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4.15 AVERAGE
4.15 AVERAGE
reflective
slow-paced
excellent condition, even after being shoved in my backpack over and over. sturdy and maintains its gloss. mine came with original annotations by a friend (dear) and i regrettably left accidental nail polish streaks from my clawed reading position. all the better for the best!!
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
In my search for new essayists to follow, Blanchfield's work (along with his poetry) comes highly recommended--I understand why.
As summaries of the collection assert, this is an essayist left alone to explore himself--his knowledge, his personal condition, his cultural aplomb, the connections he discovers there, all without consulting authority. The result is interesting, as occasionally his errors find connections otherwise unlooked for or sometimes his discoveries were made obvious when re-examined, sublimated as they were to appear afresh as original connection. His essays are intimate, on occasion a bit uncomfortable in their frankness on family or sexuality, but if read as personal--as a man himself working to understand the events of his life--merely genuine.
I don't know how many of these I will take with me; after all, these are Blanchfield's mind, not mine. Nevertheless, I never found their journeys uninspired or uninteresting: the empathetic differences between the words "this" and "that," or the Robin Hood workings of The Dukes of Hazzard, or the etymologies of meeting "minutes," or the coveting of a tumbleweed of happenstance. Blanchfield follows all where they take him, much it seems as his disparate jobs have led him from recollection to recollection.
As summaries of the collection assert, this is an essayist left alone to explore himself--his knowledge, his personal condition, his cultural aplomb, the connections he discovers there, all without consulting authority. The result is interesting, as occasionally his errors find connections otherwise unlooked for or sometimes his discoveries were made obvious when re-examined, sublimated as they were to appear afresh as original connection. His essays are intimate, on occasion a bit uncomfortable in their frankness on family or sexuality, but if read as personal--as a man himself working to understand the events of his life--merely genuine.
I don't know how many of these I will take with me; after all, these are Blanchfield's mind, not mine. Nevertheless, I never found their journeys uninspired or uninteresting: the empathetic differences between the words "this" and "that," or the Robin Hood workings of The Dukes of Hazzard, or the etymologies of meeting "minutes," or the coveting of a tumbleweed of happenstance. Blanchfield follows all where they take him, much it seems as his disparate jobs have led him from recollection to recollection.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content, Toxic relationship, Death of parent
Moderate: Drug use
My friend Dan and I backpacked together for a few months after college and invented a game called Toss. I'd offer him a topic, and then Dan would free associate until his well ran dry. Then I'd go until I finished, at which point Dan would toss me a new word. We found the most generative topics were ones like urinal -- things of the everyday that are rarely discussed.
PROXIES has the same format, and I loved it. It's a poet's essay collection. Associative, vulnerable, wonderful. I think Maggie Nelson calls it erudite, too -- which is spot-on. Some favorite chapters on: propositionizing, man roulette, the leave, frottage ("I can't bring myself to rhyme it with cottage..."), the understory, and the near term. I will definitely be working with PROXIES with college writing students.
PROXIES has the same format, and I loved it. It's a poet's essay collection. Associative, vulnerable, wonderful. I think Maggie Nelson calls it erudite, too -- which is spot-on. Some favorite chapters on: propositionizing, man roulette, the leave, frottage ("I can't bring myself to rhyme it with cottage..."), the understory, and the near term. I will definitely be working with PROXIES with college writing students.
Blanchfield's Proxies is an exercise that grasps the broad and the narrow, astounding in its willingness to accept the frames of ones own knowledge and associations. Driven by just how much is already locked away, how much the author already knows, each essay in Proxies instills a faith in the reader that we learn even in error. In an era defined by constant access to knowledge and the ability to fact check every conversation, Proxies is a reminder that we don't need to and that we have so much to gain for letting intuition and experience lead.
I heard Blanchfield read "On House Sitting" at the Queer Heart panel at the &Now conference a few years back and have been eager to read this collection. The last essay starts there, actually (at the conference), a meditation on queer love in uncertain times. All of these essays are tightly constructed yet airy with rumination and allowing for errata. I especially appreciated the ways Blanchfield writes about the South and also the academic job market for creative writers. Favorites, in addition to the aforementioned: "On Tumbleweed"; "On Confoundedness"; "On the Leave"; "On Peripersonal Space"; "On Frottage".
Proxies is a crisp and observant collection. I think I may have missed more than two thirds of what Blanchfield was writing, but what I understood I found fascinating.
It's also fun to read a book that makes you look up a new word every few pages.
It's also fun to read a book that makes you look up a new word every few pages.
wonderful book i love. taught me something about following your gut!
