I will not sleep.
Men sleep and the beasts sleep, and no one watches.
The paid watchmen going their rounds
Are drowsy or a little drunk. They cannot be depended on.
The night shift in the upstairs shop lounges on the window
sill.
He has his dreams. I must watch for him.
The circuits are all alive, but there is no one to give warning.
Without watchers we are not safe.
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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