ON BEING BLUE: A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY - WILLIAM GASS

William Gass is really a fool for this one. I’ve never read anything by this guy before. I believe I bought, but never read, a copy of THE TUNNEL, his most famous novel, back when I was on “long  postmodern novel” kick in late high school/early college. So I don’t know much about the guy outside of his reputation as a great novelist, but his novels are very long and I found out that both he and Wittgenstien wrote books about the nature of color and since my library didn’t have the Wittgenstien one, I went with ON BEING BLUE. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting, perhaps something more analytical and precise, but this thing was all over the place and pretty amazing. The book is ostensibly about the color blue, which I think he’s correct in identifying as a more malleable and flexible color. There are happy blues and sad blues, a range Gass says is only matched by green. He also spins out into the more connotative aspects of blue, like blue meaning raunchy or blue meaning sad. There’s a long section about blue (or obscene) writing and sex scenes in books. He’s got strong opinions about which naughty words are best. He’s got a poet's sense of sentence structure and rhyme. ”Cock is okay but only schoolboys have dicks. Thus civilization advances by humps and licks” or, “Poets who would nervously meter their stick or brag of their balls; who never vulgarly vaunt of their lady’s vaginal grip or be publically proud of her corpulent tits, succumb to the menace of measurement.” He also makes the claim that, “certainly nothing else will do for fellatio, which has never had its poet.” But that’s only because this book was published in ‘75 and fellatio’s (and cunnilingus’) poet, Lil’ Wayne, wasn’t born until ‘82. He’s got some interesting stuff about the relationship between words, concepts and reality, though his insights are more poetic than philosophical in the traditional sense, ”What was naïve in the magician was the belief that things have names at all, but equally naïve are the learned and reasonable who reject any connection beyond the simply functional between blue and blue...Words are properties of thoughts, and thoughts cannot be thought without them.” It’s really short, less than 100 pages, and seems like it was a labor of love. It jumps across topics and between ideas so quickly I have to assume it’s a collection of ideas he thinks about all the time. Nothing but respect for that, ideally other authors would write short, non-fiction books about their weird theories w/r/t color or whatever. 18 decillion colors