Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Steve Mossberg, and it’s ultra-difficult. I made a good start with 33-D, six letters, “Tighten up, perhaps,” whose last letter gave me a good guess for 32-A, thirteen letters, “Sidewalk café patron, perhaps.” The stickiest parts of this puzzle: the northeast and southwest corners. I had to plug in four or five letters to get the southwest corner. Marone!

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, five letters, “Nothing to worry about.” Just pleasingly clever.

4-D, nine letters, “Small sums.” Not a plural you see very often.

6-D, ten letters, “French fashion.” I had the answer, though I’d long forgotten what it means.

28-A, thirteen letters, “High-tech plants.” The first in a stepped stack of thirteen-letter answers. 32-A is the second.

24-A, thirteen letters, “Rigid reminder.” The third in that stack.

24-D, ten letters, “24th century teakettle.” I’m sure that this clue is meant as a giveaway, but I thought it must have to do with ancient China.

30-D, nine letters, “Racing vehicles.” Only mildly misdirective.

43-D, four letters, “Sphere sliced for snacking.” Not an OREO, though that’s one way to eat them.

47-A, seven letters, “Touch technology.” I just like the word.

55-A, five letters, “Literary heavens.” Why do crossword clues so often make the literary or poetic synonymous with archaisms and stilted contractions? EEN, OER, ORB, &c.

Ugliest row of answers in the puzzle: 36-A, three letters, “The Chesapeake, to geologists”; 37-A, four letters, “Botanical branches”; 38-A, three letters, “Union returnee, Jun. 1868.” (That silly “Jun.” — because there has to be an abbreviation.)

My favorite in this puzzle: 18-D, eight letters, “Encouraging words.” In the American grain.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

A teaching moment

I sometimes taught Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” (take two) in intro poetry classes. Its imagery, economy of means, and emotional intensity make the song an extraordinary piece of poetry. (Here are the lyrics.)

The singer begins by going to a crossroads and falling to his knees, pleading for God to save him. He then stands and tries to flag a ride. Vehicles go by; he doesn’t move. He notices the sun sinking down and asks someone else to carry a message to his friend-boy Willie Brown: “Lord, that I’m standin’ at the crossroads babe, I believe I’m sinkin’ down.” He’s still standing, but he feels that he’s sinking. Standing at a crossroads, which seems to promise horizontal movement, he, like the sun, is moving downward.

One time after I played Johnson’s recording, a student in the front row said “You should’ve played Cream.” I smiled and asked, “Where do you think they got it?”

Related reading
All OCA Robert Johnson posts (Pinboard)

[A friend-boy is a male friend. The lyrics of Cream’s “Crossroads,” with their Rosedale choruses, seem incoherent by comparison. And yes, in teaching “Cross Road Blues” I took the opportunity to talk about sundown towns. And no, Robert Johnson did not go to a crossroads to sell his soul to the devil.]

Icicles, shrimp, and tamales

From Mack McCormick’s Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey, ed. John Troutman (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2023):

From a pile of old road maps I’d found in a used bookstore, I dug out a Standard Oil map published in 1942. This one conveniently put Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi — plus a corner of Tennessee — on the same sheet. It covered everything from Memphis down to New Orleans, and it showed the roads substantially as they were in Johnson’s lifetime. I devised a code for marking the map: a red triangle for a place mentioned in the songs, a black circle for a town that he was said to have frequented, an abbreviated note that would lead me back to the source, and some cryptic symbols indicating my own hunch as to how trustworthy each entry might be.

I started with the primary clues: the places Johnson had sung about. He’d mentioned eleven towns: Chicago, East Monroe, Friars Point, Gulfport, Hot Springs, Memphis, Norfolk, Rosedale, Vicksburg, West Helena, and West Memphis. Three states: Arkansas, California, and Tennessee. Three nations: China, Ethiopia, and the Philippines. And two transportation lines: Greyhound and the “Gulfport Island Road.” In addition, there were three words from which some geographic inferences could be drawn: icicles, shrimp, and tamales.

It wasn’t a long list, only twenty-two items in all.

This passage gives some sense of the book, which is, in truth, not a biography but an account of the writer’s detective-like pursuit of the facts of Robert Johnson’s life. As the editor points out, McCormick was given to considerable fabulation, so it’s difficult to think that everything presented here as fact is fact (especially the astonishing elements of chance that lead to some of McCormick’s discoveries). And there’s much that could be here that’s missing: material gathered from two of Johnson’s sisters is omitted, a decision the Smithsonian made in light of McCormick’s shamelessly dishonest dealings with the women. And here’s a spoiler: an editor’s endnote says there is no evidence that McCormick identified and interviewed Johnson’s killer. For years, McCormick claimed that he couldn’t publish his work until the guilty party was dead.

The best moment, which I hope has a basis in reality, though there are no photographs here to document it: a listening party of sorts, with McCormick playing the 1961 compilation LP King of the Delta Blues Singers for men and women who had last heard Johnson sing and play thirty-odd years before.

My next reading: Annye C. Anderson’s Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson (with Preston Lauterbach), by the sister McCormick didn’t interview. But first I’m going to listen to the recordings.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Johnson posts (Pinboard)

Sill bitar after all these years

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Fresca sent this photograph. Thanks, Fresca. The jar is holding buttons.

Sill bitar is Swedish for “herring pieces.” And yes, sill bitar after all these years: Noon Hour Food Products has been at it since 1876.

[Herring today, sardines Sunday, in the form of an NYC tax photograph.]

A dictionary in progress

Aunt Hagar’s children, bussin, cakewalk, chitterlings, grill, kitchen, old school, pat, Promised Land, ring shout : ten entries from the Oxford Dictionary of African American English, in progress.

A New York Times article has the words, their definitions, and background about the project.

A related post
The ODAAE

Gray’s Papaya’s Nicholas Gray

The New York Times has an obituary for Nicholas Gray, the Gray of Gray’s Papaya.

Gray’s Papaya is a wonderful place to stop if you’re in Manhattan. And yes, “you chew standing.”

About reading

Catherine Rampell, writing in The Washington Post :

Amid debates about how children will process texts invoking racism or sexual identity, a much more basic question plagues our educational system: whether children can process texts, period.

And:

It is disheartening that the culture wars have come for not just lesson plans but librarians, too. Librarians are instrumental in promoting literacy. They guide students toward texts that will absorb and engage them. They nudge kids toward books, films, periodicals and online resources that will answer burning, sometimes embarrassing questions.

Perhaps most important, they teach children how to critically evaluate the credibility of their sources — not only the tomes on library shelves but also whatever they might find in the Wild West of TikTok and Reddit, where protective parents are less able to gate-keep.

Call me old-school, but maybe we should devote less energy to limiting what kids are reading and more to whether they can read at all.

Related reading
A few OCA Sold a Story posts

Mystery actor

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Leave a name in the comments. I’ll drop a hint if one is needed.

*

The answer is now in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all!)
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I’ve just seen a face

Related reading
All OCA pareidolia posts (Pinboard)

When writers go on strike

What? From The New York Times:

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is planning to announce the start of his 2024 presidential campaign on Wednesday in a live audio conversation on Twitter with Elon Musk, the platform’s polarizing owner, according to people with knowledge of his plans.

That’s the kind of laughably crappy storyline you’re left with when writers go on strike.