A couple of times a month when I have evening events in New
York City I choose to cadge a bed at my daughter’s apartment rather than trying
to return home late at night. I
can still get back to Princeton in the morning in time to be at the gym at its
6:30 opening if I catch a seriously early train out of Penn Station. It departs at 4:51 and seems to have a
pretty regular clientele well known to the conductors, judging from the level of
somnolent bonhomie displayed on all sides. The already sparse population of the cars as we leave New
York is halved again by the time we are pulling out of Newark Airport.
I
cannot sleep on trains. I have to
be reading—but there is reading and then there is reading. The book I
had with me for the trip up was the Life
of Moses by Gregory of Nyssa—a patristic text of considerable importance to
my current project on the literary origins of Christian asceticism, but perhaps
not exactly light fare. The
chances of engaging with it profitably in my pre-dawn daze were not good. I long ago learned that the proper
literary level for this milk train was one of the New York tabloids. As the Post is a quarter cheaper than the Daily News, I went for the
Post.
The
best part of the Post, as also of
some of the English tabloids of decades past, is the headlines, which often
exhibit a power of poetic concision to rival that of an Emily Dickinson. Nowadays at the cashier’s post in mercantile
establishments the various Hollywood and television fan tabloids tend to
monopolize the rack with a somewhat limited and long since hackneyed vocabulary
of scandal—“Cheatin’ Hearts”, “Love Child,” “Pants Down,” etc. Post
headlines often still have crackle.
There
are certain headlines one encounters in one’s daily rounds—such as “Avis
Important,” “Terms and Conditions,” “Statement of Limited Liability,” or “How
to Get the Most Out of Your New Suk-o-Vac”—apparently designed to quench any
desire to read any further. The
tabloid headline, when properly done, removes any need to read further.
In the good old days in the grocery stores any number of The News of the World alone could be
counted on for two or three typographical outrages. Two from my youth have stuck in my memory. The first—“Dead Mom Gives Birth to
Child in Coffin” practically made me gag right there in the check-out line, and
for several years I thought it must surely be the gold standard of the
journalistic grotesque. A second
actually induced me to buy a copy: “The Filth You Eat in Your Bread!” in at
least forty-eight point type. The
suggestive powers of a sentence fragment are often irresistible.
But
these days the New York Post seems
nearly alone in its noble mission.
Certainly I was richly reward by Wednesday’s edition. There was a squib headed “Spouses, you
post, you’re toast” devoted to the interesting sociological fact that in
England Facebook postings are now cited “in a third of all divorce cases”. More interesting still was the
following meta-headline: “We’re ‘head’line news!” On the off chance that you are not familiar with my curious use
of the Greek prefix meta, I should
explain that I take it from the gobbledygook of current literary critical
theory. The meta maximizes self-involvement. Indeed the meta is
to ideas what the “selfie” is to photography. You have perhaps read a novel about a novelist who is writing
a novel about a novelist who…etc.
Such
is the genre of the Post story. Its headline “We’re ‘head’line news!” actually introduces a celebration of another
headline. It’s a story from Down
Under. A young Australian
journalist, whose name is Nick Buttery and whose physiognomy and attitude remind one slightly
of Alfred E. Neuman, was forbidden by a security guard from entering the
Parliament House in Canberra—roughly the equivalent of the American Capitol—on
sartorial grounds. According to
the Post reporter, “The Department of
Parliamentary Services said Parliament forbids offensive messages on clothing
in the House.”
What
offensive message? Mr. Buttery was
at the time wearing a tee-shirt adorned with the classic Post headline: “Headless Body in Topless Bar”—a
headline that, according to several eminent scholars expert in the genre, may
be the greatest tabloid headline known to man. “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” nearly perfect in its
syntactic balance and grotesque juxtaposition, displays the peculiar elegance
of wit demonstrated in the titles of two memorable mid-nineteenth-century
novels by Emily Eden: The Semi-Detached
House and The Semi-Attached Couple. These too are worthy underground
classics, though incapable of generating a potential international incident.
According
to journalistic theory reporters are supposed to cover the story, not be the
story. Mr. Buttery’s own cover
defeated that sound principle, however, and his story, if not quite viral, has
proved to be at least amusingly contagious.
