I realize of course that I’m no longer worthy of the name musician, if I ever was, though officially I’m still registered as a specially-funded pianoforte soloist with Segismundo Alegría and the Vienna Philharmonic for the duration of the Estabrook Festival, Summer 1978. I know this is true, because one of my new Anarchist friends at the Black Orchid Bar actually called the Festival offices to check me out; the secretary told him she wasn’t allowed to comment on my musical competence, “if any,” but I was in fact on record with them in what she called a “semiactive file’’; and then she made some fantastic allusion to suicidal tendencies I was supposed to have. I don’t know what to make of this last charge except to deny it straight out; the other insults are harder to answer, because I really do feel semiactive these days and I’m not sure how I’d characterize my musical ability except to say that it’s dubious and maybe even preterite; I suppose that’s why I’m out here campaigning for the Anarchists right now instead of making music the way God meant me to.
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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