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7 person house for Fall, 
2 bath, 7 parking spcs, 
nice house, 
1 block from CCRB, 
$5,895 plus util. 
(734)646-5548

By Gary Larson
©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
11/13/19

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

11/13/19

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Wednesday, November 13, 2019

ACROSS
1 Big name in wax 
museums
8 Surpasses
14 Worldwide law 
enforcement 
group
16 Eradicate
17 *Place for an 
eruption in Hawaii
18 Supreme 
Egyptian god
19 *Place for 
memorabilia 
about the 44th 
President
21 Eight British kings
24 Disney doe
25 Middling mark
26 Cries of pain
27 Lab work
30 Sondheim’s 
“Sweeney __”
31 “Robinson 
Crusoe” novelist
34 Shooting star
36 Money ... and, in 
three parts, a hint 
to the answers to 
starred clues
39 Like some dress 
shirts
40 Digital video files
43 Part of P.R.
46 Dix plus dix
48 Agua, across the 
Pyrenees
49 Smart-whip link
50 Saigon New Year
51 Badger at the 
comedy club
54 *Place on 
“Desperate 
Housewives”
58 Put in a pyramid
59 *Place for a 
space cadet
63 Treeless tract
64 Monty Python 
member
65 Like many a 
salad
66 Record 
collection?

DOWN
1 Allen of TV’s 
“Last Man 
Standing”
2 Spanish “a”

3 Name spelled 
with an alphabet 
sequence
4 Tijuana title
5 Sheikdom of 
song
6 Batting ninth
7 Ruination
8 Compact cars?
9 Latin dance
10 Car service app
11 Mediterranean 
gambling mecca
12 Sounded content
13 Hung around
15 A.L. West team, 
on scoreboards
20 Allowing
21 Mortar carrier
22 Wool coat wearer
23 Brief warning 
accompanying 
a link
28 Academic 
retirees
29 Stitch into place
30 Mouth, in slang
32 Cry of woe
33 Fair-hiring abbr.
35 Omega, to an 
electrician
37 Area between 
banks

38 Vichyssoise 
veggie
41 “Wonder 
Woman” actress 
Gadot
42 Seek damages
43 Least refined
44 Has a passion for
45 Social strata
47 Name shared by 
a Grace and a 
Muse
50 Phoenix neighbor

52 Put on the books
53 Salsa singer 
Cruz
55 Surpasses
56 Smithwick’s brew
57 Fat used in 
baking
60 Free-app 
interrupters
61 Div. won by the 
Braves in 2019
62 City of Lions and 
Tigers: Abbr.

FOR RENT

MIDWESTERN COLUMN

In 1965, Michigan boldly declared itself 
a “Water Winter Wonderland.” They even 
slapped it on their license plates. This is 
awfully brazen, given that man has hated 
winter since long before Jack London snuffed 
a man out in the Yukon for his inability to 
build a fire. The fact of the matter is that the 
Upper Midwest is a cold place. Michigan is 
shaped like a form of winter attire, so I’m not 
sure what you expected. 
Winter 
is 
an 
institution, 
stubbornly 
persisting from November to March. With it 
comes the trusted fundamentals: the ghostly 
white film on our clothes left by slush, the 
ice clinging to our windows, the cold that 
squeezes our toes and fingers. The first snow 
is upon us, and I promise this is a good thing. 
Winter is more than hellish, white-knuckled 
driving conditions. It comes every year, for 
more better than worse, if only you’d let 
yourself get lost in it.
The cold doesn’t hurt so bad if you keep 
moving. The frigid sting of winter is a 
lethargic miscreant, easily outwitted and 
dodged. The most effective method of evasion 
is purely up to your preference. For the daring, 
go to Muskegon, where you can slide down 
an Olympic-sized luge track, which will send 
you hurtling down 750 winding feet of ice. If 
you prefer less of a downhill slope, Muskegon 
also has a quarter-mile ice track that 
ambles through the woods between skinny 
evergreens. Or perhaps you’d rather traverse 
one of Michigan’s 6,500 snowmobile trails, say 
in Cadillac or Grayling. You could also spend 

a winter with man’s best friend, heading to 
McMillian in the U.P. for a 20-mile dog sled 
trip.
Many see snow as a glacial blanket, 
suffocating and snuffing out the beauty of 
fall. But my fellow midwesterners tell me 
that waking up to a yard full of snow where 
there was none the night before — with the 
trees lined with little white clumps and the 
car covered so heavily that only its imprint 
is recognizable — is one of the most beautiful 
things ever. Especially when it’s followed by a 
surprise phone call from the school district, 
freeing you from your societal burden of 
school.
I have only ever fallen in love in wintertime. 
I have fallen in love with tall firs and pinecones 
and the way you can feel hot coffee warm you 
all the way down to your toes when you sip 
it outside. I have fallen in love with people 
and places, with words like “blustery” and 
“boreal,” with the sight of foxes dancing alone 
in a heimal field. Where there are cold ears 
and fingers, there are warm hearts, begging to 
be warmer still.
Have you ever followed deer tracks through 
a snowy field? Have you heard an elk call echo 
through the barren trees? Have you ever held 
someone’s hand and it started snowing? Snow 
is what you make it. Snow is an opportunity to 
be reminded that there is beauty here. Maybe 
it isn’t always obvious. Maybe it stings a little 
if you throw a ball of it at someone’s face (that 
goes for snow and beauty). But it’s there. It’s 
there and it wants you to know it, to follow it, 
to trace it out in your front yard by laying down 
in a big pile of it and coming back up an angel.
Have you played in the snow yet? Have you 
reminded yourself what it means to be alive?

Warm up to the winter and
find the beauty in the snow

MAXWELL SCHWARZ
Daily Midwestern Columnist

But my fellow midwesterners tell me that waking 
up to a yard full of snow where there was none 
before — with the trees lined with little white 
clumps and the car covered so heavily that only 
its imprint is recognizable — is one of the most 
beautiful things ever. 

The overarching themes of Elaine Equi’s 
poetry collection “The Intangibles” are not 
difficult to grasp: critiques of materialism 
and technological dependence. But in a world 
saturated by older generations bemoaning the 
death of social interactions and demonizing 
younger adults for using technology, Equi’s 
claims 
seem 
tired 
and 
outdated. 
Take, 
for example, part of her poem “Hello”: “I 
remember when people / used their hands to 
gesture / and would meet each other’s eyes / 
with curiosity or annoyance.” It’s a clear “back 
in my day” moment. She continues, referring to 
smartphones, “but now everyone looks down, 
/ studying their palms intently.” Her point is 
understandable and culturally relevant, but 
that does not prevent it from feeling like an 
old woman wagging her finger at “kids these 
days.” 
Equi is in danger of losing entire audiences 
as she is dismissed with an “OK, boomer” 
(She was born in 1953, making this statement 
accurate). Her poetry on the subject of 
technology is only marginally more eloquent 
than the comics about tech-addicted teenagers 
that Gen Z’s grandparents post to Facebook. 
She yearns for the glory days, when people 
“radiated oneness” and “knew how to inhabit 
a moment.” Now, of course, in a world 
populated by the youth, this world has all but 
disappeared. It has been replaced — according 
to Equi — with one populated by materialistic, 
unthinking, tech-addled masses with minute 
attention spans and no appreciation for 
poetry. We are merely “flitting from screen to 
screen,” and “if something was unpleasant, we 
deleted it.” Her platitudinous argument would 
not be complete without a critique of social 
relations and how they have been affected by 
technology, so the lines “And if we happened 
to lose a friend, / hundreds more were ready to 
take their place” barely even register. Hers is 
an argument the world has heard a thousand 
times over. 
Her poetry on this point is also sometimes 
too clunky to be impactful. When her point 
is more understated, the resulting poetry is 
more beautiful: “We will not need the old 
language / they took and ground to numeric 
sand.” But the lines, and entire poems, that 
seek to contribute to her larger message of 
the dangers of technology often fall flat, like 
“The big stories — peckish news / gets told 
in tweets.” Her heavy-handedness impedes 
poems that have nothing to do with technology 
as well. The lines describing a perfume 
bottle “a forest, an ocean, / a mountain — / a 
whole kingdom / in these glass towers” are 
thoughtful and defamiliarizing, summoning 
an everyday object in a completely new and 
more imaginative way. But her poetry is 
only effective up until the point of over-
explanation. In the same poem as the perfume 
bottle description, she says, “No shape / takes 
place / in time / without smell.” These lines 
are especially frustrating because they exist so 
close to the other more strange and wonderful 
lines about the same exact feeling. But while 
the first description makes the reader think 
and presents an emotion or concept in a new 
way, the second simply states that emotion. 
Where the first is dexterous, the second is 
graceless. Equi underestimates her audience’s 
ability to understand — perhaps because she 

thinks we are tech-obsessed sheep — and 
therefore her poetry sacrifices some emotional 
power to the grail of complete understanding. 
Equi actually does her best work in this 
collection when she is not trying to make a 
point. The most memorable and remarkable 
poems in the book are also the most subtle. 
For instance, almost no poems discuss family, 
but the one that does — an outlier — does so 
elegantly. Equi describes a recurring dream 
that both she and her mom have as a “genetic 
trait, a locket / handed from one generation to 
the next.” She captures the nonsensical quality 
of a dream and distills it to a particular feeling 
of loneliness that could only be remedied by a 
mother. She yearns for a moment in this lonely, 
wandering dream in which she and her mother 
“stopped for a moment, embraced, / and shared 
a cup of tea.” The poem does not necessarily fit 
into the larger themes of the collection, but it 
still manages to hold its own better than most 
of the ones that do fit. 
Equi’s other strength has nothing to do 
with content and everything to do with sound. 
Some of her poems focus exclusively on sonic 
portrayal, with little or no thought given to 
meaning. In her poem “C-notes,” she simply 
lists words starting with the letter C that 
have completely disparate definitions but 
have some connection sonically, like “corners 
/ and coroners” or “caliphs / and calipers.” 
In other poems, she deftly connects ideas 
using similar consonant sounds, like “the 
rabbit / of the alphabet,” and internal rhyme, 
like “drops back / into the void / of the black 
hat.” This appreciation for sound hearkens 
back to the earliest days of poetry in the form 
of oral tradition, and it is often overlooked 
or considered as an afterthought by modern 
poets. One might even say Equi’s attention to 
sonic detail brings us back to the “good old 
days” of poetry, before technology got in the 
way, but that would be cliched and dismissive 
of the leaps and bounds we have made since 
then — a lesson that perhaps Equi herself could 
learn. 

‘Intangibles’ is out of touch

EMILIA FERRANTE
For The Daily

The 
Intangibles

Elaine Equi

Coffee House Press

Nov. 12, 2019

COFFEE HOUSE PRESS / YOUTUBE

BOOK REVIEW

The most memorable and remarkable 
poems in the book are also the most 
subtle. For instance, almost no poems 
here discuss family, but the one that 
does — an outlier — does so elegantly ... 
She captures the nonsensical quality of a 
dream and distills it to a particular feeling 
of loneliness that could only be remedied 
by a mother.

6A — Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

