Enjoy the latest issue of INTERFACES
FacebookTwitterShare Voilá, the latest issue of INTERFACES, internationally renowned journal of text and image. This issue focuses on format and the myriad ways writers, artists, sculptors, and photographers play with format to achieve their effects. Included is my extended essay and on-camera interview with Peter Sacks who began making the tiniest of images rendered with a…
Read MoreRoberta Allen: Art and Language as One
“Drawing saved me from the insanity of my family.”
Allen’s art has been exhibited globally, and her more than 200 stories have been anthologized and published in collections as well as literary journals. She is a conceptual artist: the connection between writing and art is vivid in her work—text and image are one as you can see in this recent piece shown beside.
Read MoreFrederic Tuten Fulfills a Youthful Fantasy
“George Moore said, ‘School … killed the life of love and art.’ I would not let it kill me.” As a young teenager, distinguished novelist and short story writer Frederic Tuten dreamed of being a painter and living in Paris. Inspired by such books as George Moore’s memoir, Confessions of a Young Man, and…
Read MoreHow Peter Sacks Joined the Greats
“Paint seems more embedded in the cosmos than language.” The Poet Picked Up a Paintbrush You are about to witness a historic moment. A little more than twenty years ago, Peter Sacks, a successful poet and Harvard professor, decided to pick up a paintbrush for the first time. Today, hailed internationally, his work is…
Read MoreEvan Hunter/Ed McBain, “there is no frame in writing.”
Among the very rare group of writers whose books have sold over 100 million copies, the inventor of the police procedural with his dozens of 87th Precinct novels, the author of The Blackboard Jungle, and the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” Evan Hunter as the boy Salvatore Lombino was art editor of his school…
Read MoreLouise Glück, Nobel Poet and Sometime Painter.
“I couldn’t bear the endless forfeits [painting] involved.” In her youth, Glück painted which, in her essay “Education of the Poet,” she describes as “a small gift.” To this she adds, “Small but, like my other aptitudes, relentlessly developed. At some point in my late teens I realized I was at the end of what…
Read More“Unorthodox”: A Fantasy Based on a Fiction
We all know that when a movie opens with “based on” or “inspired by” true events that what we are about to see is only remotely connected with historic truth. But we want to believe we’re getting lived reality and not just writerly invention so we’re happy to accept the fiction that follows. “Unorthodox,” the…
Read MoreFreeman Dyson, Brilliant and Wrongheaded
Freeman Dyson, the legendary polymath of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, died a week and a half ago. He leaves behind prodigious contributions in mathematics and physics and, perhaps equally important, an iconoclastic philosophy and gadfly writings that challenged consensus thinking, particularly, and rather notoriously, in the sphere of climate change. He also promoted some…
Read More“Parasite” is not what you’re being told it is. A review with spoilers.
“Parasite” (Bong Joon-Ho 2019) “Parasite” is not what you’re being told it is. A review with spoilers. The New York Times this morning joins other media commentators in describing this movie as a “class-struggle thriller” and, in the same post-Oscar article, as a “comedy-thriller.” These are misleading descriptives. Parasite is not about class struggle, although…
Read MoreAmiri Baraka: “Politics is to protect truth and beauty”
“Politics is to protect truth and beauty.” Amiri Baraka, famed leader of the Black Arts Movement, was a poet, playwright, jazz critic, and actor. He was also a notorious political revolutionary who did not cease protesting despite arrests and beatings by the Newark police and struggling to install an honest government that would respond to…
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