It is nothing new
for horses to be harnessed to hemispheres
it has happened at intervals
since the famous first experiment
when we know how to do a thing
we do it again
night or day the horses
are hitched up in teams
hemispheres are brought together
half to half
all the air is drawn out from between them
the seal is as wax
at a command the teams begin to haul
raising the vibrating chains
and the sphere
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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