As capable a troupe of super-
stars as we could hope for.
But which one, having dressed
in hand-me-downs out of a skimpy
wardrobe, is acting up?
However
each exhorts us, we can hardly
tell them apart. Is this what
ensemble playing means?
But now
a grizzled king, tricked out
in assorted stinking body rags
lurched roaring
across the boards,
wields a dagger athirst for blood,
the rest of the cast swept along,
subject to his madness.
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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