Rectangularity controls the setting
Of tables, the organization of paint
On canvas, and the sport of ping-pong.
Once perpendiculars have been established
Various circular forms may be introduced:
Glasses, soup bowls, loops of color
Intended to suggest our own possible
Movements through more extensive spaces,
As when we drink, or sink into imaginary
Depths of Prussian blue, or hit the ball
Approaching us on its strict trajectory.
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.
Subscribe for free: Stitcher | Apple Podcasts | Google Play