November 11, 2019 Issue

Three pieces in this week’s issue that I enjoyed immensely: Johanna Fateman's “Goings On About Town: Art: Howardena Pindell”; Nick Paumgarten’s “The Symptoms”; and Dan Chiasson’s “Make It Old.” 

Fateman’s note contains a wonderful description of Howardena Pindell’s paintings:

Punctuating the surfaces of these handsome abstractions are seams—fissures, really—bridged by stitches resembling little teeth, and fragments of photographs and postcards. They lend the paint-toughened surfaces a pieced-together fragility and form their swirling and fanning interior structures. The found imagery, emerging from dense areas of acrylic color, includes disembodied hands, a frog, and a statue of Shiva. Neither random nor coherent, the fragments seem to represent the impressionistic puzzle pieces of partial recollection, which the compositions dynamically integrate into a meaningfully illogical whole.

Paumgarten, in his “The Symptoms,” writes about three concussions he suffered playing “beer league” hockey. Here’s his description of the first one:

I didn’t lose consciousness, or even my footing. When it was over, I skated away, with a ludicrous grin but without every item of my equipment or all of my wits. I had a sudden headache and a sense already of an alteration in the fabric of the world beyond the confines of my skull. Teammates leered at me. Aluminum rink light glinted off a thicket of surfaces: ice, plexiglass, helmets, sticks. The referee bent to report the infractions to the timekeeper, through a slot in the glass. In the penalty box, I fought the urge to lie down.

That “Aluminum rink light glinted off a thicket of surfaces: ice, plexiglass, helmets, sticks” is excellent.

Chiasson’s piece reviews Charles Wright’s new collection Oblivion Banjo. Chiasson says of Wright’s poetry, 

Within the repetitive cycles of his verse we find the loveliest surprises: an afternoon in the cupola at Emily Dickinson’s house, the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet, the “sizzle like E.T.’s finger,” the “afternoon undervoices” of kids playing red rover.

Adorning the piece is a delightful portrait of Wright by Tom Bachtell, who for many years illustrated “Goings On About Town.” It’s great to see him back in the magazine. 

Tom Bachtell, "Charles Wright"