Dear Reader,
Welcome to issue four, which marks the beginning of our second year of canalizare here at The Wall. We are pleased to have a contributor to our inaugural issue, Carmen Firan, return as the curator for this issue’s Pocket Anthology of writers and artists from Romania, the subject of which is the immensely timely, “Amnesia." We have multiple In Sight artworks in this issue: The artist Jorden opens the issue with a narrative in wood entitled Pope Joan, and this issue is blessed with Bill Hayward’s arresting “Moonlight Catechism,” a still from his new film, Asphalt, Muscle & Bone, as well as Kelvin James’s photo of a mural in peril on 108th Street in Manhattan. From the same meridian (108th Street) but across town on and near Amsterdam Avenue are the powerfully intimate photos of a four-block village in J. Maya Luz’s portfolio Good Neighbors. Darton’s Notes Towards a Dao of Writing highlights the “reciprocal processes of reading and writing” and explores the space opened through allusive language. And in Mills’s meditation on Judge Dee, she describes the fascinating history of this series of novels written by the 20th century Dutch diplomat, Robert van Gulik, in such a way as to reflect the original Judge Dee oral tales from the 7th century (but with anachronisms from the Ming dynasty some 700-900 years later, when the original tales were put in writing). Finally, we have some real delights in both our Remarkable Reads and ¡Viva! sections, including reviews of noir and uncanny novels as well as celebrations of the lives of greats we have recently lost. And what would a Wall be without an Endgame and of course a Colophon? —Hardy Griffin |