I owe all this to Gabriel Ratchet. It was he who arranged for the round-trip ticket, two seats side by side, on Scandinavian Airlines, got me my reservation in the King Gustaf Holiday Inn, deodorized my basket, put in the new sheets, put on my new, formal black sack with the white ribbon drawstring around the top and bathed my suppurating stumps for the journey. He even carried one end of my wicker laundry basket when I went aboard. In the darkness, I heard him instructing the stewardesses as to how to clean me, how to feed and water me and when to turn me. I heard money changing hands. I heard his stomachy laugh and the ladies’ bovine grunts. I think I heard a stewardess pat his little bald head. Then came my first lift-off. The great surge of the old Boeing 747 sliding my butt and stumps again one end of the basket and the the floating and my ears popping. end glorious, golden dreams in my black chute. Into non-stop gliding through images of published books, careful emendations, gr…
Suggested Reading
Molly
By Blake Butler“Every sentence that I’ve tried to put here to frame the moment feels like a doormat laid on blood, an unstoppable force colliding with an intolerable object in slow motion, beyond the need of being named.”
The Daily
First Person
The Art of Poetry No. 114
By Sharon Olds
From left, Galway Kinnell, Robert Hass, Olds, and Brenda Hillman in the Oakley house at the Community of Writers, Olympic Valley, California, 1989. Courtesy of Sharon Olds and the Community of Writers.
Sharon Olds published her first book, Satan Says, in 1980, at the age of thirty-seven. The book is organized into four sections, “Daughter,” “Woman,” “Mother,” and “Journey,” and it begins with its title poem, whose speaker is locked in a box she can open only by repeating after Satan: “Say shit, say death, say fuck the father.” At the time, Olds—who was born in San Francisco, graduated from Stanford, and received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia—was married to a psychiatrist, and she spent her days on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, caring for their two young children. Not long after the book’s publication, she told me last year, someone who had invited her to give a reading picked her up at the airport and said, “I thought you would look angrier.”
From the Archive, Issue 244
Interview
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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