We’ve got to get these wagons unloaded. The channel, tubing, I beam, pipe, rod, conduit, connectors, the milled bombs, the forged doohickeys—I forget what they’re called, are those bells? Why are we stocking bells?—those drilled blocks, the bolts, the cams, tailpipe, the Torquemada, tensiometers, and if that is a case of Hi-Bounce Pinkys I can’t believe it, but maybe we are to improve our morale with ball games, unload them, too, unload it all. The mattresses, the dressers, the mannequins, the raincoats, the marshmallows, the monster makeup, the marble cake, the crabs, the electrical tape, the torque wrenches, the pills, the mustard plasts, the canaries, the tomato starts, the nonmedicine, the dogs, the magazines, the men’s underwear, the dailies, the trusses, the small-caliber arms, the hex nuts, the candy. Did anyone see my wife drive up? Might have sat there a bit and then eased off? I have found her before down at the corner pottoed after easing off like that, no honking or atte…
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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