Customer Reviews

On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry

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4 star:		(3)
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If I am any sort of example, you will not be sure what this book is about, until you're through. Keep at it. On the way, it's one of the most wondrous pieces of writing I've encountered. When you're there, if I am any sort of example, you will weep (for the joy of affirmation, mostly) and start again.

Sadly often difficult to find; thankfully recently reprinted, On Being Blue stands as a must read for anyone who loves language--writer or reader. Gass' prose instructs as it entertains and enlightens. This gem of a book purports to be about a single word. Blue. Yet it manages, in a very few pages, to speak cogently of how all words gather meaning "like lint in a deep pocket," of the blueness (eroticism) in writing and of writing

William Gass presents a discussion on the word Blue, but in the process makes an argument that language is actually less complex in some ways, and more in others than we often realize. In his prose he shows us the many facets of language, and how writing not only is a relational tool, but an instructional one as well. His treatise on a word and its many meanings becomes a story about the nature of writing itself. Professor Gass' philosophical side shows in this work, a good read about composition

This is one of my favorite books. I read at least five books a week, and this rates on my top 10. I snap up copies in second-hand stores and occasionally find a new one to buy (or order). I am dismayed that the publisher has let it go out of print again. This is a book that you can open at any page and find something to delight you. Blue is the saddest mood, but reading about the blues here, even when your own blues are so blue they're black, will cheer you up. If you're already in an up mood, you'll go even higher. Stylistically impressive. Gass the novelist gives very little foretaste of this book. Delight yourself and read one of the best books of this century before the century is gone. If you've never read non-fiction outside of school, this is the place to start.

A great read! This interesting study on language has the added benefit of shocking anyone who rudely reads a few lines over your shoulder.

A witty essay on the different shades of blue in our language, from blue jacket, blue bells, blue nose, blue laws, my blue heaven, and lady sings the blues.

It's an enjoyable 91 pages, buzzing with rhetorical questions to inspire thought, frank discussions of formerly bad words (well, they may have yet been obscene when this was first published), pleasantly deconstructing erotic excerpts from Barth and a few other novelists. A breezy book.

What is this thing called ON BEING BLUE?

It's not an argument or at least not like any argument you've heard before. It's a larky performance by a monologist. It's a meandering rant, a riff in the jazz tradition. It's an improvisation that dances an elliptical orbit around blue and blues. It's precocious even for a professor. It's the unspooling of the passions of a mind -- a mind and a set of passions at once childish, adolescent, and assuredly adult. It's from the pen of a man to whom aesthetic experience comes easy. It's prose that's sometimes bell clear and other times twisted into contortionist poses. It pauses every page to strike a new pose. It's about the making of words and the making of sentences. It's about confronting the fact that even the best are betrayed by inadequate language. It's, in the face of this, the forging of errant beauties ranging from metaphor ("into and out of sight the way trout, I'm sure, still disappear among the iridescences ... suddenly to emerge again in the clear, swift streams") to slabs of Joycean yelps. It's a plethora of quotations from authors forgotten and authors eternal. It's maybe too enamored of its own alliterative formulations ("that lead-like look"; "blues we'd love to have loom large and linger long around us"). It's love for sale. No, it's sex. It's the five common methods by which sex gains an entrance into literature. It's a gleeful, George Carlin-spirited look at dirty words. It's Gass harrumphing at failed writing: "the sexual, in most works, disrupts the form; there is an almost immediate dishevelment, the proportion of events is lost." (Quick, some editor somewhere please commission Gass to review Nicholson Baker's "House of Holes: A Book of Raunch"). It's swift justice for also-rans (of Henry Miller: "He talks too much") and Wildean wit for others (a shout-out to Pierre Louys, "whose credentials are impeccable, being both French and pagan"). It's sometimes a musty period piece (Gass tut-tutting Oh! Calcutta! will throw most readers for a loop) and at other times a fresh reminder of the heydays of his bright fellow jesters John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and John Hawkes. Alas, it's long since past.

Linguistic creme brulee. Rich, ornate, evocative; more than a philosophical inquiry, a an almost stream-of-consciousness meditation on the ways in which the word blue has been used by literature and culture in the twentieth century. A mood piece.

Be forewarned: Gass's standards are utterly bizarre, and his "blue period" is misogynistic in the extreme. He relishes the tumescent meanings of blueness, but the only good "blue" scenes, in his view, are those that describe violent rape or abuse. Only if a woman is black and blue and bleeding does the blueness of the language succeed.

Not for the faint-hearted, and far more Sade than sexy. Expect no wisdom, but read it for what it is: a peculiar man's lyrical virtuosity.

...beautiful even when I had no idea what was going on for the first several pages. I don't know if this problem was an aesthetic or intellectual challenge. However, I think I found another writer that will take up considerable space on my shelves. My first Gass book is not my last

_On Being Blue_ is a light, ethereal piece of beauty with the density of elemental lead. The price of admission is low, but you can take away so much. Don't limit yourself and open your arms and mind.

One of the great dirty books of Christendom while being an imaginative commentary of the philosophical problems of perception.