No one knew her real name, but she appeared to be Greek.
She posed nude for painters, when she could find them.
She could slap hard enough to draw blood.
She slept around.
She was not one of those women who behave like cats,
jumping into your lap when you sit down to read.
Ignore her, and she ignored you.
Yet she was jealous. She would wound.
She dressed in classical rags, shawls and hobble skirts, the
shot-silk cloak and snood.
She spoke many languages and was not interested in
disguising her intelligence.
Incense-laden atmosphere drove her wild. She loved the
pagan remains of festivals and insisted on visiting
cathedrals.
Although she had no compunction about lying, as a character
witness she was useless: she had substance-abuse problems
and no known address.
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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