Background
I am convinced that if I died she would be really annoyed. So when I realized this—that die “real” is actual and potential —I could swing both bodies at once. And one morning on the broad avenue I did and she was there. Her reaction—whirrr clikk—pure nonchalance, walking along as if she were totally somewhere else holding hands with a moth. The sheerest nerve can catch die smallest thought. Read on and learn why.
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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