I have a friend who has a friend
Who asked her to place her hand
And place a flower on Samuel Beckett’s grave
On his behalf.
This man, who is in the theater, had corresponded with Sam.
My friend asked me to join her to do this.
It seemed reason enough to come to Paris.
And it was.
And there, quite a surprise, was Susan Sontag’s grave.
And now it’s time to get the fuck out
Of this beautiful pointlessness.
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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