A smile shrinks in the continual rains.
The cat stretches without opening his eyes.
The searches for interest begin, centrifugal
Journeys without souvenir through random tracts:
1750, tie psychology of plants.
Choreography of boredom, names of Greeks
Cut by Axe the son of Noman on a shin
At Abu Simbel, under water, Memnon singing
Every dawn: “but there it's always sunny.”
I scissor silhouettes of my wife yawning.
Languages WANTED, by schizomacaronic.
And farther back a still school-room resounds:
Energy cannot be created or destroyed.
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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