Woo hoo hoo hoo

12 January 2002

The other morning, Timprov was waiting for me to get up and read the first bit of a story he'd written, to see if I like where it was going. He started flipping channels, and there was a "Winnie the Pooh" show wherein Tigger convinced Eeyore to be more like him. So we've been wandering around the house saying in our best slow, dull Eeyore voices, "Woo hoo hoo hoo, woo hoo hoo hoo."

(My best Eeyore voice is nowhere near as good as CJ's, but we do what we can. I also find it disturbing that Christopher Robin on this show has an American accent. Christopher Robin has lines like "Oh, God bless Nanny, I quite forgot." You can't say "quite forgot" with an American accent. Then again, that's presuming a level of Pooh fidelity that probably is not there very often.)

Ah well; the world does not rise and fall on a Winnie the Pooh show. Still. Woo hoo hoo hoo.

The fog this morning is astounding. The gas station across the street can barely be seen -- only the trees around us are really clearly visible. I often go home to the Midwest and sigh and say, "It never rains like this in California." But honestly, it never fogs like this at home. Doesn't know how. And the fog smells of salt and damp juniper.

I was reading Columbine's comments on character, fantasy, and the real world, and I started thinking about why I don't like Woody Allen films. (Timprov: "That never takes me very long. I always come up with a reason immediately, and even if it's a different reason from the last time, it seems like it's always enough.") I don't think the problem is that they're too realistic. I think the problem is that they're the wrong kind of realistic.

Sure, there are people who bumble ineffectually through their lives and whine a lot in the real world. I don't really want to hang around with them. Sometimes comedies manage to help me put up with realistic people I'd want to slap silly in real life -- but not most of the time. This is why "realistic" is not an unlimited virtue: if you can get a pile of artificial vomit to feel and smell just like the real thing, well, that's quite a technical achievement, but I don't want to buy it and put it on my living room floor. Not everything humanity produces is worth reproducing. That's not a flaw in reproducing stuff, but it does need to be a bit selective.

Woody Allen films are not on the level of "realistic artificial vomit" for me, in case anybody was wondering. I actually did enjoy one of them -- "Deconstructing Harry" -- although I can't for the life of me say why a non-writer would want to watch it.

Ah well. I finished reading The Boggart yesterday, and while it was charming in its own way, it was certainly not up to the Dark Is Rising novels, or even Seaward if I'm remembering correctly. The author and I had different ideas about what was the big problem of the book, was part of it -- I thought it was the evil psychologist locking Emily up, and it turned out that he was really not the threat, and the threat was that the Boggart would feel homesick. Oh. It just seemed anticlimactic. If you're going to make one of the "big problems" into something that isn't the big problem at all, it seems like the real big problem should be, um, big.

I did like it, though, that the villain wasn't really the point of the story. I mean, there he was, all villainous and scary, oooh, but then he wasn't the big climactic problem. I don't like it when evil is thoroughly external in a story. Evil isn't something that you can put over there, vanquish, and be done with it. I mean, sometimes it is out there to be vanquished, but that's never the end of it.

Well. I'm going to stay home with Mr. Badback and Mr. Snozzlehead today. Plenty on the list of stuff to do -- for me and for them. Woo hoo hoo hoo.

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