SIMPLICITY, INTRICACY, AND BEYOND

Blair presents ruminations on a wide variety of topics.

In his latest “hypervolume,” the author creates collages of images (blank screens, blurry snapshots, photos of concrete) and combines them with various kinds of text, ranging from bullet-pointed historical facts to personal observations to copies of correspondence. A scattered few passages from the book are intriguing for the world-view they represent, but even these are undermined by other inclusions, such as the “open letter” the author sent to the FBI in 2024 acknowledging some of the mistakes present in the multiple copies of his earlier book that he had sent to FBI headquarters (readers may reasonably question the wisdom of sending unsolicited copies of one’s book to FBI headquarters). Blair haphazardly dispenses historical information; he tells his readers that on January 8, 1790, George Washington gave the first State of the Union, which is true, but he also makes the statement that in January of 2021, “many Americans became super-worried about the U.S.,” which is so generic it’s practically meaningless. As with the author’s earlier hypervolumes, it’s virtually impossible to imagine an engaged readership for this work beyond Blair himself. The pages are filled with mysterious ephemera that can only have significance to the author: random photos of highways, buildings, and clouds; pictures of the covers of his earlier books; an old photo of his aunt and uncle; long transcripts of arguments he’s had on Facebook Messenger; and so on, endlessly. Readers will quickly get the impression that they are seeing the private, disjointed jottings of an author who’s deeply incorrect about how interesting his random thoughts are to other people. There are occasional compelling notes in the work, but the vast bulk of it is noise.

A weird, discordant jumble of one man’s thoughts, photos, and online arguments.