Moving across the light, on agitated hips.
She hurries away bread crusts and grape stones
And glances in mid-talk, as if from fear,
At the irreproachable sea. Lanes frown away
Through the gaps in the hills she is looking at now
In the other window; but the floor throws up
Immediately, there, fresh patterns of her hands
And hair quite undismayed. So why is afternoon's
easiness
Not beginning easily? Is the room
Not set correctly for the thing to come?
Or did we break some subject much too soon?
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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