Non-fiction: 5th Column 12.01.17 Black and Blur Maggie Nelson An ecstatic occasion: a response to the first book in a new trilogy by Fred Moten. Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being) , by Fred Moten, Duke University Press, 339 pages, $27.95 • • • I’m going to try to write something really plain about poet/critic/theorist Fred Moten’s new collection of essays, Black and Blur , which feels hard, because Black and Blur , like all of Moten’s work, isn’t written plainly, and I’ve always felt a little foolish coming at Moten’s writing in the (idiot) idiom of lucidity—a kind of pretended straight arrow at a field defined by incessant motion, escape. Even if I admit that such an approach is a fool’s errand wholly inadequate to what makes Moten’s work so worthwhile and sustaining (albeit an approach socialized by my own maternal; my mother teaches business writing), it still feels, well, foolish...