My life as Eloisa: A story lover's memoirs and photo blog. :-) #Dumaguete #Manila #StreetPhotography #Psychiatry #Books #LIfe #PopCulture
“I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys paint upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence, there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particular good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight. ”
Very recently, I’ve developed “an extremely strong desire to mentally consume” all episodes of this small screen/ Netflix wonder (read: I binge-watch these episodes in my spare time, with my father occasionally joining to watch. )
It simply cannot be helped. The large-scale production of a historical drama, with larger-than-life characters, created by the legendary Michael Hirst is a compelling show to watch. He is the sole writer for the show, and allegedly, to up the excitement factor new scripts come out every two weeks for the actors, and they never know what to expect.
The characters have great chemistry, and the actors are very easy on the eyes (aside from the fact that they are good actors, of course.). My initial favorite,was of course, Ragnar Lothbrok (played by erstwhile Calvin Klein model, Travis Fimmel) and now, heavily favored is the very strong “crippled Viking” character, Ivar the Boneless , who is portrayed by Alex Hogh Andersen.
Like any full-blooded female, I am partial to strong male characters on TV, but these two characters were so well-crafted and well-played that they actually made me dissociate pleasantly and had me thinking that they might actually be real vikings in their past lives. I kid you not. 🙂
Ragnar is bold, adventurous and curious…enough to defy his earl and go wandering off West, even when he was explicitly told not to. Also, as a bonus he has this leering look and twitching of his eye that seems to emphasize his points. You really have to admire the man, he was ahead of his time, and his nearly insatiable thirst for “the new worlds to explore” made him a standout indeed. He had that fire in his eyes, a charisma, which everyone saw, because they all followed him unquestioningly.
(Maybe he was a visionary in those Dark Ages…but really, the show was only based on The Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok, an old Viking tale handed down from generations through storytelling, too diluted to be even considered as real, accurate history. )
Nevertheless, it made for very entertaining viewing. My father loves it for the swordfights and battle scenes, I myself, love it for the relationship drama and the internal and external conflicts of the characters. #Priorities. 🙂
Lagertha, the shield maiden, is also a favorite character, as she is a…well, a Badass female, way ahead of her time. She could handle herself in a brawl…and still have time for her kids, AND was brave enough to pack up her bags and divorce her philandering husband publicly, without fear of the unknown. Also, I might add, she never looked back. Sure, she may have seemed to love such a powerful man with all her heart, but in the end, she could not bear to be humiliated by his philandering ways, and she opted instead to just break it off with him anyway.
(She never settled, and became Earl in her own right…winning battles and commanding men.)
🙂 Really, this is just the gist of it all, and I am merely writing out the things that I like about this show. There are several articles on the show, and I think this one here is more congruent with real Viking History. 🙂
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Perhaps since I am infinitely curious about people’s character and how they think, my current favorite would have to be one of Ragnar’s sons, Ivar the Boneless, played by Alex Hogh Andersen. This character was born with Osteogenesis Imperfecta ( and was nearly killed by his own father) and had an anger management problem that drove him to be one of the most notorious Viking conquerors of Western Europe, so to speak. (AH fun. All the internal conflicts there!) He was also, allegedly, very smart…and cunningly genius war strategist as well…and despite the fact that he could not walk, legacy stories about him were telling about how “stood higher than many men in the battlefield.”
Speculations about his condition abound, of course, but we really have no way of knowing for sure, because all this data is being extrapolated from the recounted histories, and very old Viking records from the 10th century that were recorded by the monks and the priests of Christianity.
However, it is not a bad thing at all that Alex Hogh Andersen is playing Ivar. No, not at all…especially since he also takes photos in his spare time, in real life (which I think is pretty cool, of course!). haha. not at all. 🙂
Don’t take my word for it, though… try to watch it yourself. If you like stories and characters like I do, then this series is for you. 🙂
(And this concludes my extra-curricular writing blogging activity. 🙂 )
So, enjoy! Because I definitely did,beards,manbuns and all.) 🙂
One can easily fall in love with this song…
The melody is really good, and the lyrics, though simple, ring true.
This is clearly my favorite song for 2016.
(:-) May we all find this kind of ideal.)
A diary is like a confessional… the burial ground, the seed bed, the debating arena of all your deepest, darkest fears. No matter how large or small it is, it probably holds the biggest drama of the Colosseum of your life.
Inane or important, the words you write in it are of value to you or to anyone you wish to share it to. Which is why privacy is a necessary, albeit unspoken rule in diary-keeping. Oftentimes, it is the only refuge for a person to write down her troubles, and make sense of her loss. Or even simply, it is the repository of anger so it will come out only as screaming ink on paper, and not fists and yelling.
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So, no, Ma’am, you cannot steal your teenager’s diary and yell at her because you’re upset of what she wrote about you. Maybe it would have stayed a healthy way of coping instead of you throwing theatrics and making it all complicated. It was never just about you.
If you see me nodding my head slowly and silently, I am not agreeing with you entirely, but it probably means that I’m writing in my mental diary, the words…that rhyme with truck and university. #Peeves
Edit: it’s 6:30am now, and rereading this made me realize how i need to edit some more, and how i’m fond of using lengthy sentences broken by commas.
#Peeves 😂
I got this idea after reading Vivian Gornick’s “The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative.” I’m starting to explore this avenue.”
And I quote: “The writing we call personal narrative is written by people who, in essence, are imagining only themselves; in relation to the subject in hand. The connection is an intimate one; in fact, it is critical. Out of the raw material of a writer’s own undisguised being a narrator is fashioned whose existence on the page is integral to the tale being told. This narrator becomes a persona. Its tone of voice, its angle of vision, the rhythm of its sentences, what it selects to observe and what to ignore are chosen to serve the subject; yet the same time the way the narrator – or that persona – sees things is, to the large degree, the thing being seen.
“…To fashion a persona out of one’s own undisguised self is no easy thing…The unsurrogated [NB: without the “trappings” of fiction] narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.”
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It is very much like journal writing in a sense that there is narration, but the voice, the voice should be strong and unique. 🙂
It’s a riveting book and is very well-written. I was entranced, and inspired.
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(The rest of the book is here…)
What’s your favorite form of writing?
I agree with Victor Hugo on this one…there is something about the whole love-at-first-sight thing that inspires poetry. Or quotes such as this one.
Perhaps it is much better to understand what VH means when you have had this “moment”. It burns deep into your heart, and it is unlikely to be forgotten, this “glance”.
The “slow burn” type of loving is good too. This type just “sparks” more creativity. 🙂
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Do you believe in love at first sight?
