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lookhome's review against another edition
4.0
'So a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the world the way lint collects. The mind does what. A single word, a single thought, a single thing, as Plato taught.' (7)
A whimsical stroll down the dark alleys of colour theory and thought.
This had way more references and word play than I expected and thought I read it in a single day I feel it might be best digested in smaller sittings.
It's incredibly dense in allusion and its sprawling sentences kind of suck you in and carry you in a way that, while exhilarating, might leave you looking back, asking yourself, in the immortal words of Talking Heads 'how did I get here?'.
I've since done a bit of research on the writer and now I'm very curious as to his other novels, has anyone read The Tunnel, thoughts?
'What seems to line our life with satin? what brings the rouge to both our cheeks? Loneliness, emptiness, worthlessness, grief... each is an absence in us. (11-12)
Being without Being is Blue (12)
Without plan or purpose we slide from substance to sensation, fact to feeling, all out becomes in, and we hear only exclamations of suspicious satisfaction: the uhms, the ohs, the ahs. (17)
Art, like light, needs distance, and anyone who attempts to render sexual experience directly must face the fact that writhings which comprise it are ludicrous without their subjective content (19)
I would like to suggest that a least on the face of it a stroke by stroke story or a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken's wing. (20)
I am firmly of the opinion that people who can't speak have nothing to say (25)
We have a name for the Second Coming but none for a second coming (25)
I saw not the forbidden image but the forbidden object of that image, the great mystery itself (38)
If any of us were as well taken care of as a the sentences of Henry James, we'd never long for another, never wander away. (44)
Crude as it is, the case allows us to separate what is meant from what is said, and what is said from what is implied, and what is implied from what is revealed' (48)
It is the color consciousness becomes when caressed (57)
Colors flood our space so fully that there isn't any (61)
perception was a process in which a felt effect, in the moment of its existence, was nevertheless always experienced as if it were occurring in the space of its cause (65)
perceptions are always profound, associations deceiving. (77)
A whimsical stroll down the dark alleys of colour theory and thought.
This had way more references and word play than I expected and thought I read it in a single day I feel it might be best digested in smaller sittings.
It's incredibly dense in allusion and its sprawling sentences kind of suck you in and carry you in a way that, while exhilarating, might leave you looking back, asking yourself, in the immortal words of Talking Heads 'how did I get here?'.
I've since done a bit of research on the writer and now I'm very curious as to his other novels, has anyone read The Tunnel, thoughts?
'What seems to line our life with satin? what brings the rouge to both our cheeks? Loneliness, emptiness, worthlessness, grief... each is an absence in us. (11-12)
Being without Being is Blue (12)
Without plan or purpose we slide from substance to sensation, fact to feeling, all out becomes in, and we hear only exclamations of suspicious satisfaction: the uhms, the ohs, the ahs. (17)
Art, like light, needs distance, and anyone who attempts to render sexual experience directly must face the fact that writhings which comprise it are ludicrous without their subjective content (19)
I would like to suggest that a least on the face of it a stroke by stroke story or a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken's wing. (20)
I am firmly of the opinion that people who can't speak have nothing to say (25)
We have a name for the Second Coming but none for a second coming (25)
I saw not the forbidden image but the forbidden object of that image, the great mystery itself (38)
If any of us were as well taken care of as a the sentences of Henry James, we'd never long for another, never wander away. (44)
Crude as it is, the case allows us to separate what is meant from what is said, and what is said from what is implied, and what is implied from what is revealed' (48)
It is the color consciousness becomes when caressed (57)
Colors flood our space so fully that there isn't any (61)
perception was a process in which a felt effect, in the moment of its existence, was nevertheless always experienced as if it were occurring in the space of its cause (65)
perceptions are always profound, associations deceiving. (77)
chervbim's review against another edition
3.0
I enjoyed this a lot! Really interesting discussion of sense and sensuality in modern language, as well as exploration of how people absorb things for themselves. I don't see this attracting beyond a sort of niche audience, but I'm so glad I finally found a copy and was able to read it, worth the wait.
george_salis's review
3.0
“A gull's
gobbled the center,
leaving this chamber
—size of a demitasse—
open to reveal
a shocking, Giotto blue.” – Mark Doty’s “A Green Crab’s Shell”
This little blue book is described as “a philosophical approach to color” but if anything it’s a colored approach to philosophy with impeccable prose but meandering theses, not feces, though I’m told that poop can turn Prussian blue after consuming the medication Radiogardase for radioactivity, or even just an excess blunch of blueberries. And but so this book doesn’t really have much to do with blue other than an uncertain tint to the lens that hovers over ideas relating to obscenities, sex in literature, and other topics wrought obscure in part yet amusing, writing of language similar to “the deity who broke the silence of the void with speech so perfect the word ‘tree’ grew leaves and the syllables of ‘sealion’ swallowed fish.”
“Nothing moves but the intimate landscape of Patinir, a self-contained silent process which demands no attention, for the prevailing color there is blue.” – The Recognitions
Especially considering the sometimes vaguely licentious nature of Gass’ musings, he missed mentioning the blue veins in big breasts. And I don’t think he mentioned the blue-hued sky goddess Nut either, if I recall correctly. Who knew there was too much blue, did you? Though he delightfully did not forget one of the greatest blue books: “...or the emblematic blues, the color in which Joyce bound Ulysses, its title like a chain of white islands, petals shaken on a Greek sea, he thought...”
“The following things in the room were blue. The blue checks in the blue-and-black-checked shag carpet. Two of the room's six institutional-plush chairs […] two of the unsettlingly attached lamps that kept its magazines unread and neatly fanned were blue, although the two blue lamps were not the lamps attached to the two blue chairs. […] The premie violets in an asymmetrical sprig in a tennis-ball-shaped vase on the coffee-table were arguably in the blue family. And also the overenhanced blue of the wallpaper's sky, which the wallpaper scheme was fluffy cumuli arrayed patternlessly against an overenhancedly blue sky…. The sills and crosspieces of the waiting room's two windows have always been dark blue. There was a nautical-blue border of braid around the bill of Michael Pemulis's jaunty yachting cap. […] Also blue: the upper-border slices of sky in the framed informal photos of E.T.A. students that hung on the walls; the chassis of Alice Moore's Intel 972 word processor w/ modem but no cartridge-capability…” – Infinite Jest
And but so this little book has tucked into it some passion if not advice for the scrivener who would be literary king: “So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite; the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is a love that brings its own birth with it….” So what are you waiting for, wombless men and wombful women? Go give birth, pick up your pen and pullulate!
“Only the foolish, blinded by language’s conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at its melancholy rim, green in its envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in its greatest rages, black.” — Salman Rushdie’s “The Firebird’s Nest”
Allow this excerpt of a nebula-gaseous sentence of Gass’ to chloroform your inhibitions and galactify your imagination: "…blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through ‘and’ as it opens—there—there—we’re here!…in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences—sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech…ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, imagined, and mindful Sublime."
gobbled the center,
leaving this chamber
—size of a demitasse—
open to reveal
a shocking, Giotto blue.” – Mark Doty’s “A Green Crab’s Shell”
This little blue book is described as “a philosophical approach to color” but if anything it’s a colored approach to philosophy with impeccable prose but meandering theses, not feces, though I’m told that poop can turn Prussian blue after consuming the medication Radiogardase for radioactivity, or even just an excess blunch of blueberries. And but so this book doesn’t really have much to do with blue other than an uncertain tint to the lens that hovers over ideas relating to obscenities, sex in literature, and other topics wrought obscure in part yet amusing, writing of language similar to “the deity who broke the silence of the void with speech so perfect the word ‘tree’ grew leaves and the syllables of ‘sealion’ swallowed fish.”
“Nothing moves but the intimate landscape of Patinir, a self-contained silent process which demands no attention, for the prevailing color there is blue.” – The Recognitions
Especially considering the sometimes vaguely licentious nature of Gass’ musings, he missed mentioning the blue veins in big breasts. And I don’t think he mentioned the blue-hued sky goddess Nut either, if I recall correctly. Who knew there was too much blue, did you? Though he delightfully did not forget one of the greatest blue books: “...or the emblematic blues, the color in which Joyce bound Ulysses, its title like a chain of white islands, petals shaken on a Greek sea, he thought...”
“The following things in the room were blue. The blue checks in the blue-and-black-checked shag carpet. Two of the room's six institutional-plush chairs […] two of the unsettlingly attached lamps that kept its magazines unread and neatly fanned were blue, although the two blue lamps were not the lamps attached to the two blue chairs. […] The premie violets in an asymmetrical sprig in a tennis-ball-shaped vase on the coffee-table were arguably in the blue family. And also the overenhanced blue of the wallpaper's sky, which the wallpaper scheme was fluffy cumuli arrayed patternlessly against an overenhancedly blue sky…. The sills and crosspieces of the waiting room's two windows have always been dark blue. There was a nautical-blue border of braid around the bill of Michael Pemulis's jaunty yachting cap. […] Also blue: the upper-border slices of sky in the framed informal photos of E.T.A. students that hung on the walls; the chassis of Alice Moore's Intel 972 word processor w/ modem but no cartridge-capability…” – Infinite Jest
And but so this little book has tucked into it some passion if not advice for the scrivener who would be literary king: “So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite; the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is a love that brings its own birth with it….” So what are you waiting for, wombless men and wombful women? Go give birth, pick up your pen and pullulate!
“Only the foolish, blinded by language’s conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at its melancholy rim, green in its envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in its greatest rages, black.” — Salman Rushdie’s “The Firebird’s Nest”
Allow this excerpt of a nebula-gaseous sentence of Gass’ to chloroform your inhibitions and galactify your imagination: "…blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through ‘and’ as it opens—there—there—we’re here!…in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences—sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech…ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, imagined, and mindful Sublime."
nathansnook's review
3.0
A philosophical meandering into blue and its effects on literature.
If anything, it's a precursor to what Maggie Nelson's Bluets would be. A lot about blue and how it is rendered in the form of women as appetite, as object. I wish this slim book would also look into how men could also be objectified in terms of blue to level the playing field, to understand what blue is in companionship of both sexes.
Nonetheless, a playful read with lyrical prose. Gass's examinations on literature are keen and worth reading.
If anything, it's a precursor to what Maggie Nelson's Bluets would be. A lot about blue and how it is rendered in the form of women as appetite, as object. I wish this slim book would also look into how men could also be objectified in terms of blue to level the playing field, to understand what blue is in companionship of both sexes.
Nonetheless, a playful read with lyrical prose. Gass's examinations on literature are keen and worth reading.