Texter's "shrug" / TUE 6-10-25 / Model train track standard / Georges who wrote "Life: A User's Manual" / 2016 subject that dominated U.K. newspapers / Steak ___ (dish flambéed tableside) / Common name for NaOH

Constructor: Zachary David Levy

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium 

THEME: "GOOD CALL!" (38A: "You predicted that correctly" ... or what the ends of 18-, 24-, 48- and 57-Across will yield) — a cellphone puzzle—the ends of the theme answers are you need to make a (good) phone call:

Theme answers:

• KARAOKE BARS (18A: Places where nonprofessionals sing)
• STREAMING SERVICE (24A: Netflix or Hulu)
• WEDDING RECEPTION (48A: Occasion for toasts)
• MIXED SIGNAL (57A: Nodding yes while saying no, e.g.) 

Word of the Day: Georges PEREC (13D: Georges who wrote "Life: A User's Manual") —

Georges Perec (French: [ʒɔʁʒ peʁɛk]; 7 March 1936 – 3 March 1982) was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was killed in the Holocaust. Many of his works deal with absence, loss, and identity, often through word play. [...] Perec is noted for his constrained writing. His 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written with natural sentence structure and correct grammar, but using only words that do not contain the letter "e". It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994). His novella Les revenentes (1972) is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter "e" is the only vowel used. This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelt Revenantes. An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three. It has been remarked by Jacques Roubaud that these two novels draw words from two disjoint sets of the French language, and that a third novel would be possible, made from the words not used so far (those containing both "e" and a vowel other than "e"). // W ou le souvenir d'enfance, (W, or the Memory of Childhood, 1975) is a semi-autobiographical work that is hard to classify. Two alternating narratives make up the volume: The first is a fictional outline of a remote island country called "W", which at first appears to be a utopian society modelled on the Olympic ideal but is gradually exposed as a horrifying, totalitarian prison much like a concentration camp. The second is a description of Perec's childhood during and after World War II. Both narratives converge towards the end, highlighting the common theme of the Holocaust. // "Cantatrix sopranica L. Scientific Papers" is a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the "yelling reaction" provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes; e.g., "(Karybb & Szyla, 1973)" [ed: I think that's a play on "Scylla & Charybdis," but I'm not sure]. (wikipedia)

 Life: A User's Manual (original title La Vie mode d'emploi) is Georges Perec's most famous novel, published in 1978, first translated into English by David Bellos in 1987. Its title page describes it as "novels", in the plural, the reasons for which become apparent on reading. Some critics have cited the work as an example of postmodern fiction, but Perec preferred to avoid labels and his only long-term affiliation with any movement was with the Oulipo or OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle.

La Vie mode d'emploi features many interwoven stories and ideas as well as literary and historical allusions. It is based on the lives of the inhabitants of a fictitious Parisian apartment block, 11 rue Simon-Crubellier. It was written according to a complex plan of writing constraints, and is primarily constructed from several elements, each adding a layer of complexity. (wikipedia)

• • •

The theme holds together, but barely. BARS *indicate* a SIGNAL (i.e. RECEPTION, SERVICE), they aren't the SIGNAL itself. But I think the equivalency is close enough. Some of these answers (e.g. KARAOKE BARS) really change the meaning of the last word, i.e. take it into non-phone territory; but STREAMING SERVICE doesn't do this nearly as strongly. The best themers, with this type of theme, are going to radically recontextualize the thematic part of the answer, and STREAMING SERVICE keeps us too close to the whole "phone" context (in the people definitely stream those apps (Netflix, Hulu) on their phones. But this too is kind of a minor issue. The only major issue for me today, theme-wise, was MIXED SIGNAL, specifically its singularity??? The phrase is "MIXED SIGNALS." Plural. Always plural. You cannot mix a single thing. MIXED NUT? Who ever heard of that? Sure, there's MIXED BAG, but in that case, you aren't mixing multiple bags, you're mixing the contents of the bag, whereas MIXED SIGNALS always involves signals, plural. The clue itself contains multiple signals (plural!)—nodding yes + saying no. The fact that those actions are happening simultaneously doesn't make them any less two discrete signals (plural!). Hard wince at MIXED SIGNAL. But otherwise, I thought the theme was fine.

The fill, however, felt less fine. It's weird the kind of hard "nope" reaction whenever I see LEONA Lewis (especially hot on the heels of NIA Long). LEONA is not just crosswordese, it's like a harbinger of crosswordese to come. I feel like she had a moment of fame that's now about 15-20 years old (huge debut album in '07, but no albums at all since '15), but while her fame was not sustained, her crossword fame will not die. I don't think she's bad fill, but let's just say that when the puzzle hit me with stuff like O-GAUGE and PEREC (and ERROL and ARA and ENOS and TONYA etc.) immediately after LEONA, well, I wasn't *that* surprised. Much (much much) more obscure today is PEREC. I've seen PEREC dozens of times over the years, but most of those dozens were dozens of years ago, when puzzles were harder to fill (i.e. Before Software) and terminal-C five-letter words were harder to navigate. Puzzle people (some puzzle people, that is) have a thing for PEREC because of the whole wordplay element of his work (see "Word of the Day," above). I was surprised to find (just now) that his name didn't debut in the NYTXW until 2001, nearly two decades after he died. If he were that big, you'd think Weng or Maleska-era puzzles would've snatched him up. Today is PEREC's 12th appearance, with nine of those appearances coming before 2015, so if you haven't seen him before (particularly if you're new to crosswords or on the younger side or both), I'm not that surprised. I don't think he's an early-week answer at all. He's just not that famous. LEONA Lewis looks like Taylor Swift next to Georges PEREC. This is only the second time PEREC has appeared on Tuesday. He debuted on a Friday, in a puzzle by the notoriously brutal (complimentary) Bob Klahn. Anyway, by the time I got to the bottom of the grid and encountered FLAM, EENIE, TEHEE, etc. I felt like the LEONA Prophecy had been fulfilled. Despite the snazzy "Z"s, the grid really leaned sludgeward.

Still, it was definitely Tuesday-easy, overall, for me. The hardest part was the SW, where a series of errors held me up for a bit. The most insane of those errors was writing in BIG DIG instead of BREXIT (46D: 2016 subject that dominated U.K. newspapers). So many things had to happen for me to make that (again, insane) error, the first of which is that I had to write in "LEGGO!" instead of "LET GO!" at 66A: "Unhand me!". That gave me an -IG at the end of the answer. Since I took ZOO ANIMAL down to LEGGO, I didn't yet have either of the last two themers, either of which would've prevented me from making my admittedly insane mistake. What was I thinking with BIG DIG?! (which I think was the name for Boston's extremely long infrastructure project... yes: 25 years!). Well, what I was thinking was a movie I saw a few years back on Netflix about an archaeological dig ... maybe it was called THE DIG (??). It was! And it was about the excavation at Sutton Hoo (a hugely important archaeological moment for Anglo-Saxon historians). Only ... the excavation of Sutton Hoo took place ca. 1939, not 2016, so, again, insanity that I just went ahead with BIG DIG. More insanity that the "B" ended up checking out! Seems like the "B" should've led me into the mistake, but no—the "B" only hardened my preexisting mistake. Sigh. Other mistakes down there included "GOT ME!?" for "GOT IT!?" (38D: "Catch my drift?") and SNOW TIRE for REAR TIRE (54A: It helps give a car traction). How does a REAR TIRE help give a car traction any more than a front tire does? Aren't most cars front-wheel drive now (if not all-wheel drive)? That REAR TIRE clue was ... not helpful.


Bullets:

• 15A: Steak ___ (dish flambéed tableside) (DIANE) — like LEONA Lewis, Georges PEREC, and rear-wheel drive cars, this answer feels like it's from another era. Like ... from a restaurant in a movie from the 1930s. Aha,  yes! I was close. Off by a decade, but ...

Steak Diane is a dish of pan-fried beefsteak with a sauce made from the seasoned pan juices. It was originally cooked tableside and sometimes flambéed. It was most likely invented in London in the 1930s. From the 1940s through the 1960s it was a standard dish in "Continental cuisine", and is now considered retro. (wikipedia) [my emphasis]

 

• 1A: Info acquired by scouts (INTEL) — so just ... [Info], then. Scouts? I guess. But I was looking for something much more sports-specific. Like ... STATS or something.
• 33A: Was verklempt (PLOTZED) — did not know these were synonyms. I think of being verklempt as merely tearing up or getting choked up, whereas I think of plotzing as more ... dramatic. Being overwhelmed. Literally, it means "keeling over."
• 1D: Texter's "shrug" (IDK) — stands for "I don't know. Pretty common. And yet my fingers still typed in SMH. Why? IDK!!! Force of habit. Shrugging My sHoulders?? 

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]