Imagine you at the beginning of the
longest walk of your life, no thought given to
shoes, socks, toothpaste, hats, and the other
rip-rap, nothing of watches or water, sleeping
on the ground or in hay,
setting out for the east, for Padua,
for Venice, no knowledge of the churches you’d pass or the paintings
or frescoes inside, say Giotto, no friends anywhere
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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