Classifieds
Call: #734-418-4115
Email: dailydisplay@gmail.com
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