This is what comes of a Lammas Eve, tho I did not think of that at all this
year until I had awakend at two in the night with the lines “My mother
would be a falconress. And I a falcon at her wrist” being repeated insistently
in my mind. I got up and took my notebook into the kitchen, for it would
not let go. And when I wrote down the hour and date, I saw it was Lammas
“August I, 1964,” I wrote: “Lammas tide, 2 AM.” Then I remembered that
George Stanley had told me that Saturn, my birth-planet, was particularly
brilliant in the sky. “But that’s between one- thirty and two in the morning,’
he said, “long after you are asleep.”
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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