<Jay Leno voice> “Are you familiar with this? Have you heard about this?”
A week or so ago, one of the stories making the Internet rounds was about John Dillermand, the title character of a stop-motion animation Danish children’s show. Dillermand is your run-of-the-mill, bumbling middle-aged lunk who lives with his great-grandmother, save for the distinguishing characteristic on which the show’s plot hinges: his impossibly-long, candy-striped, prehensile penis.
On the one hand, there was the usual pearl-clutching that happens whenever the American Puritanical streak brushes up against the matter-of-fact sensuousness and comfort with casual nudity that seem to be commonplace in countries north of Germany.
On the other hand, there was the criticism that everyone — not just Americans — was being entirely too uptight. It’s a children’s cartoon, a fantasy world. Sure there’s no earthly record of someone having used a 30-foot penis in a trapeze act, nor is there any record of a coyote’s long-standing correspondence with a mail-order gadget company.
On the other other hand, as pointed out by one of the experts Katherine Wu quotes in her good Atlantic piece linked at the top, it reinforces a “classic macho claim: ‘I can’t control my penis.’” Or as Wu says, suggests of male sexuality that “[i]t’s so uncontrollable, it can demand its own television series.” She goes on to point out that a cartoon about someone whose distinguishing feature was a mischievous vulva with a mind of its own would, as the kids say, “hit different.”
I have no plans to watch John Dillermand, but Wu’s point about the impossibility of imagining a woman and the female anatomy in a similar starring role sent me to the basement to dig up the first book I ever bought for one of my kids.
Spring 2010 — my daughter had arrived in January. I wandered the aisles at Harvard Bookstore’s semi-annual warehouse sale, eyeing the children’s section with new interest. As you might imagine, my attention was arrested by this cover with its act of acrobatic micturition.
Written by Tjibbe Veldkamp and illustrated by Kees de Boer, Little Monkey’s Big Peeing Circus1 is a 2006 book from an apparently-prolific Dutch (not Danish!) children’s picture-book duo. It’s the third of Veldkamp’s books translated into English.
Despite the anarchic cover, I — a reader raised on mostly American children’s books where order is invariably restored from chaos — picked it up expecting the tale of a monkey whose pee party(!?) maybe got out of hand but where everyone learns a lesson in the end.
The book’s inside flap sets up a different story: “Little Monkey opens a peeing circus so that he can make a big splash.” (OK, we’re with you so far.)
“Mimi wants to perform in it too, but can Mimi pee without a peepee?” (Uh, yes?)
“This whimsical and humorous story answers an age-old question.” (Is it the one you just asked? Because — we already know?).
That’s it for the preview, but on the very first page we know we’re not in an American children’s book:
Well! There’s that frank Northern European nudity we’ve been talking about. After exposing himself, Little Monkey goes on to explain to Mimi that he’s very good at peeing and thus plans to start a circus. As one does.
While Little Monkey sets up his tent, Mimi ventures that she can also pee and asks to participate. Little Monkey assures her she doesn’t have the range, but magnanimously offers to let her stand in the ring with him.
And so she does:
And … the crowd loves it?
We are treated to several more scenes of Little Monkey’s pee performances: standing on one leg, no hands — I’ve seen many of these tricks from the seven-year-old in this household.
Mimi gets tired of this and asks Little Monkey where her peepee is, in order to send him on a wild goose chase:
Little Monkey is not a genius. He spends four or five pages looking all over for, ahem, Mimi’s peepee: in the pelican’s beak, in the kangaroo’s pouch, from on top of the giraffe. In the meantime, Mimi makes use of Little Monkey’s distraction to replace him in center ring.
Everyone is excited. Mimi and Little Monkey quickly work up an act:
For those of us who grew up during a time when Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen could be banned (or even burned!) because Mickey, the main character, is nude, this frank depiction and discussion of genitalia, not to mention a celebration of some of the functions is surprising!
But what’s the message? Is this an “anything you can do I can do better” success story? Is it for Little Monkey to learn that differences in anatomy do not constitute differences in ability (I would not suggest that the pee tricks we see here are impossible — I am not a doctor! — but they’re at least unlikely). There is probably a Queer reading of this text in which we might see Mimi as troubling if not obliterating gender norms (in one scene not pictured here she doffs her wig and braids to the crowd), and Little Monkey’s obsession with her “missing” peepee as the cisgender obsession with trans anatomy.
But this is academic stick-in-the-mudism, right? In John Dillermand and Little Monkey’s Big Peeing Circus we have examples from two different countries, 15 years apart: not even enough for a journalism trend story! But this is a tiny newsletter, so nothing stops us from speculating that maybe this light sampling of children’s media says something about I don’t know, our need to unclench and be a little cool about our bodies. To which I say: you first! I think about my body as little as possible.
(Coda: I, beaming, brought Little Monkey home that day in 2010. My wife promptly consigned it to the bottom of a box in the basement, not because of its muddled or absent gender politics, but because of its mess.)
New Department: How Do you Finish a Book?
We’re announcing the creation of a recurring department here at Sub Stock’s Substack: A Saturday Letter. “How Do You Finish a Book?” On certain days I’ve been referring to it as “How do you F****** Finish a Book?” or “How do you Finish a F****** Book?” but then my mother subscribed, and I thought we’d keep it clean.
I’m lining up writers of my acquaintance to ask them that question. Some of them have done it; some of them haven’t. In this section I hope to introduce you to some of these great people, and eventually ask them the question in the previous paragraph. Perhaps the secret will be revealed2.
What I’ve been Reading
Horror Humorist
And speaking of gender politics, my night time reading lately has been Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages. The author of the horror novels The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle and, of course,“The Lottery,” Jackson is working in a decidedly different vein. This book and its follow-up, Raising Demons, are domestic memoirs cobbled together out of essays Jackson wrote for general-interest magazines like Harper’s and Collier’s, but also “women’s magazines” like Good Housekeeping and Mademoiselle about her life raising three children in a ramshackle house in Vermont. Jackson is funny and tolerant in the way of the thankless heroines of old sitcoms where men have all the power, but the women do everything.
Every so often, there are passages that make the past seem very long ago, as when Jackson gets in the town’s lone taxi (she and her husband don’t drive) to take her to the hospital, where she will have her third child (with a subsequent 10-day stay!):
“I sat very still in the back seat, trying not to breathe. I had one arm lovingly around my suitcase, which held my yellow nightgown, and I tried to light a cigarette without using any muscles except those in my hands and my neck and still not let go of my suitcase."
Or when she arrives at the hospital to check herself in:
“Name?” the desk clerk said to me politely, her pencil poised.
“Name,” I said vaguely. I remembered, and told her.
“Age?” she asked. “Sex? Occupation?”
“Writer,” I said.
“Housewife,” she said.
“Writer,” I said.
“I’ll just put down housewife,” she said…
COVID Goodbyes
My friend Jodie Noel Vinson published a piece at WBUR’s Cognoscenti What Mattered Was That I Had Been Present: Saying a Long-Distance Goodbye to My Grandmother,” in which she describes visiting her Iowa grandmother’s deathbed and attending her funeral all over FaceTime, while Jodie sat in her room in Providence. Please go read it, and hug your loved ones.
I intend to use bookshop.org when linking to books I mention here, but this book was not turning up on that site. Had I not gone to Am*z*n, I would not have been pointed to the perplexing entry under “Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed”: My Parents Open Carry: An Open Carry Adventure.
It will not.
Sebastian— Thanks for launching my Sunday with lots of laughter ... and with tears (what a piece by Jodie).