In Michael D. Sharp’s home office, among the shelves with thousands of vintage paperbacks protected by plastic covers and Simpsons toys in unopened boxes, few clues suggest that he sits as close as he does to the fault line between new and old media. Yet he does.
Each day Mr. Sharp, an assistant professor of English at the State University of New York at Binghamton, prints out the New York Times crossword puzzle from the paper’s Web site and solves it. Soon after, he blogs the experience in stream-of-consciousness paragraphs: where he got hung up, his feelings about the puzzle’s constructor, what emotions the word “ERNE” conjured today.
And people are reading.
Last month an average of more than 6,000 people read his blog every day, and they posted a total of more than 1,600 comments. He writes under a playful nom de plume, embedded in the blog’s title: “Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle.”
William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, has said he is a regular reader, as has Anne Meara (“Stiller’s comedy partner”). Will Shortz, the crossword-puzzle editor for the Times, confesses he checks the site twice a day, in addition to a Web site by another inveterate solver, Amy Reynaldo, who started a blog on crosswords in June 2005.
“I’m flattered that people think the New York Times puzzle is important enough and interesting enough to write about,” says Mr. Shortz. He says he reads the site to gauge solvers’ reactions, like an actor getting cues from the audience on what works and what doesn’t.
The vibrant community of crossword enthusiasts that has sprouted up around the blog adds flavor to those reactions.
A typical comment: “LIVEONTAPE is one of my favorite oxymorons.” Another: “Is anyone else getting a little tired of seeing Apple products being mentioned in puzzles so much?”
While there has been an annual crossword tournament since 1978, founded by Mr. Shortz, he says regular interaction among crossword fans is a byproduct of the Internet. Crossword blogs have led that change.
“When I started the job at the Times, in 1993, the feedback I got was by mail,” says Mr. Shortz. “Over the years, there’s been less mail. Almost all of the interesting feedback is now online.”
For Mr. Sharp, the blog was never meant to provide an outlet for criticism, or to be the meeting place for crossword devotees. It started as a lark, a beta test for a site he had hoped to start for a course on comics he teaches.
That course blog never materialized, but he has since come away with an avenue to regularly write on something he feels passionate about: crossword puzzles, which he says he loves because they put words in new contexts, forcing puzzle solvers to appreciate linguistic aesthetics.
“A puzzle is the most ephemeral thing out there,” says Mr. Sharp. “You do it, and it’s done — like eating candy. What the blog does is it doesn’t throw it away; it’s giving it its due.”
On September 25, 2006, Mr. Sharp wrote his first criticism of a puzzle, delivering modest props to clues like “Kitt who played Catwoman on ‘Batman’” (EARTHA) and “Pizazz” (ELAN). Three days later, he got his first reader response.
“Please do not comment on puzzles the day they are printed,” wrote the reader, using the online pseudonym grandpamike. “This blog is just a bad idea.”
Mr. Sharp slogged on, slowly accumulating readers who disagreed with grandpamike. That regular readership has also turned the site into something of a responsibility: If he has not posted and “it’s after 9 a.m., I get e-mails,” says Mr. Sharp. He does not get paid or have advertising on the site, although he says he would not be opposed to a little commercialism.
Since Mr. Sharp writes under a pseudonym, students in the courses he is teaching this semester on comics and 17th-century literature are not introduced to his online alter ego, “Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld.” Yet his growing readership has made him weary of his underground celebrity at crossword tournaments, including one that convenes at the end of this month.
In the 17 months since he began, Mr. Sharp says his blog has been without a daily post only once, while he was traveling after Christmas in 2006. When he went on vacation to Mexico last April, he coordinated guest bloggers to fill in for him.
“I found this blog while Googling for answers several months ago and have been a faithful fan ever since,” wrote one such guest blogger. That’s how many enthusiasts find their way to the site.
Less than an hour after publishing his post on the morning this reporter visited, 10 people had already found his blog by searching for the phrase “Charlotte hoopsters,” a 5-across clue for that day’s puzzle. (The answer, BOBCATS, is an NBA expansion team that has been around only since 2004.)
“Searchers wash over my site, and hopefully some of them stick,” says Mr. Sharp.
Many do, in part because of his élan. Mr. Sharp says his personal experiences with a puzzle generate the energy he needs to write the blog. As such, his posts are often a self-described “showcase for my ignorance,” a comfortable antithesis to the erudite formalities of academic writing.
“Objectivity in some way interferes with what I’m doing,” he says. “I don’t want to be self-indulgent and engage in navel-gazing, and pretend to write about something else but only be writing about myself. But I do think there is something compelling about a distinct, personal voice.”
When people finish a crossword puzzle, and bask in a sense of accomplishment, they often do so alone. But Mr. Sharp has helped alter that experience with his blog, and his instant responses to puzzles bring a sense of community to the pajama-clad pastime.
In the din of new and old media scraping together, crossword addicts hear a joyful noise.
http://chronicle.com Section: Notes From Academe Volume 54, Issue 24, Page A6