/lit/ - Literature

>>12465207
Yeah, sure. Here's the first part to On Being Blue.

>Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit--dumps, mopes, Mondays--all that's dismal--low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like the blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter, which is our signal for getting under way; a swift pitch, Confederate money, the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that's empty: blue bottles, bank accounts, and compliments, for instance.

Most writers write for the eye. Gass writes for the ear. Read him aloud to get the full effect, he's one of contemporary lit's best stylists. A lot of his prose is self-indulgent, true, but that's kind of his shtick -- ignoring that stories/essays/novels are composed of language, and instead pretending that they somehow "appear" through "transparent prose" does a disservice to the mouth, tongue, lips, ears, the body itself, which wants to EMBODY language -- quite literally -- and not just intellectually "understand" it.

There's a great quote from a talk he did with John Gardner.
>Gardner: The difference between you and me is that my airplane flies and yours is too jewel-encrusted to get off the ground.
>Gass: But I want everyone to look at my plane and think it's flying.

Most, if not all, of his work deals with the relationship between language and reality, and the extent to which language itself shapes reality itself and not just how we perceive it. (Gass was formally trained as a philosopher and taught philosophy of language for most of his career.) His novel (?) Willie Master's Lonesome Wife -- and to a lesser extent, Omensetter's Luck -- both explore how language alters the physical world.

This might make no sense.

>bottom line; read "On Being Blue" and "Willie Master's Lonesome Wife," they're like less than 100 pgs each