The way to this is. Not easy to find when you know
how it ends, the clutter of was. Hard enough
finding one's own face in the brass
plaque of the New York Trust pulsing with taxis
at the end of a brazen century. How much harder
to follow, in a yellowed book, Englished
from an uncongenial tongue, the thread
of an argument even the Old World has lost
interest in arguing—follow it back
through a disused labyrinth till you see
nothing in the dark save the line,
only the line before you, silver blue as a vein
of electricity held lightly between thumb and forefinger.
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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