Going to visit my mother is like starting in on a piece by
Beckett.
You know that sense of sinking through crust,
the low black oh no of the little room
with walls too close, so knowable.
Clink and slow fade of toys that belong in memory
but wrongly appear here, vagrant and suffocated
on a page of pain,
Worse
she says when I ask.
And as in Beckett some high humor grazes
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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