Reviews of MOTHER MAY I? and THE FLOYD ARCHIVES (2nd Edition)
Steven Heller, Print Magazine Drawn in a light R.O. Blechman-like squiggly line style, Boxer bases many of her comic situations on books, papers, and theories by and about Dr. Freud ... There is just enough Freudian ballast to keep her strips from sinking into the depths of total absurdity (at the end of the book, Boxer includes case notes on Freud's own patients that are incredibly fascinating), yet enough skepticism and sarcasm to keep both serious Freudian veterans and casual dabblers completely amused. ... Although Boxer claims Floyd is not Freud (and it's true; for example, Freud was not a bird). Boxer's intellectually stimulating and comically entertaining strips lean towards the metaphysical. Michael Roth,Tablet Magazine : Dr. Floyd and his animal patients are back--Mr. Bunnyman is still anxious, Mr. Wolfman is still wrestling with his alter ego, and Rat Ma'am is still wondering what to bury and what to give away. But now they are joined by an aggressive rabbit (Hans Klein), the black sheep Melanin Klein and her hostile daughter Melittle Klein, and the little pig Squiggle-Piggle (named for a game used by the British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott in treating children). ... Somehow the characters find a way to gesture to what Winnicott called a holding environment, a place of affection--though they have to kill a totem figure to get there. ... Sarah Boxer's drawings are delightful, and she has completely internalized the psychoanalytic worldview that she satirizes. Freud stressed that humor, like dreams, "get around restrictions and open up sources of pleasure that have become inaccessible." There's plenty of pleasure to be found in Boxer's books ... Her psychoanalytic comix are ingeniously playful reminders of how much we carry around, no matter how far we think we've moved on from the Freudian fantasyland. Gail Boldt, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association Mother May I? finds Mr. Bunnyman, Mr. Wolfman, Lambskin, and Rat Ma’am stranded together in the wilderness, struggling to determine how to live, as Boxer says, “in the post-Floydian landscape, half treated, half mad” (p. ix). Drawing from Totem and Taboo (1912–1913), Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), and Moses and Monotheism (1939), we find our characters arguing over whether to kill Dr. Floyd by burning an effigy or to deify him by creating a totem.... In the Floyd Archives and Mother May I?, much like psychoanalysis itself, raise questions, evoke intensities of feeling, make us uncomfortable, and leave us wanting both more and less. In the best tradition of psychoanalysis, Boxer's books make it clear that these things are ours to contend with." Hannah Grieco, Washington City Paper An eagerly-awaited sequel to Sarah Boxer’s graphic novel In the Floyd Archives, Mother May I? is a hilarious and smart adult dive into psychotherapy via adorable animal main characters. Their psychoanalyst has abandoned them and they now must find a way to cope, but it’s hard. Where In the Floyd Archives showed Boxer lovingly spoofing Freud, now we see her satirically explore child psychoanalysts Melanie Klein and DW Winnicott. Boxer is a brilliant writer, known for her work in The Atlantic and The New York Times, and here, she charms us with witty, often cutting humor that is deeply thoughtful. Kirkus Reviews ... A kooky and witty illustrated tale that’s full of intelligence and educational value. |
Reviews of Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks From the Wild Web (Vintage, 2008) Don't LOL: The Strange Symbiosis of Blogs and Literature, New York Magazine, Feb. 24, 2008, By Sam Anderson The consistent lesson of Sarah Boxer’s rewarding new collection, Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks From the Wild Web, which includes Under Odysseus [is this]: The best blogs set fire to the dry abstractions of official culture—Greek myth, affirmative action, cosmology, presidential politics—with the spark of immediate, personal enthusiasm. ... From roughly 80 million sites, Boxer has picked 27 that strike her as “funnier, more ambitious, better written, smarter, and (I think) more universally appealing”; anyone who thinks of blogs as wastelands of navel-gazing (Thurs, Feb 21: “My butt hurts”) is bound to be pleasantly surprised. ... A handful of these are already very popular ... The best selections, however, are the surprises. AngryBlackBitch (“Practicing the Fine Art of Bitchitude”) riffs on the racist implications of King Kong and the opponents of affirmative action: “College ain’t a meritocracy, but that fact is better explored through a conversation with the heir to your right and not the black chick to your left.” I Blame the Patriarchy, written from the point of view of a “queer pro-choice atheist and aesthete,” smartly interrogates Abu Ghraib and “the humiliative superpowers of women’s panties.” ... A print anthology of blog writing seems, at first, to be a deeply paradoxical genre—roughly the equivalent of a cave painting about digital photography, an eight-track guide to ripping MP3s, or a Claymation documentary about the high-tech magic of CGI. ... And yet, for some of us, the combination makes a certain intuitive sense. ... it’s nice to have the experience curated—to have this virtual Proteus (to put it in Homeric terms) wrestled down for textual inspection. Y'all Writing, The New Republic, Feb. 29, 2008, By Jacob Rubin Sarah Boxer has called blog-writing id writing--I might call it y’all writing. When writing for y’all, after all, there needs to be a base-line insouciance, an insistence that one isn’t writing for the MSM (Mainstream Media); that one doesn’t care who does or does not hear it--a contrarian, underdog valence. ... And yet when stolen out of the Times Square of the web and sequestered on the page, that attitude seems much less ballsy and carefree and much more fragile and earnest. Such a public forum, ironically, invites confession. Baring themselves to the world, these writers are bravely eager to connect, a desire, one suspects, the Internet can help enlarge far better than it can help fulfill. In the bazaar of y’alls, everyone seems to want to be, and to find, a you. For the loneliness, unevenness, and frequent poignancy of Ultimate Blogs, imagine an anthology of some other y’all genre--an anthology of the Best Bathroom Graffiti, say, or Best Personal Ads, with one addition: author bios. It’s fitting that Ultimate Blogs contains the best, and most human, “notes about the contributor” section I’ve read in recent years. ... We learn how the breakdown of Nina Paley’s marriage led to the creation of her animated adaptation of the Ramayana, or why Tony Karon stopped working with the African National Congress after Mandela’s release from prison. These glimpses into the authors’ lives encapsulate the best quality of this book--and of blogs, generally. They provide a rousing awareness that many people, in many places, are thinking, feeling, and eager to connect--even if most of us, separated by the old-fashioned fact of distance, cannot reach them. |
On "The Exemplary Narcissism of Snoopy," in The Atlantic, November, 2015
Learning to Write by Sedulous Aping, Law Prose Lesson #235, on Bryan Garner's Law Prose blog What did David Foster Wallace and Robert Louis Stevenson have in common? They taught themselves to write better using the same technique: reading short passages from superb writers, trying to re-create from memory the passages they’d just read, and then assessing how their own versions compared with the originals. The assumption was always that the original was superlative—and that each departure from exact replication was a slight failure. It’s a superb technique to improve your command of syntax, punctuation, and phrasing. ... So let’s try this technique on a passage I’ll suggest. It’s a splendid opening paragraph from the current Atlantic Monthly. The piece is Sarah Boxer’s “The Exemplary Narcissism of Snoopy.” It’s only two sentences, a short one and a long one. The second sentence will be the challenge for you to re-create from memory. But try. I suggest that you read it three times, then put it aside and try to write out the passage without looking back at the original. On "Reading Proust on My Cellphone," in The Atlantic, June, 2016 The Odd Pleasures of Reading Proust on a Mobile Phone by Clive Thompson A year ago I wrote an essay about reading War and Peace on my iPhone. ... Today I discovered an essay by Sarah Boxer describing her even more Olympic feat of novel-phone-reading: The entire 1.2-million text of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. ... Boxer did an even better job of describing the peculiar aesthetic delights of reading a ginormous book screen by screen. Let me quote it here at length: Soon you will see that the smallness of your cellphone (my screen was about two by three inches) and the length of Proust’s sentences are not the shocking mismatch you might think. Your cellphone screen is like a tiny glass-bottomed boat moving slowly over a vast and glowing ocean of words in the night. There is no shore. There is nothing beyond the words in front of you. It’s a voyage for one in the nighttime. Pure romance. ... That’s such a great metaphor: The book as an ocean, the e-reader as a tiny porthole! |