Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock
Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2005. News item: Not now. “News item” is a decades-old method to prepare the reader for an essay or column, especially a humorous one, whose subject, or just an allusion used in it, may be borderline obscure. If it truly is obscure, we wouldn’t use it, would we? We writers, you see, are trying not to be patronizing, as in, “You idiot, if you had a decent education, just through high school even, and remembered a third of it, and you skim a newspaper a few times a week or see a newscast all the way through (OK to “mute” the commercials), you’d already know X, and I the writer wouldn’t risk killing the joke just to lead you by the hand through it.”
Online yesterday I saw an editorial cartoon about the unveiling of Watergate’s Deep Throat, in which the figure “Narcissus” is mentioned in a bubble of dialogue. Who these days recalls Narcissus. Some smart people I know, middle-aged and younger, wouldn’t remember. The more connected of those folks would try to figure it out: “narcissistic … oh, Narcissus must the root from Latin or something.” That’s good enough. It’s still striking that a working cartoonist today would make the reference when so many of us creators or our editors avoid mythological or classical references.
Over the weekend, in the Brick below, I faced a comparable dilemma: Do I spell out the “If a tree falls” rhetorical question, or assume that most or some of the Brick’s readers are familiar with it.
I worked myself over on this. It’s why some months I lay few Bricks, deciding how much to include, knowing full well that I either deflate a punch line (if it’s any good in the first place), or just anger readers who do know better.
I just sent out a freelance piece on the ivory-billed woodpecker. We’re all familiar with that around here because the scientifically confirmed sighting of the once-thought-extinct creature occurred in another part of Arkansas. Articles have appeared nationwide; The New York Times has run a good number over the summer. But the subject is obscure, details about this saga more vague. My “News item” ran almost 200 words. Those nine sentences are just a fifth of the essay, but “news item” prefaces in the S.J. Perelman style run only a paragraph. I sent in the piece, thinking that an editor would know better than me the audience’s overall knowledge and could whack it to size in seconds. More likely, an editor would reject my piece for the opener.
My decision in the Aug. 13 Brick was to include the original “tree falls” reference. The reason was that my twist on it did not follow the original closely so it might be missed by the casual or hurried reader. That’s right, no Mirthology/Loose Leaflet/Brick reader is stupid. We’re just distracted. -30-
