Times 26965 – Swimming the Lucinda River with Joie de Vivre

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
A very Mondayesque puzzle indeed, which I romped through in 21 minutes, so we may expect the speedsters to be comfortably sub-5. Sometimes a puzzle is like a London bus – you know what I mean: you wait ages for a word to come along and then it just can’t stop coming. SPOILER ALERT!

That word today is the girl’s name (Inés in Spanish, Inês in Portuguese, Inez in Murcan), which I had never heard of until it popped up recently, generating, as these things so often do, as much discussion about its spelling (if it’s not spelling, it’s pronunciation) as about its intrinsic value. And what a nice intrinsic value it possesses, being derived from the Greek word hagnē (meaning chaste), which gives us Agnes. Agnes of God, indeed.

For me, the third bus trundled along last week, when I watched a truly magnificent film, which was made in 1966 and released in 1968, called The Swimmer. Parable, fairy-tale, dream, nightmare, reflection on the male menopause, who can tell?, but this adaptation of a short story published in The New Yorker deserves its cult status, and contains quite possibly, as Roger Ebert contends, the best work Burt Lancaster ever did.

¡Manos a la obra!

ACROSS

1 Cleric — a Roman Catholic — bound to admit mistake (10)
ARCHBISHOP – BISH in A RC HOP
6 Daughter is wanting hot food (4)
DISH – D IS H
9 Wild river crossed by this writer’s companion (10)
IMMODERATE – ODER in I’M MATE
10 Object of worship in Delhi or Lahore principally (4)
IDOL – initial letters of those middle words
12 Tampers with some marks on exam paper? Nonsense (12)
FIDDLESTICKS -FIDDLES TICKS
15 Writer knocked back drink after drink, going round Australia (5,4)
EMILE ZOLA – ALE and LIME around OZ, all reversed; I have to confess I’ve never read a word of this chap’s output, but he acquitted himself well in the Dreyfuss business, writing the pamphlet ‘J’Accuse’.
17 Affected Florentine painter I ignored (3,2)
GOT TO – G[i]OTTO
18 Pan for cook (5)
ROAST – Double definition (DD)
19 Sailing vessel‘s crew stole through empty street (9)
STEAMBOAT – TEAM BOA in S[tree]T; it’s a bit counter-intuitive to describe a steamboat as a sailing vessel, but it is , in the sense that it ‘moves over the sea’ (or ‘sails’).
20 Resourceful burglar with crowbar might? (12)
ENTERPRISING – (a burglar) ENTERS PRISING (the door open)
24 Band‘s big hit (not the second) (4)
SASH – S[m]ASH
25 Noting a royal figure with duke visiting urban area (6,4)
TAKING DOWN – A KING D (duke) in TOWN
26 American entering Malayan kingdom (4)
YANK – hidden
27 Form of SATs bandied about in these? (10)
STAFFROOMS – anagram * of FORM OF SATS and an all-in-one

DOWN

1 Line of cabs, first one leaving (4)
AXIS – [t]AXIS
2 Holiday site with parking close to river (4)
CAMP – CAM (piffling ‘river’ at the other place) P
3 Base politician stifling newspaper account of late (7,5)
BEDTIME STORY – TIMES in BED (base) TORY (politician)
4 Divided among several people, except for a small amount (5)
SHRED – SH[a]RED
5 Like Nana, perhaps, he got name changed (2,3,4)
ON THE GAME – HE GOT NAME*; Nana, the eponymous heroine of one of Zola’s best known books, was a lady of the night.
7 In a manner of speaking, concealing a piece of evidence (10)
INDICATION – A in IN (in) DICTION (a manner of speaking)
8 Presents lectures (5,5)
HOLDS FORTH – DD
11 Male celebrity upset by a German worker behind the scenes (5,7)
STAGE MANAGER – STAG (male) EMAN (NAME reversed – ‘upset’) A GER
13 Boldly rush around like Van Gogh? (10)
FEARLESSLY – EARLESS in FLY; as a matter of fact, Van Gogh was only partially earless.
14 Brexit extremists clashing with Parisian supporting both sides (10)
BIPARTISAN – BT (B[rexi]T) PARISIAN*
16 Attentive valet supports old bachelor (9)
OBSERVANT – SERVANT after O B
21 Pursuing last of scullers, row hard (5)
STIFF – TIFF after [sculler]S
22 Leading Motown duo on revolutionary sort of recording (4)
MONO – MO[town] ON reversed
23 Spanish woman tucks in, skipping starter (4)
INES – [d]INES

55 comments on “Times 26965 – Swimming the Lucinda River with Joie de Vivre”

  1. A Monday puzzle accessible to the experienced QC fraternity. The GK was maybe a bit harder but it was largely familiar.
    Like others I read Balzac and Zola in my youth. The French novelist I remember most fondly is Stendhal.
    MY LOI was SASH after 13d and 26a.
    It helped that I met Inez recently another minor bird it seems.
    Finished in an hour or so; I must think about timing these solves. David
  2. 5.5 Monday minutes, didn’t know Nana despite having tangled with Zola (Germinal, possibly) during French A-levels. Ines also, in Sartre’s “Huis Clos”.

    The Swimmer is indeed a magnificent film, I was haunted by it when I first saw it as a teen and was delighted to find it still held up when I watched it again during this millennium. Love how it starts of very jolly and then gets darker and darker as it goes on, much like my own evenings really.

  3. As a newcomer to this blog, could someone kindly spare the time to explain the meanings of “biff” and “parse” – at least with relation to crosswords?
    1. Parse means to break the answer down into the parts indicated by the wordplay – it’s basically what the bloggers are doing when they explain the answers.

      Biff is short for bung in from definition, ie write the answer in without parsing/checking the wordplay. This can speed things up but can result in incorrect answers.

  4. I must have been grumpy with NicktheNovice over the week-end or given the wrong password more than once!

    Anyway today was nice’an Monday.

    FOI 10ac IDOL
    LOI 22dn INES

    COD None
    WOD FIDDLESTICKS!

    18ac ROAST was a piss-poor clue IMHO

    The dishonourable Member for Shanghai West

  6. I liked the enterprising burglar and the i-less Giotto, and I wasted time at 20ac on the crew, who were biffable-clearly the center part of fr-eight-er. I’m not really familiar with Zola, I am familiar with Cheever, and I definitely believe Burt Lancaster’s best role was The Leopard. Thanks, Ulaca. Pleasant go, setter.

    Edited at 2018-02-19 07:50 pm (UTC)

    1. I remember being rather disappointed with The Leopard when I saw it a few years back. But then I generally find myself out of sympathy with Italian films generally, as opposed to, say, French and Japanese ones.
        1. What I liked about the film is the frictionless juxtaposition of the turbulence and emotional upheaval of the ancillary events – revolution, sex, dynasty – with the stately and civilized way that the story proceeds. This is the same reason I like baseball and cricket: too much going on at any one time for one person to focus on or comprehend, but still contained inside the framework of a game which proceeds at its own pace.

          I also like that the film:
          a) bought out all the roses in Naples for three weeks running, and flew them over to Sicily every day, nearly bankrupting the production in the process; and
          b) hired descendants of the kind of aristocratic Sicilian families portrayed in the film to appear as extras, with roles as the servants who emptied all the piss-pots during the Ball.

  7. 26:35 nice and Mondayish. Zola did not appear on my French A-level syllabus and like others, the only Nana I could think of was the dog in Peter Pan. I had my doubts about her having fallen on such seriously hard times and put the otherwise obvious answer in knowing that enlightenment would follow on reading the blog. FOI 1ac. LOI 7dn. COD 20ac.

  8. I’m a QC-er who gives it a shot on Mondays. Like last week just a couple short after a 90 min cut off.

    I have read Zola (Therese Raquin) but did not get at as was stuck with COLA and SODA for my drinks.

    I also had B[r]ASS for 24 a, which I thought fitted OK.

    I await my first 15×15 solve in 90.

  9. I’m so late coming here that it’s tomorrow. Nothing new to say except that this was fun with some witty clues eg 20a. 16 minutes – which is a good time for me. Ann
  10. Fast steamboat today, in about 12 minutes – one of my speediest solves ever.
    “Mecs and nanas” are sort of generic casual French for “guys and girls” but the origin of “mec” is from “macquereau” meaning pimp, with “nanas” being prostitutes. Maybe Zola played a part in the origin or popularization of the term, I don’t know.
    Most of the clues I really liked: COD being BEDTIME STORY.
    A couple seemed a little tired. There’s a defect I have termed in my own mind “parallax” where the two indications are not sufficiently distinct. For example pan & ROAST both use the same metaphor of cooking. Similarly, OB+SERVANT is the obvious way to split the word into prefix+main part. There is no surprise or interest. It’s better if the two indications are as orthogonal as possible.
    Thanks to setter, blogger and commenters.

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