On Being Blue
BLUE PENCILS, blue noses, blue movies, laws, and stockings. The dumps, mopes, Mondays; the ocean, the sky, and the deep, deep ice. The Whale. Jay. Ribbon. Fin. The grass in Kentucky. The china in Grandmother’s pantry. Of all the colors, blue has the widest range of associations, and the widest...
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BLUE PENCILS, blue noses, blue movies, laws, and stockings. The dumps, mopes, Mondays; the ocean, the sky, and the deep, deep ice. The Whale. Jay. Ribbon. Fin. The grass in Kentucky. The china in Grandmother’s pantry. Of all the colors, blue has the widest range of associations, and the widest bandwidth of emotional tints and shades. It is therefore the most suitable color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright and thin or low deep sweet thick dark and soft, blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling. This eccentric essay into the "world of blue" is the heart of the heart of Gass’s oeuvre.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780879232375 (0879232374)
Publish date: April 1st 1991
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
Pages no: 91
Edition language: English
Category:
Non Fiction,
Writing,
Essays,
Language,
Literature,
Book Club,
American,
Criticism,
Literary Criticism,
Art,
Philosophy,
Theory
Please excuse my French, but reading this book felt like watching Gass trying to impotently force himself onto something he couldn’t see. In the dead of night, in the dead of all colour.So his victim happened to be the blue of this world. He tried to perform on it all obscene acts one can think of -...
Under no set of circumstances would I agree to write an introduction for this essay-panegyric to the color blue and, let's admit it, to the thought/act sex ; under no set of circumstances would I want my prose to be set directly next to that of William Gass. Michael Gorra was a fool. From the init...
this is the longest short book i've ever read, have difficulty in concentrating and following Gass' line of thinking.
“Yellow cannot readily ingest gray. It clamors for white. But blue will swallow black like a bell swallows silence ‘to echo a grief that is hardly human.’ Because blue contracts, retreats, it is the colour of transcendence, leading us away in pursuit of the infinite.” On second thoughts, I think thi...
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