Airborne it's like a dream. It's dreamy. It's for
all the world like something
ants have made, something gigantic fomented
and foisted upon us by ants, clearings and houses, these
anticipatory trees and roads, the extremely
antic squiggles and zigzags traced
among the selfsame trees with a convincingly
antlike insouciance and sense of random
and undirected energy.
Ah, but of course
ants are anything but random!
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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