num_pages: 183
description: A go-for-broke essay collection that blends cultural close reading and dicey autobiographyPast compunction expressly unbeholden these twenty-four single-subject essays train focus on a startling miscellany of topics Foot Washing Dossiers Brer Rabbit Housesitting Man Roulette the Locus Amoenusthat begin to unpack the essayist himself and his lifes 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 Blanchfields 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 projects 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?
language: English
title: Proxies: Essays Near Knowing
publisher: Nightboat Books