And now, I present the strangest, most convoluted post I have ever authored at YeahRight…
We are approaching the 100th birthday of the late author P.D. Eastman, whose work I have recently begun to revisit with a certain 2 year-old that I’m close to. Probably, many of you fondly remember Eastman's Are You My Mother? But today, I write in praise of his book, Go, Dog. Go!
It’s the simplest of books, starting with a drawing and a single word: “Dog.” Then you get adjectives, and then you get practice with your prepositional phrases (“A dog in a house on a boat in the water”). Along the way, you’ve got an intriguing series a conversations between two dogs about one’s hats. And the Wikipedia entry on Go, Dog. Go! notes some clever little peculiarities that are fascinating to the two-year old connoisseur.
But what impresses me most about Go, Dog. Go! is the pacing of the story. The only thing that I can compare it to is an amazing Danish film from 1955 by Carl Dreyer, called Ordet (“The Word”). I had to watch Ordet in a pretentious "History of Film" class in my college days, and most of the films in the curriculum were barely watchable arty garbage. Ordet was different, and for once, I bought into the professor’s pitch. If I remember correct, the movie is shot essentially like a play. Super-long camera shots, from a perspective outside the movement of the characters but drifting around strangely. But at the end -- when the pace of the plot suddenly escalates and leading up to a religious miracle that occurs after two hours of dry realism -- Dreyer suddenly changes his technique. The effect is really moving. The two hours of slow pace make it so that basic shot-countershot cuts (in which the camera is now showing you what its like to see out the eyes of one of the characters in the film) are startling exciting.
So back to Go, Dog. Go! After about 50 pages of “Here is a dog over a tree. Here is a dog under a house,” the last few pages break the rhythm in a shocking way. The reader is suddenly being asked questions – “Why are the dogs going fast in those cars? Where are they all going?” Where there was no plot at all, you’ve suddenly got a mystery. I love the simple declarative writing as it approaches the end: “Now the cars stop. Now all the dogs get out. And now look where those dogs are going! To the tree! To the tree!”
And why are all the dogs going to the top of the tree?? Behold. It is a dog party. A great big dog party. And no matter how many times we read it, it’s exciting to see everything that’s going on at that wild dog party. An incredibly satisfying book. Kudos, Mr. Eastman. Kudos to you.
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