Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

John Fowles on The Collector

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There’s an excerpt from The Journals of John Fowles in The Guardian about the making of the movie The Collector, based on Fowles’s novel. It sounds like nothing much ever changes in Hollywood, no matter how much everyone always thinks it does:

The awful American-English language problem. Anything that wouldn’t be comprehensible to the average American moron Willie objects to. We had the line: “I did it to exorcise you from my life.” “Exorcise, exorcise,” said Willie. “Who’s ever going to be able to say that – we need another line.” “I did it to get you out of my system,” I suggested. Yes, that was fine. But Willie kept on saying it over and over again. “Out of my system, out of my system, OUT of my SYSTEM. That sounds kind of peculiar.” About 20 minutes later, we ended up with “I did it to get you out of my mind.” Everything has to be mish-mashed to a smooth banality.

(During one of my first classes at USC, we would read out one another’s scripts in class, so we could hear what we’d written. I used “schadenfreude” at one point; the classmate reading it had never heard the word before, let alone had a clue how to pronounce it.)

What’s amazing, of course, is that the filmmakers even had Fowles on the set to begin with. Whatever were they thinking?

(Apropos of nothing: it cracks me up that you can use the Seven Dirty Words (whatever they are) in British papers and American papers still insist on using dashes, as though the people reading don’t immediately have to stop and mentally fill in the blanks, thereby paying more attention to the word than they otherwise would. The funniest one is when the dashes don’t seem to correlate to any bannable word that I know of, and I have to stop and think what they possibly could have meant.)

But he doesn’t know C. Yet.

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Currently Simon’s favorite computer game is Pooh Toddler (I think this is the right one, except Amazon says it’s just for Windows and we’re definitely using it on a Mac). One of the games is “Pop the Balloons,” in which various Pooh characters get lofted on to the screen and the player pops their balloons. The player can type on the keyboard or move the cursor over the balloon and a few seconds later the balloon pops.

Simon has figured out how to use the mouse to move the cursor over the balloon…and then click to pop it.

I guess when you see everyone else in your family doing something every day (a lot), you begin to think it’s perfectly normal. Why shouldn’t a 16-month-old know how to operate a mouse?

Darin and I were pretty impressed, that’s all I’m saying.

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Simon has also decided it’s time for him to sit at the table with the rest of us. He’s not down with the whole high chair thing any longer.

My first clue that Simon was thinking along those lines was when I cut up a peach and put the pieces in a bowl for him, then put the bowl on one of the kitchen chairs so he could snack from it as he raced around the kitchen. I turned to my computer, which (as per usual, because we haven’t cleaned out my %$#(*$@# office yet) was sitting on the kitchen island, then I turned back to the kitchen table. Simon had moved the bowl to the table and was sitting in the chair enjoying the peach.

Now when it’s dinnertime he races to sit in the chair alongside Sophia. If I put him in the high chair (because we don’t have a booster seat for him), he struggles and cries and gets himself out of the chair. Darin reported that he put Simon in the high chair one day for lunch and then wandered off to check something on his computer. A minute or two later, Simon came racing in to join him.

I like to think that we’re self-actualizing the children.

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His vocabulary is also growing by leaps and bounds. I pulled out the jar of Nutella the other morning and Simon ran to the kitchen table yelling, “Chocolate toast!” (Unfortunately, Darin, who was in the other room, didn’t hear him say it, so I can’t be 100% sure that’s what Simon said. But it sure as heck sounded like it.)

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Simon is also ready to start school. Preschool, at any rate. Every day when we drop Sophia off at preschool Simon says hi to the teachers and then busies himself in the play kitchen or plops down on the beanbag in the library area to page through a book. Every day I have to pick him up, screaming and flailing, and leave.

I wonder how interested he’ll be when he has his own class and Sophia isn’t there. Probably pretty interested.