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Proxies: Essays Near Knowing
Proxies: Essays Near Knowing | Brian Blanchfield
8 posts | 5 read | 49 to read
Past compunction, expressly unbeholden, these twenty-four single-subject essays train focus on a startling miscellany of topics Foot Washing, Dossiers, Br er Rabbit, Housesitting, Man Roulette, the Locus Amoenus that begin to unpack the essayist himself and his life s rotating concerns: sex and sexuality, poetry and poetics, subject positions in American labor (not excluding academia), and his upbringing in working-class, Primitive Baptist, central-piedmont North Carolina. In Proxies an original constraint, a total suppression of recourse to authoritative sources, engineers Brian Blanchfield s disarming mode of independent intellection. The repeatable experiment to draw only from what he knows, estimates, remembers, and misremembers about the subject at hand often opens onto an unusually candid assessment of self and situation. The project s driving impulse, courting error, peculiar in an era of crowd-sourced Wiki-knowledge, is at least as old as the one Montaigne had when, putting all the books back on the shelf, he asked, What do I know? "
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bookriot
Proxies: Essays Near Knowing | Brian Blanchfield
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Pickpick

Such an interesting book of essays. They are rich, dense in a good way, essays to savor and ponder. Blanchfield does amazing things with language. - @RebeccaH

rebuketodali I've been reading this one very slowly during my commute over the past month. It's so fantastic. 8y
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RebeccaH
Proxies: Essays Near Knowing | Brian Blanchfield
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Pickpick

Such an interesting book of essays. They are rich, dense in a good way, essays to savor and ponder. Blanchfield does amazing things with language.

15 likes1 stack add
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RebeccaH
Proxies: Essays Near Knowing | Brian Blanchfield
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Up next and in the middle of.

shawnmooney I'm so curious to see what you think of the book of essays! 8y
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Kenny
Proxies: Essays Near Knowing | Brian Blanchfield
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I try to sound smart and clever when I write these reviews, but this book is better than me so what can I say? I can't tell you how much I love it, how much I miss it when I'm not readIng it. I'll say this. You need it if you love Maggie Nelson or Hilton Als or Mary Ruefle or Claudia Rankine.

MMFinck I adore this review. The first line sealed it. 9y
BookishFeminist I have not heard of this book before but I'm gonna have to get this, especially with whose writing you compared it to! 9y
Robspillman 100% 9y
LianneB Great review. It's going in my TBR. 9y
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quote
Robspillman
Proxies: Essays Near Knowing | Brian Blanchfield
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"This is a book braver than I am."
Mind being blown.

Kenny That last line is great too. (I'm about to read this book until I fall asleep. If it lets me sleep.) 9y
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