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A review by george_salis
On Being Blue by William H. Gass
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."