Indie puzzle highlights

July 25: themeless no. 36 (crosstina aquafina & erik agard, crosstina aquafina)

July 29: the symphony series: movement twenty-seven (owen bergstein, Dissonant Grids)

July 31: Extra Toppings (bob weisz, Puzzmo)

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themeless no. 36 (crosstina aquafina & erik agard)

This puzzle marks the return of the greatest byline yet discovered (their last blog collaboration won an Orca for puzzle of the year, and with good reason). Obviously, if you take two great constructors and combine them, you're probably going to get a great puzzle, but this particular byline is a very specific pairing of sensibilities that works like gangbusters. I associate Kelsey with wonderfully wordy-yet-precise, often autobiographically inspired, references in the clues - things like [make a last-minute, winning ebay bid on a vintage 90s nike charles barkley 1993 mvp single-stitch t-shirt, for example] for SNIPE or [fandom creation that might have a "felonious gru/minions", "bisexual mary magdalene", or "reichenbach falls coffeeshop au" tag] for FIC. And I associate Erik with wonderfully terse, creative wordplay clues - things like [prince fandom?] for SATAN WORSHIP or [defeat on points?] for OUTARGUE. (I have no idea who wrote those specific clues, of course - especially since I find that, when I collaborate, I tend to accommodate my style to that of the person I'm collabing with.)

The 1-Across clue is a perfect illustration of how beautifully those two sensibilities are married in this puzzle. [STOP! ..... hammer type] for BALL-PEEN both has the zaniness that I associate with Kelsey's byline and the ear for wordplay that associate with Erik's. I also like that there are clues with disguised capital letters that would only work in the all-lowercase house style of Crosstina Aquafina: [someone who's unmatched on bumble?] for OAF and [where u at?] for CAMPUS. And I like that ALLITERATIVE (clued as [like big bags bussin' out the bentley bentayga]) is stacked on two entries that are (quasi-)rhyming, the exact counterpart of alliteration (DIVINE NINE and TEXT NECK). I guess this writeup has just devolved into listing various things I like about this puzzle, so I'll also mention the colorfulness of the long fill: TWO CHEEKS OF THE SAME ASS, YOU HAD ONE JOB, A WORLD Of HURT, UNFUCKWITHABLE, I PLEAD THE FIFTH. Anyway, all this is to say that this might be the puzzle of the year so far, and I wouldn't be surprised if Kelsey and Erik repeat at the Orcas next year.

the symphony series: movement twenty-seven (owen bergstein)

Last month, Dissonant Grids featured the "symphony series," in which Owen Bergstein posted a puzzle a day for 31 days. The series is framed as a sort of cruciverbal symphony, though that analogy didn't really ring true for me. A symphony, at least on the classical model, has a tightly-linked large-scale structure connecting its movements, whereas I had no idea what to expect from day to day in Owen's series. A more revealing comparison for me would be to something like Luciano Berio's Sequenza, a series of 14 compositions for solo instruments or voice, incorporating a wide range of extended techniques and oddities (perhaps most notoriously the moment in Sequenza V in which the soloist turns to the audience and asks "Why?"). Owen's series is similarly an exercise in experimentation, encompassing many different approaches to grid design and cluing, many of which wouldn't fly in mainstream venues.

For me, the most productive of the experiments was in movement twenty-seven, in which the cluing is extremely difficult in a deliberately unfair way, and in which the solver is forbidden from using the check or reveal functions in the applet. With vague clues like [Name that's an anagram of another] and [There are about 90 million worldwide], there's practically no way to solve this puzzle without assistance, but Owen has provided optional hints to accompany each clue. Forcing the solver to eschew check and reveal, and decide exactly which hints they want to make use of, makes the solver into an active participant in the construction (or maybe more appropriately the editing) of the puzzle, choosing which clues need to be made easier to provide footholds. You could simply use all the hints, making it into a standard easy puzzle, or you could try to strategically use as few hints as possible, or you could do anything in between. To make another analogy to the avant-garde music of the mid-20th century, I'm reminded of George Brecht's Event Scores, which push the notion of the musical score by providing brief, open-ended instructions that ordinary people can carry out in everyday life. I think there's great potential in this kind of reimagining of the relationship between the constructor and the solver, and I'm excited to see what else can be done with it.

Extra Toppings (bob weisz)

When I make themed crosswords, I have a tendency to try to overcomplicate things, to put a hat on a hat, as they say. So I love to see a puzzle that puts a hat on a hat but does so for a good reason, and mildly ribs itself for doing so. Unusually, this puzzle has two unconnected sections, each shaped like a different kind of a hat, and each with its own revealer. The top section's revealer at 10-Across is PUT A LID ON IT, clued as ["I've heard enough!" ... and what the constructor did to the bottom part of this grid], while the bottom section's revealer is PUT A HAT ON A HAT, clued as [Oversell a joke... and 10-Across twice... and do what this entire grid does... oh god, even this clue is doing it...]. It's a delightfully weird and meta theme and I'm not sure I have anything else to say about it; it kind of speaks for itself!

Indie puzzle highlights

July 17: Stay in the Loop (halle, Puzzmo)

July 17: Puzzle Pieces (Ada Nicolle, Dissonant Grids)

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Stay in the Loop (halle)

I write a lot of midis for Crossword Club that are meant to be very easy, but it gets boring using the same basic grid patterns over and over again, so sometimes I attempt more ambitious patterns. The ones that are hardest to fill cleanly, invariably, are the ones with patterns like this puzzle here, where there are black squares in the corners and the center, but nowhere else. In these patterns, no individual section is at all siloed off from the next, so every filling decision you makes drastically limits the rest of the grid. If a fill doesn't quite work, you often end up having to start over from scratch. So it's extremely impressive that Halle found eight interlocking 9s that are all high-quality (SPOON REST, WOULD I LIE, SIDELINES, TEENAGERS, TIDEWATER, SPINELESS, SWAP MEETS, PORE STRIP) and that there's nothing in the short fill that so much as made me wince.

It's also just an enjoyable solve, thanks to evocative cluing: [Canvas for Charlotte the Spider's messages], [Stressed coaches often pace along them], [When an episode's cliffhanger happens], [What many "Vampire Diaries" characters appear to be, even though they are actually over 100 years old], [The Cheesecake Factory's famously lengthy reading material, which I logged on Goodreads before it was removed as "NOT A BOOK"]. I'm not even giving the answers for these, because they're both easy and specific enough that you can probably guess most of them even without any letters, but they nonetheless feel fresh.

Puzzle Pieces (Ada Nicolle)

Owen Bergstein's "Symphony Series," an ongoing avant-garde puzzle-a-day series over on Dissonant Grids, has included a couple of intermezzos by other constructors, including this one by Ada Nicolle. Given its provenance, I should be using a musical analogy to talk about this puzzle, but because I know nothing about music theory and a few things about poetry, I won't be doing that.

I like to compare crossword grids to poems because they're often working under similar sorts of linguistic constraints. But a crossword grid is much more like a sestina than, say, a sonnet, because it's the nature of the form that the constraints on what words you can use in concert with each other are rather severe, since every letter generally needs to be checked. I can think of a few sestinas that don't feel like they're straining under the weight of their form, but not many. And similarly, I can think of a few crossword grids that feel like pretty much every entry is chosen at will and not forced by the constraints of the interlock, but not many.

An underdiscussed constraint is the fact that the grids have defined endpoints, almost always the edges of a rectangle. I've made many grids, particularly ones that I've built out from stacked entries in the center, that would have worked beautifully except that the lengths of the long vertical crossers don't play nicely, so that one of them is a bit too close to the edge of the grid, necessitating a two-letter word or an unchecked letter. In "Puzzle Pieces," Ada decides to simply dispense with this pesky constraint, and the results are marvelous. Looking at any section of this collage of grids, I can immediately tell who made it - from up-to-the-minute stuff like UWU SPEECH over TOXIC YURI, to meta stuff like STAGGER STACK and SAN JOSE STRUT and NOM DE PUZ (not to mention HOW META), to stuff specific to Ada's life like ICELANDER. Every section is just bursting with colorful entries, and the fact that Ada didn't have to actually finish the grids off makes it like the "Oops! All Berries" of themelesses. Even just the titular section, piling up Z's with KAZOOS/PUZZLE PIECES/OUTPIZZA THE HUT crossing EX-YAKUZA/SNAZZY/PIAZZA, is worth the price of admission.

Puzzle #249: Words in Progress (Crossmess Parzel #5)

When I picked up Stan Gebler Davies' biography of Joyce, I knew I was in for a bad time from the first paragraph of the preface, which calls Finnegans Wake the "apotheosis of the crossword puzzle" and means it derogatorily. Later, he elaborates on that by calling the novel "a gigantic multilingual crossword puzzle, the theme Resurrection (either by whiskey or divine agency) and the language built on puns." Sure, but you say that like it's a bad thing!

Finnegans Wake is indeed a dense amalgam of puns and coinages that's nearly impossible to understand (the phrase that provides the title of this puzzle series, for example, is a combnation of "Christmas parcel" and "crossword puzzle"), but a crossword puzzle seems like a singularly inapt analogy to me. A crossword puzzle is too orderly, too decipherable, to be a symbol for Finnegans Wake. Most crossword puzzles are, anyway. This here puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) isn't really solvable. At least, if it's solvable, it's only solvable in the sense that Finnegans Wake is readable. Maybe you'll be able to solve it, but certainly not in one or two sittings. Maybe you'll come up with a solution that isn't the same as mine, but that works just as well. Maybe (probably) you'll just hit "reveal grid" and read through the solution PDF for an explanation of the answers.

Constructed by Will Nediger using PuzzleMe's free cross word generator

Puzzle #248: Episode Guide (Crossmess Parzel #4)

The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa had a lot in common with Joyce; they were both visionaries who espoused what might be called a "critical nationalism" with respect to their home countries, and they even both participated in puzzle contests (Pessoa did so under the name A. A. Cross). But Pessoa was no fan of Joyce, complaining that Joyce's writing "is preoccupied with method, with how it is made." He added that the sensuality of Ulysses is "oneiric delirium - the kind treated by psychiatrists - presented as an end in itself."

It's true that Ulysses is a forbiddingly methodical novel, one that uses a dizzying range of styles and techniques. It's the polystylistic nature of Ulysses that makes it hard to compare to a crossword, though many have approached it as a puzzle. In a crossword, thematic unity is key: a single, consistently executed theme is generally treated as the hallmark of a good puzzle. That's a metric that I've brazenly ignored in this Ulysses-inspired crossword (pdf, puz, pdf solution). It's a 25x25 grid with 18 sections, each corresponding to one of the 18 episodes of the novel, and each one having a conceit inspired by that episode. Don't worry, familiarity with Ulysses isn't required to solve the puzzle (though it will surely help in some sections). If you're curious what the heck is going on in a particular section, I've included a handy section-by-section guide below the puzzle.

Thanks to Frisco, Richard, and Matthew for test-solving this beast!

Built by Will Nediger using PuzzleMe's free crossword puzzle creator

 

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Episode 1, "Telemachus"

The symbol of the cross is the first image in Ulysses, which begins "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed." But the symbol of the broken mirror is also a motif in Episode 1 (representing, according to Stephen Dedalus, the warped state of Irish art). So the puzzle opens with the image of a broken mirror crossing a razor.

Episode 2, "Nestor"

This episode depicts Stephen as a teacher at a boys' school, drilling his students with rote questions about ancient history, so the entries in the second section of the puzzle are clued in the same way.

Episode 3, "Proteus"

Episode 3 is named for Proteus, the mythological shapeshifter, and the third section of the puzzle is made up only of the letters in PROTEUS.

Episode 4, "Calypso"

Episode 4 is the first major introduction of the theme of bodily appetites, and the entries in this section are all related to food and drink.

Episode 5, "Lotus-Eaters"

This episode is inspired by the episode of The Odyssey in which Odysseus's crew eat lotus flowers and become intoxicated, losing all desire to continue their journey home. The episode also portrays the wandering and digressive thoughts of Leopold Bloom. The entries in this section are all related to the motif of intoxication, and are all interrupted before they can finish.

Episode 6, "Hades"

Episode 6 includes the first of several mentions in the novel of the phrase "retrospective arrangement," which critics often use to refer to the way in which passages in the novel serves as echoes of previous episodes. In this section, each entry is clued with a cross-reference to an entry in a previous section.

Episode 7, "Aeolus"

This episode is interspersed with newspaper headlines, so the clues in this section are written in the style of headlines.

Episode 8, "Lestrygonians"

Like Episode 4, "Lestrygonians" is filled with references to food, and Joyce's schema for Ulysses lists "peristaltic prose" as the technique used in this episode, with the contractions of the digestive system serving as a model for Bloom's post-lunch walk through Dublin. In this section, the letter bank from Episode 4 above is reused, as if the foods are traveling through the digestive system.

Episode 9, "Scylla & Charybdis"

In this episode, Stephen delivers a lecture on Hamlet, and the episode is dense with Shakespeare references, so each clue in this section is a reference to Shakespeare.

Episode 10, "Wandering Rocks"

This episode consists of 18 short vignettes using the technique of interpolation, in which passages from one vignette reappear in the middle of another vignette. A letter is interpolated into each entry in this section. (MAC becoming MASC is also a nod to the "man in the macintosh," mentioned in the writeup to the second puzzle in the series.)

Episode 11, "Sirens"

The prose in Episode 11 attempts to imitate the qualities of music, so this section of the puzzle is filled with musical references (and repeats the C, R, and N sounds in a hopefully quasi-musical way).

Episode 12, "Cyclops"

Episode 12 is a story narrated by an unnamed Dubliner, unusually using first-person "I" narration. Since the episode is named after the Cyclops, every entry in this section includes the letter "I" exactly once.

Episode 13, "Nausicaa"

In this episode, Bloom masturbates to the sight of Gerty MacDowell, a woman he sees on the beach. Before Bloom's climax, Gerty is characterized with an over-the-top cavalcade of references to beauty and fashion, but that sense of beauty fades afterwards as Gerty walks away and is revealed to walk with a limp. The Across entries above and below CLIMAX in this section are thematic nods to those descriptions.

Episode 14, "Oxen of the Sun"

This section recapitulates the stylistic history of English prose, shifting between styles every few paragraphs. The Across clues in this section imitate five of the styles from the episode, ranging from early Latinate prose to Gothic horror.

Episode 15, "Circe"

This episode is written as a surrealistic stage play set during Bloom and Dedalus's visit to Dublin's red-light district. The clues in this section are written as if they were part of that play.

Episode 16, "Eumaeus"

This episode is deliberately written in a stilted, overwritten style, with some critics arguing that it imitates the way that Bloom himself would have written it. The clues in this section are written deliberately poorly.

Episode 17, "Ithaca"

This episode is written as a catechism (a theological question-and-answer session, essentially), so the clues are written as questions. The answer to the final question in the episode is a large dot printed on the page, referenced by the PERIOD rebus square.

Episode 18, "Penelope"

The final episode is a stream-of-consciousness representation of the thoughts of Bloom's wife Molly, so the clues and entries are in a continuous stream that doesn't break at the boundaries between entries. The partial clue at 123-Across, [yes], is a nod to the fact that "yes" is both the first and last word of the episode.

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)

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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