Food for the fat is like air. It fills you up
and lifts you out of the chair where otherwise
you sit like a dead seal.
But with pastry you soar.
The roar of ignition, the heavy ground recedes.
Cares, sorrows sift out and float in air, just
another cloud—whipped cream,
schlag—it does not
tempt you, does not preempt the plans for the day,
those plans which, stuck in your chair, you despaired
of effecting.
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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