After I make my home dark
I wander through the few
quiet rooms and let
the bright blinking eyes
of the continuing electricity
take me in. The modem, forever
streaming its signals in and back
out again to the air of the
living room, flashes the language of
its six green indicators
into the dim, and I’m not
untouched. By the door,
the alarm pad keeps its emerald
beacon of earnest defense
burning on, and I’m not
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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