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P.D. Eastman started in animation, working initially at the Walt Disney Studios before going into the army and working in the Signal Corps film unit which was being headed up by Theodor Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, before he was also known as Dr. Seuss).

After the army, Eastman worked for a while at the UPA, a design-forward group of massively talented, independent-minded animators and artists. One of the films he worked on there was the Academy Award-winning Gerald McBoingBoing, which was adapted from a story by, again, Theodor Geisel. The stylistic influence of the work done at the UPA, which also included Mr. Magoo among other things (my favorite film from them is The Unicorn In The Garden, though it’s a tight race with The Telltale Heart) is hard to overstate. Their application and distillation of modern graphics and art basically defined the look of a lot of children’s television and film for many years after, and was rediscovered by the people who ushered in the golden age of Cartoon Network decades after that.

Eastman worked at these early studios as a writer, storyboarder, and stylist. When Theodor Geisel co-founded the Beginner Books imprint in the late 50s, which would eventually comprise well over a hundred books, Eastman’s Sam and The Firefly, the first book he wrote himself, was the sixth one they published. His second book for them was Are You My Mother?, and his third was Go, Dog. Go! — a hell of a run.

Those first two books (we will deal with each of them another day), you could argue, are structured a little more like paged-out versions of short films — which is understandable, given Eastman’s background. But Go, Dog. Go! does not behave like a film. As we’ll see, it doesn’t really behave like anything else that came before or since.

It might be easy to overlook a book like Go, Dog. Go! It is, in a lot of ways, an unassuming-looking thing, and ubiquitous now. But we don’t think any book sticks around this hard for no reason, so today we are going to dig down on why it has established itself as the quiet force that it has.

Mac and I had this conversation over text.
—JON

MAC: Hi, Jon.

JON: Hi Mac.

MAC: I used the comma (vocative comma!) this time because I was surprised to see how well punctuated the title of Go, Dog. Go! is. For a chaotic book, it's a very orderly title.

JON: See I think it IS chaotic.

MAC: Grammatically speaking.

JON: “Go, Dog.”? And then “Go!”? Why not at least “Go, Dog! Go!”?

MAC: Well maybe that’s just it: it balances the wild (dogs going) with the orderly (Fowler-level grammar). And really that’s the big question of this book, right? Go, Dog. Go! is mostly a series of unlinked, action-packed, absurd vignettes that come in rapid succession. How the heck does this thing hold together?

When I did events with Jon Scieszka and kids would ask him what his favorite book is, he would always say: “Go, Dog. Go! It’s about a bunch of dogs who drive around in cars and have a party in a tree.”

I don’t know if we’re going to do better than that, but we can certainly be longer than that, so get ready for thousands of words on a book that is like 70 words long.

Before we get into things, can we start with a category question?
(Half the readers close this browser tab.)

JON: (Watching the algorithm crash.) Yeah go for it.

MAC: So Go, Dog. Go! is a specific kind of book, an “early reader.” And there are some people who don't believe early readers are picture books, that they’re a different form. Before we get into the characteristics of early readers, I guess, Jon, do you think early readers are picture books?

JON: Yes, yes I do.

MAC: Yeah me too.

Not everyone does though! Carson Ellis for instance, threatened to flame our comments section if we ever did Frog and Toad because she doesn’t believe those are picture books.

JON: Oh wow.

MAC: Yeah. So we can all look forward to that.

JON: Hi Carson!!

MAC: Thanks for being a paid subscriber!

OK so let’s talk about early readers.

The big difference is that, unlike most picture books, readers are designed to be read by kids. Picture books, generally, are read by adults to kids.

Since these are meant to be the first books children read independently, they have simple words and often very clear syntax.

For a long time the standard easy readers were the Dick and Jane books. Very easy to read, and also very boring.

So the language there is really simple. So simple that it sounds stilted and unlike both human speech and belletristic prose.

But! There is a dynamic and kind of interesting interplay of text and image in these books.

A lot of the storytelling takes place in the pictures. On the right hand page of the spread up there, Dick is doing some interesting stuff — he's on roller skates, being pulled by a dog — you can see why the narrator really wants us to “look” and “see,” to the point of repeating those words to the exclusion of all other words.

I guess I’m saying the picture is kind of fun and adds to the story!

Not to be too stingy, but I get the feeling that this interplay between text and image isn’t so much the result of a brilliant storytelling mind as it is the consequence of a text that says almost nothing. Writing this bad puts a lot of pressure on the pictures! I mean look at this:

But these primers were the standard way to learn how to read. By the early 1950s, it’s estimated that 80% of American first graders had read the Dick and Jane books.

And then in 1957 Dr. Seuss comes in and pretty much single-handedly destroys the entire Dick and Jane publishing empire with The Cat in the Hat.

In The Cat in the Hat, Seuss takes a short list of easy-to-read words and creates a complex narrative.

But in The Cat and the Hat, the pictures do much less storytelling than in a typical picture book. The miracle in these books is how rich the prose is, despite being so simple. Often there’s some redundancy between the text and illustration, which normally you’d try to avoid. In the above spread, the text is a list of the things the cat is balancing (including a dismayed fish, who has been established as being a bit of a dud). The picture is just a depiction of all those objects. But this is useful in a primer, because the kids can use the pictures to help them decode the text.

In the 1980s Seuss said The Cat in the Hat “is the book I’m proudest of because it had something to do with the death of the Dick and Jane primers.”

The Cat in the Hat was so popular that it spawned Beginner Books, an imprint devoted to early readers. Seuss ran Beginner Books with an editor at Random House, Phyllis Cerf, and the goal was to publish books that not only taught reader, but were actually enjoyable to read. Go, Dog. Go! was one of these books.

In many ways, the text of Go, Dog. Go! actually works more like a Dick and Jane book than The Cat in the Hat. The language is spare, and the pictures do a lot of the lifting. But unlike Dick and Jane, this book is good.

The first page of Go, Dog. Go! is just one word. “Dog.”

In some ways, this is an age-old way to start a primer — the word “dog” with a picture of a dog. But look at what we learn from the illustration.

In this world, dogs can roller skate, and they wear hats. (But they also still wear collars with tags.)

JON: Also, “Dog.” isn’t really a sentence. So we know we might not have a book that deals in normal sentences. And indeed we don’t.

MAC: And now we know that we aren’t really dealing with a story. Our roller skating dog, who had a lot of charisma, is gone. That was not our protagonist. Now we have a “big dog” and a “little dog.”

JON: A very big dog, and a very little dog. Impossibly big and little, relatively speaking.

Besides the unreal bigness and littleness of them (an idea which, curiously, Eastman never goes back to for the rest of the book. All the dogs we’ll meet from here on out are more or less proportional), this spread demonstrates something that makes this book so enduring.

So much of my memory of this book, and my continued interest now, is how the empty spaces feel around everything — they feel like actual empty space. I felt like I could run for miles in any direction if I ever broke into this book. It is exhilarating. But lots of picture books use negative space this way, so why does THIS book feel especially like you are wandering around in this giant dream-void?

Well, Eastman is very, very good at drawing. He has a way of hiding it in how simple and straightforward his characters and places look, but he is. He boils things down, never getting too stylish or too rendered, but everything he draws has weight and is correct in its way. The way he’s drawn things here, the minimal shading, the (actually pretty sophisticated) perspective, even the line weight, is all making these dogs feel like they have weight, that there really is a big dog and a little dog sitting in this space (picture for instance, Eric Carle doing this image, and it wouldn’t have the same effect, because of how graphic his work was — he wasn’t in the business of making you feel like anything was really sitting there).

Surrealism, often, uses familiar or iconic objects or locations recontextualized in impossible ways. Part of what made Dali or Magritte’s images arresting was that they knew how to render things so well — they could really DRAW. A melting clock or a train coming out of a wall isn’t THAT interesting an idea until you render it with correct shading and shadows to convince the eye that it’s actually happening.

Another form that deals with simple, iconic objects (and words) is the early reader. You could describe the Magritte painting above like you were writing a Dick and Jane book.

See the room.

See the fireplace.

See the clock on top of the fireplace.

See the train.

The train is coming out of the fireplace.

That’s basically what my brain is doing when it looks at that image. It’s collecting the symbols and combining them in an unexpected way. It suits the way you write for very young readers.

Big Dog. Little Dog.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Dr. Seuss’s imagery has a lot in common with how Dali or Escher paintings feel. And Eastman’s voids, in this book anyway, feel like a dream. These guys were interested in surrealism. The connection between books meant for very early readers and surrealism is there to be made, but they were some of the first ones to make it.

MAC: Before we move on, this spread also introduces another trick Eastman will use throughout the book to deepen the story and hold the readers attention: the dogs have very expressive faces, which Eastman uses to suggest rich relationships.

Look at that big dog — so imperious. And that little dog — meek, maybe put out, struggling to pull the cart.

There’s a compelling dynamic between these dogs, a power imbalance (reinforced by the big dog’s tasseled pillow). There’s some long backstory, which we never learn. But these dogs have a life outside of this picture.

And their relationship imbues the very simple text with more meaning. The words “big” and “little” are now freighted with the emotional dynamic we see on this page.

This emotional stuff really comes into play a couple pages later:

JON: These guys come out of nowhere. And there is so much going on immediately.

MAC: I mean, let’s take it moment by moment.

JON: Hahahaha. Ok.

MAC: They greet each other, they're both so happy.

JON: Exclamation marks everywhere etc.

MAC: It seems like this is going to go very well. And that momentum carries us into the next spot, on the upper-right hand side of the spread:

The poodle, so proud of her hat and I think quite reasonably expecting that everyone will like it, and especially that this yellow dog will like it, since he has already seen the hat in the previous illustration and, again, seemed very excited to see her, asks: “Do you like my hat?”

And she runs into a brick wall.

Kind of literally, the way this spot and text are laid out.

You read her line, which is set right above her. It’s actually placed sort of wonkily, starting well to the the left of her, which draws your eye far away from the yellow dog, preserving the surprise of his reaction. The line ends right in front of the yellow dog’s face, and you take in his expression and pose before you read his reply, which is placed behind him.

JON: Yeah. He’s like, upset already. By the hat.

MAC: He is so upset.

JON: 5 seconds ago he was fine. And he could SEE the hat from there!!

MAC: He clocked the hat.

JON: Now he’s pissed.

MAC: And then —

He is fine again!

JON: God this relationship messed me up so badly.

She is drawn perfectly on that last beat, also. She’s pissed now.

MAC: Understandably!

This encounter is so mysterious. Do these dogs know each other? Why doesn’t he like her hat? Why, also, does he tell her that he doesn’t like her hat, and in such a snooty and emotional way? And then why is he suddenly so carefree when he trots off?

We’re left to fill in the blanks, to imagine these characters’ backstories. Again, the dogs’ emotions here give weight to this whole absurd and fantastical world (dogs wearing hats, walking on two legs, pink dogs, yellow dogs). The ambiguity makes the encounter feel real. This is what it’s like to watch people interact on the sidewalk — we get a glimpse into their lives, but we don’t fully understand what’s going on with them. This is especially what it’s like to watch adults interact when you’re a kid — grown-ups are always smiling, then fighting, then laughing, and you never quite know why.

JON: It feels real because we don’t totally understand it. It’s an amazing trick. Another thing this does is give potential complexity to ALL of the dogs we've seen and will see. After this page, we assume — at least I always did — that all the dogs in the book had this kind of stuff going on. They weren’t all friends, they weren’t all being sunny to each other, they didn’t all understand each other. And there is a lot of evidence to support this as we move through the book.

MAC: The risk of this kind of ambiguity in picture books is that the encounter can feel random or inexplicable. But this one feels grounded and motivated — we just don’t know enough to fully understand what’s going on. So it gives us something to mull throughout. This is a lot of the fun of the book: wondering what the hell these dogs are doing.

JON: So now, to sum up: the void spaces feel “real” because of how well Eastman can draw, and the dogs are, in a weird way, “real” because we just watched two of them have a kind of opaque but emotionally authentic conversation.

MAC: Yup.

JON: And then we snap out of that whole thing, into this nightmare:

Again, very simple text. Early reader text. But there is so much going on. The red dogs are truly messed up. Besides the expression on their faces, I was always really preoccupied with the fact that they are taller than the hedges. They can see over the maze. Why are they walking out like they were lost???

They are feeling their way like they can’t see anything at all!!

MAC: See, I have a different read of their expressions. That little blue poodle is so eager and excited to enter the maze. And then the three red dogs exiting look like they have seen something truly awful in there.

JON: Yes.

MAC: So you get this gap — even the way the text is laid out. “One little dog going in.” Huge white space crossing the gutter. “Three big dogs going out.”

And you add the picture and it’s a ghost story.

What did they see in that maze???

JON: I used to stare at this maze. It’s so beautiful with the white floor. Looking at it now, how he’s shaded the different sides of it — again, very simple mark-making, but it works. It’s so solid. AND he has chosen an angle here that lets this maze go off into infinity in our minds. If he’d chosen a lower angle again, and let the maze head off on the page towards a visible horizon, it wouldn’t work as well. Here we just imagine the horror of the size of this thing above the top of the page.

MAC: I just want to echo that I also spent a long time thinking about this spread as a kid. And what we’re doing now (and what we do a lot at Looking at Picture Books, I guess) is trying to put into language the very immediate response this book engendered in us. And a big part of this book’s appeal is how suggestive it is of other stories, how it demands that you imagine what’s in the upper part of that maze, up above where the page stops.

And I don’t mean this as an intellectual exercise. I really wondered what was up there as kid! The dogs’ expressions demand interpretation — we’re just so primed, as humans, to respond to these dogs’ faces.

Like when the dogs get into cars — and obviously dogs driving cars is a big part of the fun of this book (though the dogs don’t spend all that much time in cars) — my main interest isn’t the zooming. It’s all the intense interpersonal stuff going on with these dogs.

JON: Yeah. All is not well in this dog void world. And we leave them in their conflicts and fights, they’re not solved. It’s just the way things are.

MAC: A car crash and argument — totally unaddressed by the text. And two distinct personalities immediately established: the hotheaded little dog and the laconic big dog, who still seems like he might be ten seconds from casually walloping the yellow guy.

And what is going on with this situation:

These guys are also wondering what is going on with the previous situation:

JON: They seem basically on the same page at least.

MAC: And also, this is an underrated dog:

JON: I don't like him.

I don’t like how he’s honking and how coordinated he is.

EVERYTHING yellow? Come on. Live a little.

MAC: That is what you look like to me right now:

JON: I wish I was as confident as that guy.

But this IS involvement too, for the kid. This kind of uniformity, and variation inside the uniformity. All the dogs in their cars, all wearing stuff, you start to pick your favorites, and ones that rub you the wrong way. You get involved! Which to a certain extent is all a storyteller can hope to do to their audience! They don’t have to LIKE your thing, but you can at least get them working for you.

MAC: All these intense micro-stories really come into play on the Ferris wheel spread.

JON: That one bucket. The jerk bucket.

JON: Yelling at the operator to go around again, like they weren’t going to anyway, and he’s MAD about it? Like he’s making fun of the guy for having a job?? And his bucket-mate, sneering down at basically the nicest dog in the world.

MAC: The expression on that green dog. Just looking up adoringly at his tormentor. Two seconds from being spat on. Or having a scorpion dropped into his bucket.

JON: Some kind of navy initiation stuff.

MAC: What is going on with the bottommost bucket? The pathetic single rider doffing his cap. To nobody.

JON: What a dweeb.

HE needs to be under the jerk bucket for a couple spins. Take him down a few pegs.

MAC: The operator is a chiller.

JON: He’s seen it all.

MAC: Real carnie stuff. Dog carnies.

JON: Jerk buckets don’t affect him. He’s onto the next town! He doesn’t care about nobody.

MAC: It’s such a great visual idea too — all that motion, and then the dog completely still, ignoring everyone. The whole thing is so redolent of a time long past — model planes, yo-yos, sailors spitting on you. The chance that you could pressure a carnie into giving you an extra spin on the Ferris wheel. Those were the days.

JON: We used to have a country.

MAC: I assume you’re talking about Canada.

JON: Sure.

MAC: OK but also: The hat-having dogs come back!

They enter on scooters. She seems sure that he is going to love this hat. And from his expression, again, she has every reason to think he does. But he doesn’t. Do we have any clue as to why? The yellow dog now has a hat of his own. A bowler, like you might expect a London banker to wear. And he has a red cane. On a scooter. It’s a real pile-up of signifiers.

JON: And also, you know, with the first interaction, you’d believe she just had a hat on and was excited about it. Now, though... she’s trying for him. It’s a bigger hat. There’s a feather. She left the house hoping he’d see it.

MAC: Well, he sees the feather all right.

JON: UnbeliEVABLE what happens with the feather. What a maniac!!

MAC: His expression is wild here. The last time he exited, he was pretty chipper. Now look at him.

JON: Maybe it’s supposed to be like Clockwork Orange.

Just senseless violence.

MAC: Big Kubrick day on Looking at Picture Books.
Her reaction is different too — last time she seemed wounded, now she just seems disgusted. The relationship is settling into genuine antipathy.

Which is good, I am happy for her. This feels like progress.

JON: I want to re-state your point from earlier here, about how these micro-interactions are fun (and very funny to everyone, I’m sure) and also how they are a big part of what makes this book work — but I’d add that this is what makes being an illustrator kind of terrifying, also. You remember looking at stuff this hard, and taking any hint of expression and running with it. A stray line under an eye is a totally different feeling. The stakes could not be higher. It’s no wonder none of my own characters almost ever visibly look like they're feeling anything. I know what happens when you start with that. You get Go Dog. Go!

MAC: Eastman must know he’s got something special here, with these two dogs, because they are secretly the structural backbone of this book. The whole book feels like a bunch of rapid cuts between scenes. So far, every spread has been a new setting with new dogs. This is the first time we see characters and a dynamic we know, and I think the reader, subconsciously, is desperate for it. We have a story. The hat dogs make four appearances in the book. They show up again five spreads later. It doesn’t go great.

JON: It’s so cool too, how the scenes between them are identical, but just by virtue of showing it happening again, you realize that now it’s got to go SOMEWHERE.

MAC: Yeah, the text is repeated almost verbatim. His replies change slightly: “I do not.” “I do not like it.” And, on time number three, “I do not like that hat.” Which feels particularly pointed.

JON: If he’d only showed it happening once, it would’ve washed away with everything else. But now, when he shows it again, you’re hooked.

MAC: But his expression feels maybe a little softer here? Like he is a little bummed that he doesn't like the hat? On the exit, he’s back to happy and carefree. And he has not, to my knowledge, stolen from her this time. She’s just pretty annoyed with him.

Jon, I feel like twice a year you post this picture to Instagram and write something like “this is what my soul looks like.”

Anything else you want to say?

JON: I want to say that this is the kind of party I always wanted to be at, instead of the high school parties in a hydro field with beers I didn’t like the taste of, wondering how I was going to get home.

MAC: As you doff your cap to nobody in a dark corner of the field…

JON: “What is Jon doing?” “Who cares.” “Go around again!”

MAC: Night falls twice in this book, very suddenly. Instead of a tidy Aristotelian unity of time, taking place over a busy day and ending at night, with dogs going to bed, this book unfolds like a vacation you win on The Price Is Right: “two nights, three days!”

There’s this incredible moment where the book gets so still, and feels like it’s wrapping up on the second night, which he introduces by once again saying: “Now it is night.” And the text here feels like it is trying to contain the explosive energy and action of the book. It is almost scolding: “Night is not a time for play. It is a time for sleep. The dogs go to sleep. They will sleep all night.”

JON: I always looked for that dog in the following morning spread, looking for a dog who looked like he hadn’t gotten any sleep. I never found him.

MAC: Even the sleeping dogs are very chaotic: the dog sleeping on the headboard, the two dogs sleeping under the bed, one a back sleeper, one a stomach sleeper. The dog curled up on the floor. These dogs are irrepressible!

Jon, is this a “real” dog? Or a stuffed animal?

JON: Oh gross. I think it’s stuffed.

MAC:

But this spread, the dogs sleeping, would be an obvious place to end the book.

JON: If you weren’t making the most chaotic book.

MAC: Wrap up with the characters going to sleep, make the parents grateful, cash the royalty checks. But turn the page —

JON: Page 51.

MAC: Of 64.

JON: WAKE UP.

MAC: DAY 3.

This spread begins 14 pages of sustained, linear story. So while on one hand these dogs waking up is the most chaotic choice Eastman could make, he also settles into an endgame.

“Settles.”

But Eastman is very deliberately building to something now (and thus far he has refused to build anything in this book, besides a dysfunctional relationship between two dogs who like hats). He starts in with the questions, which push us to turn the page and promise some big reveal.

JON: I love the writing in this section. I love that he’s asking these questions. Where are those dogs going in those cars? Man, you have given us nothing to go on here. I have no idea.

MAC: “Obviously they are going to play tennis on a blimp, or take a ski vacation, or just heading back to their houses, which are either human houses or, in the case of one bulldog, a classic doghouse.”

JON: “Even though SOME of the human houses, from the outside, have been slightly, but UNDENIABLY, too small for the dogs to fit into themselves which will drive a certain kind of child insane.”

MAC: “Sure, we'd invite that kid to our field parties. But we wouldn't, like, hang out with him.”

JON: “Go around again!”

MAC: So I have to say, if you only had the text, this would be a pretty terrible reveal. The text is literally just, they are going to “that tree over there.”

JON: WHAT no way!! This is like, the best thing they could be headed for!! A tree with a LADDER??

MAC: I SAID IF YOU ONLY HAD THE TEXT.
THE LADDER ISN’T IN THE TEXT.
And also, unsurprisingly, the dogs’ expressions make this spread so compelling.

JON: Oh right I see. Yeah it is kind of funny, he’s not using exclamations or anything in the text.

MAC: We have never seen these dogs this focused.

Like, here is a dog doing dangerous physical work:

Here are dogs driving to “that tree”:

JON: Right. The whole book has been establishing a total lack of any plan or urgency in this land. It’s just a rudderless void. And suddenly they are gunning it for this tree. It could not be more urgent.

We are on page 55, of 64, and we are finally like “YES. NNNGHH. GO!!!”

MAC: This thing is so intense. The build.

They’re sprinting desperately for the tree.

JON: They don’t even drive the cars all the way up to the ladder.

MAC: They parked so far from the tree. Hahaahaah.

JON: There’s more room.

MAC: Look at this guy.

He has been 20 minutes late, minimum, to everything in his life.
And look at him now.

JON: I gotta say, every time you read this book, you can’t believe you get to go up this ladder. You can’t believe it.

MAC: I know why they are going up the tree.
I have read this book hundreds of times.
And I have to tell you right now I am HYPE.

I just feel like it’s important to note that we just sent those last two messages to each other at the same time, without knowing what the other guy was writing.

JON: I got in there first but only just.

MAC: “Up the tree! Up the tree!”

The text gets breathless:
“Up they go
to the top of the tree.
Why?
Will they work there?
Will they play there?
What is up there
on top of that tree?

JON: Just reading our minds now.

MAC: Though it seems pretty implausible that they are running up the ladder to work in a tree.
I know these dogs. These dogs are not workers.

JON: Where does a row of lazy jerks go this fast?

MAC: Eastman has moved from Dick and Jane mode to The Cat in the Hat mode now — it’s sustained narration, stoking suspense, asking questions, yes, reading our minds, but using very simple language to do it.

Also, there is a terrible lesson here: which is you can just fool around for 49 pages and then make your book feel coherent by just juicing the suspense for a big finale.

JON: Well, you have to have the greatest thing ever in the hopper though.
You can’t do anything less than what we’re about to see. It has to be this good.

MAC: A dog party!

JON: A big dog party!!!!!

MAC: This is a trick straight out of Shakespeare. End with a big feast. Although he’d usually have a wedding.
But wait... because the book is not over yet!
(This book is never over.)
Look who's back!

JON: This drawing always really got to me, too. We’re so CLOSE to them here, they’re so big. You can see more detail in them than you have. And you can see the car’s little dashboard situation too. That’s new.

MAC: They’ve both been at the party, which you can tell because they’re covered in streamers, and they’re leaving early, or maybe yellow dog was leaving early and the poodle hurried after him to ask him a question. (One thing you can say for this yellow dog — he figured out you can park right next to the tree.)

JON: (One thing you can’t say for him is that he is in any position to be judging extraordinary hats.)
(Every dog at the party was wearing the hat he has on.)

MAC: I mean thus far the best theory I could come up with for why he hasn’t been liking her hats was that they were too showy.
But, plot twist.

JON: He’s a freak for it.

MAC: The last page is them driving off together.

It turns out Go, Dog. Go! is a romance!
The dogs’ parting dialogue — and the last lines of the book — is same the thing they always say: “‘Good-by!’ ‘Good-by!’”
Except now they’re bidding the readers goodbye, as they leave us behind to start their new life together, which I’m not sure is going to work out, but we wish them the best.

JON: I don’t even want it work out.
This has to be like an office party thing and that’s it.
He stole her feather!!

MAC: It’s a nice trick though, this final pair of good-bys.

JON: Yeah, I do like that.

MAC: He's taking a word that he’s already taught us, that the child learning to read will be now confident decoding, and changed its meaning in a pretty profound way. It’s not dissimilar to what you do in a villanelle, a poetic form which, like the early reader, restricts language, pushing the poet to find multiple valences from the same words and ends with some new meaning, a big flourish.

JON: Now who’s doffing his hat in a field.

MAC: “Go around again!”