At first, we spoke in many languages.
Mainly jabbed and pointed amidst
The din of pounding and sawing. But
Gradually, as we toiled, a lingua franca
Did emerge-with words like nail,
Level and joint compound. Still,
I don't think you could have called it
A true tongue until the forty-first night,
When Naguib, that one-eyed mason
From Ur, composed a scabrous-even
Scurrilous-song, so very infectious we
Couldn't help but clap and sing along.
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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