There are no cattle in Abilene.
I expected cattle.
I thought they trafficked in cattle in Abilene.
And diners. I expected diners.
Abilene isn’t even western anymore.
There are more foreign cars than cows.
The women are right out of Vogue.
I expected swimming holes and I got heated pools.
You could prowl the streets naked and never
Get arrested.
You could order coq au vin at any coffee shop
And get it, but fried chicken.
Never.
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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