As, many times, motive is inaccessible, must we get used to the art of the
plausible, and let live? And thrive as prats do on chat shows, toasting
each other in bat juice, and coasting?
I would not encourage others of my late age to be always handling a proximity-
fuse of indignant rage to demonstrate the art of self harming. Keep
counsel, stay charming, I now advise.
Politics and law back then—Age of Milton, I mean—were visceral; poetry
not; though republicans read the Pharsalia, inter alia, and imitated
it a lot. To Lucan, indeed, “viscera” was a word forty or more times
taken up, buzzing the era.
Coriolanus worked best by being intravenous; no great effusion of plaudits,
then, for that particular manifest. It could entertain, sustain, its mean
-ing by means subterrane. It came to the surface, for instance, in Paris
in the nineteen thirties, rendering each clangorous scene timely and
dangerous.
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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