#9 // I am all the way asleep. I am dreaming a dream.
9 // I am all the way asleep. I am dreaming a dream.
Hi everybody! I know this is the second edition of “Netflix and Phil” in a row that I’ve sent out prefaced with a “Sorry for the hiatus,” but, well, sorry for the hiatus. Anyway, the coming weeks will see something of a return to regular public writing for me, and I thought I ought to accompany that with a return to the old Tinyletter.
I’ll talk about that stuff in a minute, but before we get to all that TV, I want to talk about some books. Specifically: Jon Klassen’s “Hat Trilogy.” The first thing to say about the Hat Trilogy is that it is a trilogy of children’s picture books. In the first book—I Want My Hat Back (2011)—a bear who has lost his hat interrogates a variety of forest animals with regard to the hat’s whereabouts. In the second book—This is Not My Hat (2012)—a small fish steals a hat from a bigger fish and brags about it. In both books, the hat thief meets a bad end, off-stage. In third and final of those books—We Found a Hat (2016)—two turtles find a hat in the desert, but something very different happens, and it might be my favorite work of literature of the twenty-first century.
I have a daughter, and she’s eighteen months old. Reading with her has been an unusual affair, not for any particular reason, but just because the act of reading can mean a variety of things for a kid that young or younger. In the beginning, for instance, reading to her was as much about stimulating her tiny brain as it was about giving us something to do. For a three-month-old, all books were below her reading level, so when we’d go to the East Baton Rouge Parish Library, I’d pick the books I thought I’d like to read over and over again.
That’s when I encountered This is Not My Hat. Its illustrations are alternately spare and crowded, and the book unfolds in an almost cinematic, widescreen tracking shot, as we follow this fish swimming forward through the black ocean, telling us about how he’s stolen the tiny bowler hat perched on his head. At a certain point, we see the large fish from which he’s evidently stolen it sneak up, the two figures are obscured by seaweed, and the large fish emerges alone, wearing his hat again. It’s like an Edward Gorey story. It felt funny and bad to enjoy a story that grim. And it made me curious about the contemporary world of children’s books to know that a Caldecott medal had been awarded to a picture book that ends with its protagonist being murdered. Not judgey, just curious!
Eventually, I checked out the first book in the series, which ends in a similar fashion.
But my daughter is older now. We read books to her that she tells us she likes, and she picks books off the shelf and flips their pages on her own. She has preferences! I tried to get her to express interest in This is Not My Hat, but she wasn’t having it. (And this is a kid who frequently picks up academic monographs and carries them around like a briefcase full of unmarked bills—for a while I thought she might prefer the book jacket designer for the University of Chicago Press over Jon Klassen.) I was disappointed, but not surprised. She likes a lot of books, but her favorites are often busy in a Richard Scarryesque way. She likes to find things on re-read that she didn’t see before, or practice identifying animals from a spread of different types, or locate things she remembers are there, hidden in the densely packed illustrations. (One of her current favorites in this style—and a wonderful book in general—is Mary Hoffman and Ros Asquith’s Great Big Book of Families.) That said, she still loves Are You My Mother?, which shares a certain compositional similarity with the Hat Trilogy, so, when the third book came out, I bought it and thought we’d give it a try.
It’s probably just because she’s humoring me, but she seems like a fan, too.
Or maybe it’s because We Found a Hat tells a different kind of story. This one involves two turtles who find a preposterous ten-gallon hat in the desert. They both try it on and both agree that they both “look good in it.” They decide that if they can’t both have it, they should leave it alone. And so they do, but, as the turtles walk away to watch the sunset, it’s clear that one of them can’t get the hat out of his head. He waits, and as the other turtle falls asleep, he creeps away, presumably, to steal the hat and, if the other two books are any indication, probably murder his friend. But then an extraordinary interaction occurs. The creeping turtle asks his friend, “Are you all the way asleep?” The other turtle replies, lyrically, “I am all the way asleep. I am dreaming a dream.” This is the signal our nefarious turtle needs in order to pull of the heist, but then his friend begins to describe his dream.
“I am dreaming that I have a hat. It looks very good on me,” he says. “You are also there. You also have a hat. It looks very good on you too.”
“We both have hats?” the dreamer’s creeping friend asks. This revelation obviously moves him. He returns to sleep, leaving the hat alone. The book ends with a gorgeous two-page illustration of the turtles, both wearing hats, flying through space.
It’s bonkers. This is the end of a two-book con, getting us to believe the worst is always going to occur. It’s the animal kingdom. Everybody gets eaten. You want a hat, you have to kill somebody for it. I don’t know why my daughter likes it—I suspect it will become a different book for her once she can talk, and once she can understand a little more about the stakes, and once the subtle edges are something she can discover and identify like the cat she likes in The House in the Night . But the thing to love about this book, for me, and the reason to wade through the other murderous prequels, is that Klassen makes you believe things are bad, makes you expect individuals to behave at their worst, replicates and affirms the impending sense of doom that seems to float around everything. Characters are boastful cheaters, they tattle on strangers, they buckle before powerful foes, they are merciless in the pursuit of their property, they are consumed by it. And then we are rewarded with this tremendous moment of goodness and friendship and joy. It’s undeserved, but it’s there. And it seems impossible until it doesn’t.
I don’t know, maybe new fatherhood and the crumbling edifice of liberal democracy have conspired to make me even more of a sap than usual, but that book, man. Look at those turtles fly!
Finally Started // The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu)
We debuted a slightly revamped Dear Television line-up in order to cover Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale this Friday. Our first column featured Sarah Mesle and myself dealing with all the cruelty and (minimal) compassion and ice-cold music cues of the first three episodes. You should watch them and read along with us—Jane Hu and Aaron Bady take over the reins at the end of this week.
Flagging // Homeland (Showtime)
Go home, Homeland. You're drunk.
Finally Finished // Girls (HBO)
This week, I got back together with the Original Recipe Dear Television gang—Jane Hu and Lili Loofbourow—to write about the final episode of the first show we ever covered together: Girls. Writing with those funny funny people again was a treat, even if our text was a bit of a stinker. (If you have any archival desire to see where the three of us—and Evan Kindley!—started on this show, have at it here.)
Recommendations //
A lot of the pieces I work on for the LARB TV section have pretty long gestation periods, but Michael Newman’s Riverdale take came in fast and with a lot of energy, and I think it’s really fun.
Writing about Handmaid’s Tale has necessarily involved a fast education and difficult tangle with the various controversies that have risen up to greet it. In this internet melee, I want to single out two extraordinarily considered and incisive reads: Rachel Handler on the creators’ nonsensical feminist panic, and Soraya McDonald on the show’s alternately laudable and worrisome racial revisions. And Anne Helen Petersen’s essay on the show’s aesthetic choices is a must-read.
I might be biased because I’m her friend, but Lili Loofbourow is just sinking every shot at The Week. Here’s a link to her author archive—go nuts!
I’m only halfway through the first novel of the series—so please please don’t spoil anything for me—but N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season is mesmerizing.
I know I recommend a Jia Tolentino piece almost every newsletter, but it’s warranted: her essay on watching Girls for the first time this year is one of the best pieces of criticism I’ve read on the show. I obviously feel there's been a lot of great writing about this show, but I'm interested to see, over the next couple of years, what might be written—in academia and elsewhere—about Girls' reception history, especially online. Tolentino gets to some of what's so revealing about it.
I can recommend Josef Sorett’s Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics as both an academic monograph and a fairly accessible book for non-specialists interested in religion, race, and literature in the twentieth century. Judith Weisenfeld’s review in Public Books makes a few contemporary connections—specifically with regard to film—that push Sorett’s argument in cool ways.
My friend Edward McPherson has written a very funny and sad book about places in America that matter to him. It's out now, and part of it is excerpted here.
I was skeptical about the simplicity of this recipe, but this lamb burger—based loosely on April Bloomfield’s burger at the Breslin in NYC—is outstanding. I added a little minced rosemary to both the mayo and the burger itself, but holy smokes, look out.
I will tell you what I am dreaming about,
Phil.