When I was a girl in Beverly Hills,
and things were just beginning to get bad,
they brought handwashing experts to prep school
one day. There were two, and the two of them lectured
on proper procedure: how to turn the water off
while you lather, how to take a paper towel
and turn the water off for good, after rinsing,
with it on your hand, so as not to pick back up
the germs that were on you when all this began.
And I remember waterfalls, which the other
silver-spoon girls found essential: sharing by pouring
a little of another girl’s beverage into your mouth,
so that nothing touched her mouth, then yours, then hers.
I remember their bubble handwriting, how it curved,
and how the girls repelled the ground, and spit, and birds.
“Who knows where that has been?”
Who knows that about anything?
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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