Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by David P. Williams, was Strange Solving. I started on paper, looked at 1-A, four letters, “Persian product” (RUGS?) and 1-D, four letters, “Confederate” (?), dropped down to 46-A, five letters, “Oedipus uncle” and 41-D, five letters, “Sample of Horatian poetry,” and soon found myself getting nowhere. I then tried the online puzzle with autocheck switched on and found the puzzle falling into place with just a handful of wrong letters guessed. I don’t know how to explain it.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

5-D, six letters, “Egg head.” Oof.

10-D, letters, “Incredulous inquiry.” The constructor has a good ear for colloquial language.

15-A, four letters, “Bonus round?” Well, sort of.

23-D, eleven letters, “Uber-celebrator.” See 10-D.

25-A, thirteen letters, “Incredulous.” And a good ear for old-timey language. He had WHIPPERSNAPPERS as an answer earlier this month.

27-D, ten letters, “‘Join the club’ kin.” See 10-D.

29-A, five letters, “Phish food?” Now I get it.

36-D, eight letters, “Saskatoon’s silly-sider.” So we’re bringing in Canadian slang, eh?

43-A, seven letters, “Cutters’ floors.” So strange: I just looked it up.

43-D, five letters, “Theater backer.” I was too clever for my own good: I thought the answer had to be ACTII.

45-A, four letters, “Love ____.” Also so strange: it’s in the tax photo I’m posting tomorrow.

My favorite in this puzzle: 40-A, thirteen letters, “Awareness confirmation.” You said it, bub.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Willa Cather in 250 to 250

Rebecca Solnit talks about Willa Cather for Heather Cox Richardson’s 250 to 250 series of short videos. Here’s the full text, delivered in about fifty-one seconds:

“There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made,” wrote Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather in her 1918 novel My Ántonia. Cather was born in Virginia in 1873, but it was her family’s move to Red Cloud, Nebraska, about ten years later, that inspired her work. In her novels and stories, Cather explored the connections between people and the land on which immigrants built the nation at the same time as they built their lives. Her close observations of western life, delivered in straightforward prose, created an immediacy that evoked the profound beauty of the land, the passions of the people who lived on it, and the connections between the two.

As someone who’s read virtually all of Cather, I find this capsule picture — land, immigrants, passion — sadly inadequate. Here’s my try:

A teenage girl who called herself William, a young woman who made her way as a journalist in Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., a Virginia-born Nebraskan who later lived in Greenwich Village and on Park Avenue, a celebrant of both immigrant and indigenous cultures, a keen observer of the dynamics of family life who sustained a decades-long partnership with another woman, a deeply American writer who loved all things French, Willa Cather stands as a major figure in modern fiction. Almost eighty years after her death, her sharp, lyrical prose invites and rewards continued rereading.

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

[At the beginning of My Ántonia , Cather glosses the pronunciation of Ántonia, which you’ll hear mispronounced in the video: “The Bohemian name Ántonia is strongly accented on the first syllable, like the English name Anthony, and the i is, of course, given the sound of long e. The name is pronounced An′-ton-ee-ah.“ And I’ve always heard Cather as rhyming with gather . The sentence from My Ántonia is mispunctuated in the in-video captions. I’ve punctuated it correctly here.]

How to improve writing (no. 134)

A subhead from a The New York Times article about yesterday’s disgraceful Supreme Court decision regarding TPS and deportation:

The split mirrored one that has long divided Americans: how seriously to take the president’s loose, provocative and sometimes ugly remarks.

Note to the Times : it’s long past time to drop the decorousness. Better:

The split mirrored one that has long divided Americans: how seriously to take the president’s frankly racist remarks.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 134 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose.]

Hearing or reading “Yarmouth”

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

Pretty Proustian.

Yarmouth : David :: Combray : Marcel.

Em’ly : David :: Gilberte : Marcel.

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

[“It seems that Proust did not discover Dickens before, possibly, the age of 35, when his friend René Peter lent him a copy of David Copperfield ”: Christine Huguet, “Dickens in France: Major Writers,” in The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe, ed. Michael Hollington (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Though Proust’s initial response was negative, his friend never got the book back. More here.]

Columns

[At a red light, somewhere outside Boston, a few weeks ago.]

Click for a larger view. Look closely.

Canned Heat and Dante

In the Hand of Dante (dir. Julian Schnabel, 2025) is making me want to cry zio . Zio!  But this movie is now being partly redeemed by the non-diegetic arrival of Canned Heat’s “Poor Moon.” Must keep watching. (Must?)

A related post
“Poor Moon”

Nothing to show

Michael Steele, former RNC chair, on NSNOW just now:

“You’ve got nothing to show for the last two years except a reflecting pool full of algae, and an Arc de Trump being proposed, and Kennedy Center names, and all — it's just not public policy. You win elections on how you address the pain of the people. You win elections on what you offer to solve their problems.”

“He saw David”

Adam Krug, philosopher, thinks of his eight-year-old son David.

Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister (1947).

In a 1964 introduction to the novel, Nabokov writes that “it is for the sake of the pages about David and his father that the book was written and should be read.”

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

A sad retronym

It occurred to me yesterday that “the open Internet” is a retronym for what once was “the Internet.”

W2 on the screen

[From More Than a Secretary (dir. Alfred E. Green, 1936). Click for a larger view.]

Maizie West (Dorothea Kent) to Carol Baldwin (Jean Arthur): “Miss Baldwin, are there two v s in liver ?”

That’s a Webster’s New International Dictionary , second edition, often called the W2. You can see one in color, marbled edges and all, here.

Other Merriam-Webster sightings
A Webster’s Collegiate used as a weapon : Timmy and Lassie and an W2