During Oratorio practice, my black music folder routinely secreted a New York Times crossword puzzle in its left-hand pocket and a Pilot Precise V7 black-ink pen in its handy holder, both waiting for employment during any lull in the musical action. Mike started to look over my shoulder, curious about what was going on, and eventually he whispered a word or two for a clue that had escaped me. Ink out, solution in. Repeat.
It turns out Mike that was also a puzzler, with a wider practice than mere crosswords. He started bringing in other daily word puzzles he had saved up for me, as well as other types of brainteasers. I came to look forward to our puzzle exchange almost as much as singing. By the winter of 2015-16, we attempted – and completed – our magnum opus: solution to the GCHQ Puzzle, which I recounted in a contemporaneous post.
With time I had to end my tenure with Marin Oratorio to devote myself to architecture school, and my puzzling drifted into new dimensions. I moved on to cryptic crosswords, somehow latching onto those constructed by Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto in The Nation. I remained solo in this weekly endeavor, until Josh and Henri, abandoned by The Nation, portaged their puzzles to Patreon in 2020, just at the start of COVID isolation. I lured Mike into them at around this point. After all, what better way to endure a pandemic lockdown?
My sister had also introduced me to the Saturday Variety Puzzle in the Wall Street Journal (which, despite its disturbing right-wing conviction, has some great free puzzles) and I then roped Mike into that, too. Mike quickly reciprocated with another weekly WSJ adventure – killer Sudoku – a Sudoku variant in which sums are provided for small pockets of squares rather than the numbers themselves.
Soon we craved even harder puzzles and discovered the National Puzzle League cryptics, many of which have some particular theme, pattern, or “meta” that must be conjured up, and some of which simply could not be completed by either one of us independently. Take the one written for a Boston convention, in which the trick was to discover that all the “T’s” had to be thrown overboard (but only in certain quadrants), or the one where an extra unused letter in some clues gave rise to phrase which then spelled out the title of a work, which can then be used to answer the clues themselves!
Lately, Mike became enamored of another puzzle that uses this meta strategy, the WSJ Friday “contest” crossword, though he confesses that his real motivation is the puzzler’s grail: a mug awarded to a randomly selected solver. The crossword itself is very straightforward, but the “answer” often requires several additional levels of calculus – literally each level is a derivative of the preceding one. My initial attempt at the contest was a failure, and like the discouraged child, I threw down my metaphorical crayon in frustration. But recently I gave the contest crossword a second chance, and now that I’ve had a little success, I’m hooked, too.
These two types of meta puzzles have a certain quality that really benefits from a pair of solvers. For each level, at least one of us needs to have an insight, and then we can continue on until another insight is required.
And now, at last, I come to relevance of the title for this post. Many years ago I grudgingly read a tome on Picasso, but there was a nugget in there I loved: At the end of each day, after working individually, Picasso and Braque had the habit of visiting each other’s studio to see what progress had been made. In this way, they developed cubism, and perhaps neither would have done it without the other. Picasso said, and I paraphrase, “We were like a pair of mountain climbers, each one talking the lead alternately, and that way, together, we reached the mountaintop.”
No comments:
Post a Comment