#11 // Never Alone on Earth
#11 // Never Alone On Earth
Happy new year! Ok, so, nominally, this is supposed to be a newsletter about TV. I mean, it’s also supposed to come out more frequently than once every six months. Much of the reason for the infrequency of Netflix and Phil this year is that I spent a lot of 2017 in and out of the weeds with my book (about early cinema and Jesus and assorted other things) which, hooooopefully, will be a thing in the world eventually. Anyway, back in May, I wrote this letter about one of Maeve’s children’s books that I really love, and it’s probably my favorite essay I wrote in 2017. At the end of this post, I’ll write quickly about some TV I liked, but, for this new-year missive that will, with any luck, be prelude to more and more frequent ones like it, I’m going back to Maeve’s library. If this newsletter is, in some sense, about pieces of culture that mean something to me, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the objects that meant most to me this year were my daughter’s books.
A few months ago, Maeve decided that she was interested in books for older kids. We had largely graduated from baby board books (Hippos Go Berserk), and we were firmly in the four-or-five-lines-per-page picture book (Otto the Book Bear) zone. But, more than that, we were edging into a place where her primary concern when we read a book was that it was new. We were in between library visits, I was getting a literal blister on my tongue from reading Horton Hears a Who over and over again (and also, frankly, getting pretty pissed off at how easily Dr. Seuss forgives those smug kangaroos for almost boiling an entire culture alive in beezle-nut oil—like, why is this an urgent issue for the kangaroos? If Horton is delusional, just leave him alone. Why use all that presumably valuable beezle-nut juice to destroy a speck of dust when your whole point is that there’s nothing on it? Those kangaroos suck, man), and Maeve pulled Adventures of Frog and Toad from her yellow Ikea bookcase. My friend Lara and her children had given the collection to us as a shower gift, and, assuming it was a little old for Maeve at the time, we’d kept it on a high shelf. But, because my daughter is very very tall indeed, she snagged it, and we read it.
I don’t remember reading Arnold Lobel’s stories of the friendship between a frog named Frog and a toad named Toad when I was a kid, but they seemed initially sort of familiar. It’s possible that’s because I did read them, or, rather, because, as my library scavenges of the past five months have shown, roughly 75% of early readers have pretty straightforwardly stolen Lobel’s style (or at least hijacked his influences). Houndsley and Catina, Pig and Goose, Fergus and Zeke, even Mo Willems’ much-lauded Elephant and Piggie (which I really really intensely dislike)—two forest friends having shaggy dog misadventures is apparently a thriving genre of children’s literature for the one-page-of-text-to-one-page-of-illustration ratio of kid attention span. Admittedly, Frog and Toad itself is a scaled-down reboot of The Wind in the Willows, echoing a lot of that book's sometimes melancholy tone and, at least, its revolutionary concept of forest critters wearing tailored suits. But, if you’ve encountered Frog and Toad, you know that these stories are special.
In one story, Toad tells Frog that he feels unhappy in the afternoon because he never gets any mail. Frog leaves and secretly writes Toad a letter, but, because he hands it to a random snail for delivery, it takes weeks to arrive. By that time, impatient, Frog had already told Toad about his kind deed.
In another, Toad loses a button from his coat and leads Frog on a wild goose chase around the woods looking for it. Every forest creature they meet seems to have mysteriously just found a button, but none are Toad’s. “The whole world is covered with buttons, and not one of them is mine!” Toad shrieks in frustration. Eventually, he realizes the button was just on the floor of his house. As an apology, Toad takes all the other buttons they found in the forest, sews them on his own coat, and then gives his coat to Frog. For some reason I can’t explain, Frog is thrilled to receive it.
In another, Toad makes a bunch of delicious cookies, and he and Frog can’t stop themselves from eating them. After a series of failed attempts at self-control, Frog simply gives away the rest of the cookies to some birds. Toad, undettered, leaves and makes a cake.
The stories are simple, silly almost to the point of being a little stupid, but the accumulated weight of their bumblings is unexpectedly moving. The stories negate themselves; each begins with the premise of an adventure, but the plot twist is invariably that nothing happens. What does happen, though, is that you begin to feel a crystalline sense of their friendship. Frog and Toad are friends. That's the deal. These stories could have been more sharply defined, could have had stronger punchlines, could have leveraged themselves toward an Aesopian moral, but they don’t. (One story that takes place in Toad’s dream just serves to emphasize how much all the stories operate with a sort of hazy dream logic.) It’s just a frog and a toad in tweed suits and let’s see what their day is like.
Maeve, because she’s very young for them, I think might actually see them this clearly. She requests stories based on their primary objects—“BUTTON!” “COOKIE!”—and she knows that they’re funny (“FUNNY!”). But, more than that, I think she just likes spending time with these guys. (“THESE GUYS!”) Discovering Frog and Toad not only upped the ante in terms of the kinds of books we were able to read to her (a future edition of this newsletter will almost certainly focus on the considerably-older-than-her scrapes and schemes of Ivy and Bean), but it also snapped her, for a while, from her primary interest in new books. She just likes being with Frog and Toad. I do, too. (For what it’s worth, that’s over now, but the Frog-and-Toad pause lasted a statistically significant amount of time.)
Part of the warmth and sentiment I feel toward these silly stories is maybe a result of my failed quest to get more of them. Assuming, because of their simplicity and canonical status, that we had only just begun staking out the Frog and Toad literary universe, I was dismayed to discover that we had actually already finished what paths there were to be walked. Arnold Lobel, as I soon learned, had a lot going on when he published the Frog and Toad stories in the mid-seventies. He had a wife and a daughter, but, around the same time Frog and Toad’s tales of intimacy and friendship were published, Lobel came out to his family. He died in 1987—after a prolific career and a protracted battle with AIDS—but he didn’t publish another Frog and Toad book again after 1979. It’s hard to read the almost impossible, aspirational simplicity of Frog and Toad’s loving affirmations of each other outside of this biographical context. (His daughter Adrianne has suggested as much in interviews.) Like a lot of classic children’s literature, it seems Frog and Toad emerged from a place of pain and hope both.
In the final story included in our anthology, entitled “Alone,” Toad arrives at Frog’s doorstep horrified to find a note that reads, “Dear Toad, I am not at home. I went out. I want to be alone.” Toad is seized by anxiety when he reads this note. And, alternately worried about Frog’s apparent depression and terrified that he may be the cause, Toad prepares a picnic lunch and convinces a turtle to swim him out to the rock in the middle of the pond where Frog has found solitude. As is his custom, Toad falls off the turtle into the pond, soaking the sandwiches and spilling the tea. He bemoans his dunderheadedness: “Frog, I am sorry for all the dumb things I do. I am sorry for all the silly things I say. Please be my friend again.” He points to the ruined lunch, and, with great disappointment, says, “I made it so that you would be happy.” Frog replies, shockingly: “But Toad, I am happy. I am very happy. This morning when I woke up I felt good because the sun was shining. I felt good because I was a frog. And I felt good because I have you for a friend. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to think about how fine everything is.” The story ends with Frog and Toad sitting on the island: “They ate wet sandwiches without iced tea. They were two close friends sitting alone together.”
Like Toad, there is something very silly about this story, but those surface details only serve to make Frog’s speech (and Toad's temporary panic) more powerful. Frog is proud to be who he is, and he's grateful for all the dumb and profound and ordinary things that make his relationship with Toad so real to us. I didn’t want the Frog and Toad stories to end, but this is exactly where they were always going, what they were always talking about, what they had to say.
It’s not the same thing, but, on a recent library visit, I checked out two books, both of which contained a line that resonates with the hazy, hopeful warmth of “Alone.” In one book, A Tea Party in the Woods by Akiko Miyakoshi, a girl meets a tea party of friendly forest animals on her way to her grandmother’s house. Her grandmother marvels that she made it there alone. “You’re never alone in the woods,” she says. In another book, Here We Are by Oliver Jeffers, a new father reassures his newborn child, “You’re never alone on Earth.”
Both of those statements can sound as menacing as they sound reassuring. It’s the art of both authors that neither land with too much foreboding. But, at the same time, both are about danger—specifically, environmental danger—averted. Frog and Toad’s world is a dangerous one, too, though the primary danger seems to be loneliness, invisibility. The books my daughter reads, I realize, are books about hoped-for worlds, and they are not as rosy or free from worry as I might have imagined before I started reading them to her. Toad is unhappy a lot of the time, the girl in the tea party book is afraid, and that newborn child—as well as everyone else on their planet—has legitimate cause for concern. But, this new year, despite how fine everything isn’t, and despite all the things worse than loneliness that threatened and continue to threaten our world, I read Maeve’s books, and I feel good because Maeve has Arnold Lobel for a friend.
***
Alright, so, back to TV...
A couple of years ago, Evan Kindley wrote an end-of-the-year questionnaire for Dear Television. I’ve condensed it quite a bit (I have long since answered that I prefer Ilana to Abbi), and, in lieu of an ordinary recommendations section, here is my year-end (abridged) Kindley TV Questionnaire:
What was your favorite show of 2017?
The Leftovers (HBO)
honorable mentions, in no particular order //
Alias Grace, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Insecure, Better Things, Big Little Lies
What was your favorite single-episode performance?
Sarah Gadon / “Part Five” (THE HYPNOTISM EPISODE!) / Alias Grace
honorable mention //
Celia Imrie / “Phil” / Better Things
What was your favorite sustained multi-episode performance?
Sterling K. Brown and Susan Kelechi Watson (“Randall and Beth Pearson”) / This is Us
[What I want is an interactive version of This is Us in which viewers can customize the levels of each of the four interconnected plotlines. My ratio would be 5% (tops!) shared by Kevin and Kate, 10% for flashback scenes explicitly set in Pittsburgh, 10% for Mandy Moore in old-age make-up doing whatever, and then 75% Randall and Beth.]
honorable mention //
Carrie Coon (“Nora Durst”) / The Leftovers
What was your favorite scene?
Midge’s first stand-up set / The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
honorable mention //
The diner scene in “Thanksgiving” / Master of None
What were your favorite non-Dear-TV pieces of TV criticism this year?
I loved Racquel Gates’ “What Snooki and Joseline Taught Me About Race, Motherhood, and Reality TV” (and not just because she wrote it for LARB); Kristen Warner’s “In the Time of Plastic Representation” is the sort of essay you (happily) realize is going to be in all your intro film/media anthologies for the rest of your life as you’re reading it; Angelica Jade Bastien on Mindhunter and toxic masculinity; Ryu Spaeth on Mind of a Chef; Lili Loofbourow’s “Myth of the Male Bumbler”; and Anne Helen Petersen on The Handmaid’s Tale. It wasn’t about TV, per se, but you should read Lauren Michele Jackson on digital blackface if you haven’t yet. Finally, for its TV writing but also for everything else, do yourself a favor and bookmark Real Life in the new year.
What filmmaker do you most want to see get into TV in 2018?
I would like Mike Mills and Miranda July (who are partners) to collaborate on a TV series about parenting a young child.
What film actor do you most want to see get into TV in 2018?
I know Olympia Dukakis was in Tales of the City, but I’d like John Patrick Shanley to write a six-episode miniseries that’s just about her character from Moonstruck thirty years later. So, Olympia Dukakis, come back.
What novel should be adapted for TV in 2018?
My answer, until somebody does it, is Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. (If Sarah Polley and Mary Harron are looking for a new project...)
***
The whole world is covered with buttons,
Phil.