Issue 31

Nothing is even. Every clear image is merely a question of resolution. A question of the threshold beyond which the fine-grain turns into the invisible, the point at which the parts are subsumed into the whole. Ratios and tolerances hold an edifice of exactitude in the eyes of the observer, leading them to believe in the fiction of a straight line, a flat floor, an even edge, an uninterrupted field. Zoom in far enough and the pixels are revealed, the tiny splines that make up the continuous curve. Reality is rendered obsolete—a matter of slippery perception, scale and distance. 

0.62 inches separates Pidgin 31 from past issues. This new measurement, roughly the width of a thumb, nestled against the issue’s interior fold, revives the trusty domain of textual surplus: the footnote.  Citations, asides, comments, and notes occupy this new zone of marginalia. Like the pea under the proverbial mattress pile, this change is perhaps only noticeable to the most neurotic editorial princesses (yours truly), but this shim on the internal edge has subtly adjusted our editorial landscape. It pushed our processes off-kilter, and all-but-obliterated our old standby, the endnote. We introduced the incremental fissure opened by this tiny column of text with the hopes of allowing readers to take in both the body of text and its references concurrently.  But it also exposed the content of the issue. Much of what follows deals with perceptual minutia and the fine lines that separate reality from fiction, care from obsession. 

At 196 pages, the issue’s slimness itself speaks to the impact of the single increment, and the scale of magnitude that can be achieved by a modest shim. It reacts against the bulk of Issue 30, and the loud, ceremonial significance of three decades of Pidgin publications. This issue proclaims its importance more softly, yet solidly—owning every fractionated inch of material. The footnote’s carefully-guarded space, at times empty, at times brimming with content, exists as an integral part of the whole picture, a magnified pixel that lines the inside of each page, contributing to its bulk. 

After reading Issue 31, you may want to try putting it under your chair leg. Sit back down. How do things look, after the adjustment?

Pidgin 31 includes contributions from:

David R. Shanks, Robin V Hueppe, Pablo Castillo Luna, Jacquelyn Do, Joey Guadagno, An Tairan, Win Overholser, Amelyn Ng, Anoushka Mariwala, Zachary Schumacher, Owen Caraway, Lucas Gillie, Jacqueline Mix, Andrew Herscher, Evan Pavka, Guanglei Zhang, Xingyu Zhang, and Fangyi Jiang.

Fall 2023