Yes I helped decree it.
In the white-walled
room of before with
strangers + veils.
Don’t think I don’t think
about it daily. Up here
fumigating my oriel
according to the Newer
Ordering. I feel exactly
how we got here. We
thought. Then we did
as we thought. Then
answered + when we
answered how we did
as we thought
what was was
no one could afford
the self-inducing
covenant. You’d be
surprised what little
we, the slighter figures
there among the rest,
could do in the room,
strobing like sight lines
in the jet bridge.
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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