I’m not an expert in other subcultures so I’m not sure I can speak to differences across various groups, but I can point out a few things that strike me about today’s crossword fiends. Getting to know people along the gradient of cruciverbal immersion, from casual participant to crossword superfan, has been the joy of living with this book. How would you describe that subculture? How is it different (if it is) from other subcultures and social milieux?ĪDRIENNE RAPHEL: I love this question.
#DABBLE IN CROSSWORD FREE#
STEPHANIE BURT: I already know something about the history part of book (since I kind of watched you write it), so I’m going to start at the other end, with the present-day culture of crossword fiends, people who organize their social lives and their free time around being or becoming really good at crosswords. She and I conducted our interview via Google Hangouts and speedy typing in mid-May. Please ignore me and listen to Adrienne as she discusses the past and the future of crosswords. You see what kind of a mess this book can make of your brain.
Thinking Inside the Box, the trade press book that is also a dissertation that is also a masterful first prose book (her actual first book was a book of poems), discusses the history of the American crossword and of the British cryptic crossword, the major figures on both sides, the fun and the fast pace of an in-person tournament (remember when we had in-person events? good times), and the philosophy of construction, cluing, and solving from the first Word Cross to the end of time - when we become crow dross, when doom strikes us down or cows drs, when we must pull our way out of our quarantined future by learning to row with our scow rods, when we take refuge in the imaginary realm of Sinbad and have to fight off sword rocs. In the same year, I learned with great pleasure just how good she had become at literary journalism, at the kind of long-form reviewing I do and at the kind of synthetic, reporting-included cultural coverage that I don’t do: I read her work in The New Yorker online and elsewhere. And then I started to see where the dissertation - no, the book - was going: into the greater world of human beings who read for pleasure, human beings who might not care about interpretations of interpretations of interpretations of Milton (which, for the record, I do care about!), but who absolutely care about the history of the thing with the boxes and grids and puns and inside jokes, the thing that has become a highlight of their Sundays, or their every day, the thing whose interpersonal and social and ludic and indeed literary implications have never been fully explored. I HAD BEEN DOING crosswords (the easier, American kind) off and on, with partners or alone, for maybe two decades when I learned that Adrienne Raphel - at the time, a graduate student at Harvard, and before that an Iowa Writers’ Workshop poet - planned to write part, and then all, of her dissertation on crosswords and their literary implications.
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