Listen to the episode here.
some of you who have been listening perhaps a little too obsessively might recall a seemingly trivial anecdote in the opening comments of episode six involving an impish acquaintance of mine who stole from me the recording of the story Oscar called The Knee. This acquaintance, whom I’ll refer to as Ahab Cloud here for reasons I’ll soon get to, used that recording as a road map of sorts for a no budget film I happened, by chance, to catch at a ramshackle film festival on winter night. As incredible as it might seem, Mr. Cloud instructed his fledgling troupe of wet-eyed actors to lip sync their lines to Oscar’s tapes in order to dub the field recordings over their mouthing faces in post-production. I was stunned. And angry.
Well, sometime after he disappeared to make his picture I began receiving postcards from Ahab Cloud. Though he signed none of these post cards I knew from our days of mopping up cheap beer with our faces that it was his handwriting. I was an expert in recognizing Cloud’s hand because when I knew him, if nothing else, Mr. Cloud was a writer. Now in this case, I don’t mean writer in the wordsmith mystic visionary artists sense of the word, though he may have been that too in my opinion, but rather I use writer here as a descriptor of a person performing the physical act, just as you might describe someone sitting as a sitter in a pinch. Back in our college and immediate post college days, Ahab wrote anything and everything with indiscriminate ferocity, and he wrote on any surface that provided enough space in which to cram a scrawling.
This is my career strategy, he told me one day while committing the pledge of allegiance to a cafe window using his girlfriend’s black lipstick. To be a writer, he said, One must write. So, I write. Simple. And I encourage you to do the same. You know, to get in the habit. Wax on, etc.
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