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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2012-03-15, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MARCH 15, 2012. PAGE 5. “Writing is easy. All you do is just stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” – Gene Fowler I owe it all to Eileen. That’s what I tell people when they ask me what motivates me as a writer – specifically, what makes me get up in the morning and try to do it all over again. Some people think there must be a magic ritual, or a formula or a secret prayer that makes the words come, but I tell them no, it’s all because of Eileen. Haven’t seen her in 30 years. Can’t even remember her last name, but she keeps me writing. Most writers have much more exotic stimuli to get themselves stoked. Hemingway wrote standing at a desk. Norman Mailer preferred to write in a loft which he could only get to by clambering, Tarzan-style, up a rope. I know a guy who writes mystery novels and claims he has to do the first draft longhand on pads of yellow legal paper using a fountain pen and green ink – while lying in bed surrounded by pillows. Loony? He’s written four best-sellers. Victor Hugo was weirder. The author of Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (the novels, not the sappy musicals) started his working day bare naked in a room with only a desk, a sheaf of paper, a pen and a pot of ink. He forbade his servants bring him food or clothing until his writing for the day was finished. Maybe he was just working up to sappy musicals because some composers make even loopier demands on their muses. Richard Wagner employed his pet dog ‘Peps’ as a musical coach. Wagner would hit a difficult patch, summon his pooch to the piano and play until the dog howled in anguish. Wagner would take the hint and change the tune to Peps’ taste. The famous Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen was inspired by hatred – hatred of his rival August Strindberg. Strindberg really was a tad insane but that’s another story – the point is, Strindberg attacked Ibsen in print, branding him a plagiarist among other things. Ibsen responded by buying a painting of his enemy and hanging it on the wall overlooking his writing desk. “I cannot write a line,” Ibsen said, “without that madman standing and staring down at me with those crazy eyes.” That rings a bell for me. Decades ago, when I was starting out as a writer I had a comfy little gig delivering a weekly radio commentary for a CBC radio show that played to rural Canada. My contact was Eileen, a sweet and thoughtful editor/producer on the radio show I worked for. She greeted me cheerily every week and invited me into the studio to record my piece. It paid well and all I was required to do was fill two minutes and forty-five seconds with a few scripted words and remember not to burp when the mic was on. Then, one week, I couldn’t think of a topic. The words wouldn’t come. Well, so what? It happens, right? Eileen would understand. At air time I ambled into the studio, Eileen looked up and said “Hi Arthur – what have you got for us this week?” Nothing, I said. Couldn’t come up with an idea. Somebody must have turned up the air conditioning. The studio became suddenly very chilly. “You’ve got nothing?” hissed Eileen. But it wasn’t her words, it was her eyes. They had gone from a blissful blue to gunmetal grey. From Anne of Green Gables to Adolf Hitler. At that moment a message was imprinted in my DNA: If you ever want to see these eyes again, just miss a deadline. Haven’t missed a deadline since. (Comments: arblack43@shaw.ca) Arthur Black Other Views Thank you Eileen, wherever you are If you haven’t seen the movies Inception or The Wrestler or the television show The Sopranos and you might still want to, I suggest you skip this column. There are plenty of other interesting stories to read in this week’s issue of The Citizen. Alright, for those of you left, my subject this week is the ‘new’ ending that’s sweeping that nation as far as entertainment goes: the choose- your-own ending. Jess hates it. She can’t stand it. Whereas I tend to like an ending that’s left up to the viewer (or reader), as long as it’s done right. Inception, for instance, is a movie where the majority of the story takes place in people’s dreams, not in the real world. At the end of the film, a top spins, an indicator that we’ve come to learn will tell you whether what’s happening is occurring in real life, or in a dream. If the top falls, this is real life, if it spins infinitely, we are in a dream. The top spins away and the film cuts to black just as the top begins to falter slightly. There’s no clear resolution. Is it real life or was it a dream? We’ll never know. The Wrestler is the same deal. Mickey Rourke stars, in an Academy Award-nominated performance, as a washed-up professional wrestler called out of retirement for one last match, despite his deteriorating health and tattered personal life. He is told by doctors that one more match, as fake as professional wrestling may be, could end his life due to his poor heart health. At the end of the movie, Rourke climbs the top rope, about to deliver a devastating flying elbow to his opponent. He lifts off and the camera stays with the turnbuckle and fades to black, leaving the audience, well, in the dark about whether or not Rourke’s character lives to see another match. The Sopranos is perhaps the most famous television show to end on such a note. The audience follows protagonist Tony Soprano through six seasons (spanning nearly a decade) only to have the long-awaited finale end on a quick cut to black as Tony seems to possibly be in some danger and “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey blares through the television speakers, leaving the audience to debate Tony’s fate amongst themselves. One of my favourite books of all time is The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis. It starts in mid-sentence and ends in mid- sentence. No doubt that must drive English teachers nuts seeing a book begin without a capital letter and end without a period, but it certainly is an interesting artistic statement. Being my typical impatient self, I did some research on an upcoming film that I can’t wait to see called Shame, the story of a sex addict in New York City. The movie stars up and coming star Michael Fassbender and is directed by Steve McQueen (not that Steve McQueen). The pair teamed up on a film called Hunger about Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands of which I am particularly fond. Reading the synopsis and unknowingly reading a bit too far, it seems this movie ends on a similar ‘cliffhanger’. Creativity like this harkens back to the days of my youth, picking up Choose-Your-Own- Adventure books at the St. Anthony Daniel library. You began the story and then when you came to a major plot point, you were offered two options, both with their accompanying page and you turned accordingly. As I said before, endings like these can be thrilling and create a debate that will rage in the public for years. However, the important thing to remember when leaving the movie theatre after such an experience Happy endings Discovery News (a subsidiary of the Discovery Channel) is a great resource for anyone interested in...well pretty much anything. Whether you want to know about space travel, sea life, giant creatures or micro- organisms, there is probably something interesting on the site (news.discovery.com) to sate your thirst for knowledge. This week I found something very interesting on the site I missed earlier this year: Windstalks, or wind generators without blades. The original idea was presented at the 2010 Land Art Generator Initiative, a competition designed to recognize the best work of art that generates renewable energy. Looking like a gathering of cattails along a river bed, the stalks stand nearly 55 metres tall with concrete bases between 10 and 20 metres wide. They start at approximately 30 centimetres wide at the base and gradually taper off until they are about five centimetres at the top. When the wind blows, the stalks move and their innards, layers of electrodes and discs made from special materials, put pressure on each other, creating an electrical charge. Created by Atelier DNA (atelierdna.com), which was founded by partners Darío Núñez- Ameni and Thomas Seigl in 2008, the first batch of stalks was proposed to be erected outside of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates beside a planned city called Masdar, a city labelled as “in tune with its surrounding”. That means they’re aiming for sustainability, one of those buzzwords politicians like to keep throwing around without (usually) acting on it. The project would have consisted of 1,208 stalks with the bases channeling waters to the green spaces in between them creating a lush green space underneath the stalks. Underneath the huge project would be some kind of battery; possibly a water reservoir system, to store the energy that is created (a system that all the commercial wind genera- tion in Huron County is lacking, making them nearly useless at prime consumption times). At night, when they are generating power, small LED lamps at the top of each unit will glow. The stronger the wind, the stronger the glow, creating a unique light show. And these systems do all this without making noise according to Núñez-Ameni. “Windstalk is completely silent,” he states. Reading through this and learning of these alternative wind options really got me to thinking about the landscape of change in Huron County. Maybe it’s NIMBYism (Not in My Back Yard-ism), maybe it’s a disdain for the new or different or maybe it’s simply a fear of the unknown. Whatever it is, whenever there is going to be a major change people come out of the woodwork and saying “You can’t do that here.” Of course the first example to come to mind is the anti-wind turbine groups. They realize that power needs to be created (at least I hope they do) but they don’t, for a variety of reasons, want it created via wind turbines here (I’d imagine they wouldn’t be keen on nuclear near their properties either). We need energy to continue our lives but we don’t want it close enough to hear, close enough to affect us or in a spot that will ruin the lovely view of the lake as the sun sets on it. I’ve also seen people making the same complaints about landfill sites and gravel pits. People don’t want current landfill sites changed because they have a hard enough time living with the one that’s there or their property values are already low enough with what’s there. Well, unfortunately, this is another case of a necessary evil. That landfill site needs to be there for the garbage this society produces to be taken care of. If the chance came to go completely green and have next to no non-recyclable waste, I would be the first to jump on the bandwagon. Unfortunately that simply isn’t true. We need gravel pits to keep a good portion of the roads in the county usable, but people don’t want to see the gravel pits created close to their home because it might affect their property value or their water tables. To the people making these complaints: I understand your concerns, I do, but maybe I’m just willing to put up with more because I realize it’s all for the greater good. I live in Blyth and one of the very few things I’ve found about this town that I’m not a fan of is the fact that, due to the proximity of farmers, we sometimes have some fairly strong smells drifting through town when farmers are working on their fields. Do I run to a council and tell them to move it? No. If someone suggested creating a field close to my home and using manure, I would just grin, close my windows and bear the smell because I know that it’s a necessary evil. Sure, I would do research and try and find other options and present them, but if it came down to it, I would say that I need to eat so the smell has to stay. I just found out that my family cottage in Bluewater will soon be less than a country block from wind turbines. That energy, while not exactly provided when it’s needed, is important, so I’m not going to go to Bluewater council and complain. That’s why I found this wind project so exciting. If it does everything it claims to and provides a similar amount of power it may be a solution to all of those groups that have been protesting the placement of wind turbines. If this project is anywhere near as effective as it sounds, it could solve dozens of problems that have been attributed to turbines. Like I said, we need these services and they are just like cat litter (as my girlfriend explains it to me every time I complain about the smell that follows it throughout the house): it needs to be somewhere, we can only direct where. Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense Denny Scott Denny’s Den Wind power without the problems?