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4.15 AVERAGE
4.15 AVERAGE
This book took me awhile. The essays are short and sometimes felt less accessible to a girl who's been out of theory class a minute. There's also a lot of mundanity. However! I appreciated the challenge. Each essay is, in a Montaigne tradition "on" something. Like "On Understory" or "On Bre'r Rabbit." I appreciated how Blanchfield was able to tie the subject to something personal. It was a journey, building up to a composite of meanings for each of the subjects. I was very inspired by this book and the connections and lenses he was able to apply or extract from each subject. A unique collection for sure
challenging
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
On “This American Life” you hear Ross Gay and fall in love with his Book of Delights. In his magnanimity, Gay turns you on to Proxies, an essay collection by the poet Brian Blanchfield, who calls it a book that is braver than he, told in the course of time that needs doing, spoken as if by his representative shepherd.
You fall in love anew. These essays demand interrobangs in lengthening, enlarging snakes. Each line reveals in mastery its truth, and the following holds truer still. You’re invited to a game of sardines, a hide-and-seek variant that “builds into the familiar format the stirring new elements of conspiracy, refuge, betrayal, gratification deferral, cultural assimilation, and sustained bodily contact.” You’re ferried on a voyage of discovering as though remembering, to the place “behind the construct of the idyll.” You’re lured into an “overburdened pair of briefs” and instructed “by transgressing the sacrosanct to leave be.”
How does one extract the choicest morsels from a book for which the only fitting excerpt is the book itself? Your need to integrate each paragraph into your examined clutch subsumes and eclipses all others and redefines necessity. The author points, and you recognize this as “the act that sends the gaze of others in a direction referenced by an outstretched arm and indicating finger.” You read. You gaze. You turn the page.
You feel strapped to a Procrustean bed in which a part of you cannot escape its grip before consuming every word while another aims to stretch each phrase across eternity. At the onset of your confinement you feel “lucky if you can read the script you’re acting out.” Slowly you surrender, allow the text to bear down and to rearrange your parts. In so doing you come to understand “the thought of the world whereby it is experienced is better than the world” and that “openness happens in the midst of being,” and you relent in full, as does the bed. Conveyed by life, you find, is narrative advance and the quest to make it mean.
You read a book by Brian Blanchfield, a series of black marks on paper, and exit it altered. Its name is Proxies. Evoked in its totality: a godmade boulder so replete that even its creator strains to lift it.
And to think you nearly skipped it because its cover is so plain.
i'd give this 10 stars if i could. one of my dreambooks.
This collection of beautifully written essays explores what makes us human and how important it is to find yourself in your world. I've read each essay more than once and glean some new meaning with each read. Blanchfield has a way of wielding his words that is at once unreachable and entirely accessible. Blanchfield's perspective is real and his essays carry the weight of his reality with expertly crafted glimpses into an important world.
Blanchfield's collection of essays is challenging and alluring. It's honest and raw (which I guess I write about a lot but most personal explorations are? i don't know someone help me out here!) He mixes academic explorations with personal experiences, wondering about the semiotics of cruising or exploring house sitting using queer theory. I went back and forth on the book for the first five chapters or so deciding whether or not I needed to finish it but once you get a head for his writing, it is entrancing. The conclusions to each essay sometimes felt abrupt but they were powerful! I always needed some time to think and process after finishing each essay. Recommend to friends who are interested in some different approaches to the essay.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced