right size and layout for its purpose, whether it's themed or themeless. So there's nothing stopping a Puzzmo constructor from making one beautiful 4x10 stack and extending the grid just as much as necessary to make the themeless work. That's just what jqzx has done here, with a stack of BASIC CABLE/ART THERAPY/SCREEN TIME/HEADMASTER, where all the crossings are unimpeachable - the least good, if I had to pick was NOSTRA, but I even enjoyed that one, clued as it is with reference to Carlos Fuentes's masterpiece, Terra Nostra. The best crossings are the pair of FALSE STARTS and TAKES THE BAIT, which in turn cross the mini stack of UNDERBAKED and TOMFOOLERY. Just fantastic gridwork. And it feels very atypical of Puzzmo to me, since so few of their puzzles are wide-open themelesses - but in a more important sense, it's very typical of Puzzmo in its efficient use of grid space and design.

Puzzle #244: The Uprights

Back again with a tricksy puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) - happy solving!

Constructed by Will Nediger using PuzzleMe's cross word maker

Indie puzzle highlights

April 23: Hooked on Phonics (Ryan Patrick Smith, Real Puzzling Stuff)

May 5: Untitled (Christina Iverson, Boswords)

S

P

O

I

L

E

R

S

Hooked on Phonics (Ryan Patrick Smith)

Puzzles with theme gimmicks that affect every single clue are rare, and for good reason. Much of the time, the gimmick doesn't add much to the solving experience, so it makes the clue syntax more awkward with no good payoff. (I'm thinking, for example, about those puzzles where the theme is related to the letter S somehow and then every clue also starts with a S. It's like, okay, but to what end?) On the other hand, there are the gimmicks that are integral to the solving experience, like Mike Shenk's puzzle 5 from last year's ACPT, in which the letter C had to be removed from clues for them to make sense. These gimmicks are generally so specific that it'd be nigh impossible (and probably undesirable, anyway) for them to apply to every clue.

"Hooked on Phonics" hits the sweet spot, though. In this puzzle, every clue must be spoken out loud to make sense. The four longest Across entries are thematic: PLAY IT BY EAR clued as [Deftly negotiate a new peace], TALK IT OUT clued as [Approach for descent], READ ALOUD clued as [Utter pros], and LISTEN CLOSE clued as [Frays commanding attention]. These are all excellent, with [Utter pros] in particular reading very naturally. But then Ryan applies the same gimmick to every single clue. My favorite was [Target of attacks in the lead-up to the American Revolution], where "attacks" is really "a tax" and the answer is TEA. But there are numerous delightful finds in every section - [Literary figure known for wailing madly] for AHAB, [Growths beneath tulips] for GOATEES, [It's key when speaking French] for WHO, the list goes on. What makes it work is the fact that every clue is its own unique mini-puzzle, so the gimmick doesn't wear thin over the course of the solve.

 Untitled (Christina Iverson)

Few things are more consistent than the Boswords themeless leagues, where the puzzles are reliably excellent. But there's usually a puzzle or two each season that stands out above the rest for me. This season, it was Christina's finals puzzle. In the post-solve interview, Christina mentioned that she aimed to go light on the trivia to make a puzzle that worked nicely at all three difficulty levels. I was a bit surprised by that comment, since GEODESY, LIAR'S DICE, RONCO, PHOBOS, PAD SEE EW, and TOTORO, among others, are know-it-or-you-don't. Not that I was bothered by this - those entries span a wide range of different topics, and they're distributed throughout the grid in a way that makes the puzzle still accessible for those who are stumped by a few of them. But it's true that the puzzle is also chock full of broadly familiar entries that can be clued in myriads of ways, perfect for a Boswords puzzle: BASEBALL, ASTRONAUT, CHOP SHOP, STOVETOPS, EMERALD, SYRINGE, CHARADE, etc. I only solved the Stormy clues, but there were some doozies - [Some budget cuts] for CHUCK ROASTS was the highlight for me (and the seed, evidently), but I also loved [Ride in the 1970s-'80s, e.g.] for ASTRONAUT, [Singer of "Respect," at times] for SPELLER, and [Level in a stadium?] for A GAME (an entry that's particularly hard to clue trickily).