A Chat About the Crossword
We never got the TV Guide when I was a kid. I grew up considering it an extravagance, and in a way, it was. We got the paper every day and by the mid-70s the Sunday paper printed its own TV guide.
It probably was the mid-80s before I discovered the TV guide had a crossword puzzle designed to bestow a sence of intellectual superiority upon even the barely literate. By then I’d been doing the newspaper TV guide version for a while and it was even easier than the “normal” TV Guide.
In retrospect, those were perfect entrees into crosswords for a child. I recall the satisfied feeling of accomplishment when I could complete the TV crossword on a Sunday morning. I also remember transitioning to the big Sunday crossword in the NY Daily News. For the better part of the 80s, it was Comics, Dave Barry, and then the crossword. I get the sense that’s a common combination for people my age.
Doing the crossword weekly, you notice patterns the same way you notice repeated words. I’ve written the word “Epee” maybe 500 or more times in my life, but this is the first time it’s ever appeared in a sentence.
Similarly, answers often reflected the news, a global event, say, or a new scientific fact. I can only hope that you experienced this too because I can’t recall any examples from the time.
There’s a passage in the Richard Linklater movie Waking Life about crosswords. If you’re not familiar with the movie, it’s really a philosophy class turned into narrative vignettes. I bet it plays as overwrought now, but as a philosophy student when the movie came out, it was as ubiquitous as The Matrix.
The crossword puzzle “scene” is really just a throwaway line from the vignette featuring Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. They’re talking about whether knowledge is “out there” and give the example that crossword puzzles are easier to do on the second day because the answers are now in the ether. It’s as if the attention to these obscure facts is “in the air” once millions of crossword puzzle enthusiasts have thought them.
It apparently is true, but it’s not causal. It also doesn’t matter anymore because in the last 25ish years we’ve stopped getting the paper and doing the crossword as a culture. We have niche crosswords now that we get in our inbox. I know it’s an old man thing to say, but my local paper makes the crossword so small as to not be worth the $4-ish the Sunday paper costs.
That’s an awful lot of background to tell you that when I do crosswords today, I still think in terms of current events. So when the clue, “Talkative Russian City?” came up I scanned my Ukraine war knowledge for a second, until I remembered the crossword book had to be three or so years old.
But here’s the thing: Russia is always in the zeitgeist. In fact, if you consider anything for long enough, it’s going to show itself to you more often. Car color is the best example of that. Once you buy a particular car model, you seem to see it more.
In my book, I wrote a lot about The Bible Code, which is cabalist junk manufactured from whole cloth. It said that the Bible was an entire history of Earth, including the stuff that hadn’t happened yet, and if you looked hard enough, it could tell you the future.
I wondered whether I could do the same thing with the crossword puzzle. The thing is, I don’t look up crossword answers. I subscribe to what I’ll call the Delayed Linklater Effect. I just wait for the facts to come to me as the days pass.
Recently, there was a clue about a famous voodoo priestess that I was stuck on. It happens sometimes in crosswords where a clue you can’t solve holds an entire corner hostage. About a week later, while editing an article for American Cemetery and Cremation about New Orleans cemeteries and what name should come up but Marie Laveau.
While I don’t look up answers online, I do confirm them sometimes, especially when the answer is a word I don’t know. Last night, that word was LORIS which apparently was the answer to “Nocturnal Mammal.” When I Googled it, I got this:
So it is 100% possible to forecast the news if you only know which words are the keys to the future. I need to know how often this happens to you, so I’ve started a chat thread for crossword discoveries. Please feel free to add to it (click “open on the web” at the bottom if you don’t want the app). I’ll update it as serendipity makes its way into my life, which will probably be more often now that I’m looking for it.
Keep the Faith,
Tony
Postscript
My latest book review is up. The book was only OK and so is the review. If you read mob books or have read a couple of mob books or are really into mob culture, I assure you, you will love this book. If this is the first mob book you read, though, you’ll probably abandon the genre.
There’s a lot of winking and the authors assume a lot of pre-knowledge about weird things. For instance, they spend a page or two describing the history of Alcatraz but use the word goomara like we’re all hanging around a pool hall smoking cigars.
I guess I don’t agree with a lot of their editorial and narrative choices, is what I’m trying to say.
Finally, I just saw this and wanted to share it.
Talk about burying the lede!
It says so much about these cowards in power that their concern was people would hear them speaking frankly and not that an off-the-rails crazy person got a job in Senate food service.
The charges were dropped and the man was free to go.
Here’s the latest from the Crossword chat.
TR