It could feel good to stare at numbers
all day, another job but I can’t name any;
still, on a scale of dismal to dazzling,
we should at least aim for a bit of all right—
just keep your examples to yourself
or we can’t remove them. If you wind
up with a window and sun I’ll get you
something that never dies; it’s part
of this conversation we’re conceiving—
no initials, only terminals, where nobody
looks until they need to. How many out-
sized ’50s-cartoon kisses popped up there,
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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