You are my most favorite artist. Though I know
very little about your work. Some of your followers I know:
Mattia Preti, who toiled so hard to so little
effect (though it was enough). Luca Giordano, involved
with some of the darkest reds ever painted, and lucent greens,
thought he had discovered the secret of the foxgloves.
But it was too late. They had already disappeared
because they had been planted in some other place.
Someone sent some bread up
along with a flask of wine, to cheer him up,
but the old, old secret of the foxgloves, never
to be divined, won’t ever go away.
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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