Maru's Mun Journal

You can use the same ingredients for making a nice Mediterranean salad, or for topping a pizza with; with a little ingenuity, you can even make a pasta sauce. You can do that as a writer, too. The author of Urquhart's canon re-used the ingredients of 'Death and the Devil' for a modern day thriller set in Cologne, minus the Patrician clients but with the Foreign Legion and a splinter group of the same instead of the Crusades. The book uses some of the same recurrent character archetypes in addition to plot element; the main hero is a heroine, though, which means she herself gets to sleep with the Urquhart-alike, instead of having to leave that to a secondary character, but she has to work through her own issues in order to beat him just like Jacob the Fox has to do with Urquhart. What really floored me was the way that charrie did and liked things I had established as Millicanon for Urquhart but thought I had made up as a likely bridge, from what was given in canon. That Stylish Bad Guy there, though, starts out with dried dates and ends up telling he spent eight years in Baghdad... And of course he's terribly good in bed, and a very considerate lover. Seems I can really trust my headvoice for Urquhart to be remarkably similar to the one that the author of his canon had for him and the other incarnations of that archetype.-

I have been mainlining 'Mad Men' recently, starting with it entirely for the sake of Christina Hendricks but quickly falling in love with the whole concept. That show is so meta! We learn as much about ourselves and our own time as about the 1960s, and we get to watch attitudes and technology changing, which is a good way of looking at history. History isn't a state, frozen in time by sticking the needle into a certain point of the time line, it's a process that we must learn to observe as it passes. It never stands still. Also, I like the way we get to watch the creative process in action, in the actual work these people do. The work isn't just the macguffin to get the characters to interact, it is central to the story line. Observing the way Don Draper tackles a subject is very enlightening. He's actually good at what he does. Even when he plays truant from work to go bonk his graphic designer girlfriend, he's working, as he gets some of his best ideas there, in post-coital chitchat. My favourite character so far, though, besides Joan Holloway (of course!!!) is Rachel Menken.  She has some serious style and pose, and is so independent she's a bit out of time there. I might consider apping her for Milliways after finishing with the series so far, if I weren't scared shitless at the thought of playing a Jewish New Yorker in a game that has some as muns. She doesn't take chauvinism and rudeness for granted, as everybody else does, and she doesn't fall prey to Don Draper's wiles as easily as everybody else. She thinks for herself; she demands independent thought from people that want to work with her. The characters are well thought out and so alive, even Joan swanning through the office being catty, with her impressive knockers and her red hair, being infinitely superior and always right. Of course she bonks one of the partners, but I somehow doubt she really gets what she needs and wants there...

It really pisses me off that putting up an advertisement like this is still thought a) acceptable and b) funny. The post I link vigorously protests against it, but an ad agency came up with the bullshit, that organisation is paying for it, and thousands of people are probably finding it funny, not only thin people, and people that 'successfully' fight their own body to stay thin, but fat people of varying degree as well, because they of course (almost) all internalised that they shouldn't be what they are, and all ridicule heaped on them is their own fault.

I have left that building a while ago, and never really looked back.

( Where did I go? )

( What did I learn? )

( Where am I now? )

Perhaps some of you have heard me going on about me pet theory about the Recurring Character Archetypes some writers have popping up in many of their books? I know about mine - but something schiarire said to me by email today made me realise I not only have to write him, I very much like to read him as well.

Warning: within might be rambling nonsense, pertaining only to fandom things some you have never heard of. On the other hand, within might be the beginning of a potential Inception article...

( Long ramble about writers and their favourite characters )

I'd like to start the new year with a true ghost story that has been passed down in my family for generations, and of which I was reminded this morning for some reason. Thinking about it again, I realised that it was not so much a ghost story, more a story about entity creation.

Several generations of my ancestors were parsons in a small village just east of the river Oder, in what is now Poland. The village, Kohlow, consisted mostly of independent farmers (not peasants freed from serfdom a scant two generations earlier and still beholden to the squire in many ways, as was usual elsewhere), but it did have a manor house with a large estate where a noble family lived whose male members served as officers in the Prussian army, as was customary in that class. The parson and the squire considered themselves the only educated men in the village and were something like friends, down the generations.

Shortly before my great-great-grandfather took over the parsonage, during the war between Austria and Prussia over Denmark in 1866, the squire, old Major von Kaphengst, had a wounded officer as a house guest; he must have been a distant relative of the Old Major or his wife. While he was there, the officer's condition grew much worse, and the local doctor had no choice but to amputate his left leg.

The Old Major had that leg buried in the park that belonged to the manor house and then carefully germinated a rumour in the village that this Left leg was haunting the park at dusk - with the express purpose of keeping the boys from the village out of his cherry trees.

( Ghost story ahead )