We were nostalgic for the time when the pointillist paintings had looked like autumnal birch trees, rather than for the time when the autumnal birch trees had looked like pointillist paintings. We were nostalgic for the certainty that the bird we heard singing sweetly in the suburban forest was a recording, rather than being certain that what we thought was a recording was actually a bird. We were nostalgic for the care that had gone into the realism of the polyester lilies we had placed our foolish noses in, spoiling for perfume.
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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