Are exhibitions of bad taste on a scale
Beyond belief, filling your living room
With mud or lava, blowing the schoolhouse roof
Down on the parking lot, tossing the boats
Out of the marina and smashing them across
The highway’s back, piquantly fixing for
The earthquake to catch his people on their knees
Good Friday morning; if Attila the Hun
Had done the hundredth part of what God does
You wouldn’t ask him to dinner at your house
But God gets away with it time and time again
And gets adored for doing it as well
As lest He do it to us another time.
The hope is our prayers will make Him nicer, but
It don’t look likely, and to make it worse
An Act of God is anything at all
That lets the insurance people off the hook.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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