Proxies: Essays Near Knowing

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Proxies: Essays Near Knowing

Past compunction, expressly unbeholden, these twenty-four single-subject essays train focus on a startling miscellany of topics â€”Foot Washing, Dossiers, Brâ€™er Rabbit, Housesitting, Man Roulette, the Locus Amoenusâ€”that begin to unpack the essayist himself and his lifeâ€™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 â€œtotal suppression of recourse to authoritative sources,â€ engineers Brian Blanchfieldâ€™s disarming mode of independent intellection. The â€œrepeatable experimentâ€ 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 projectâ€™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, â€œWhat do I know?â€

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