On On Being Blue

All week, I have awaited a package, a slim volume purchased without photo or much in the way of description from an unknown Amazon Marketplace seller, something I stumbled across while looking for something else, a thin treatise by William Gass from 1975, On Being Blue. I now see that the volume remains available here and there, but at Amazon there was only the one instance, at one rare book seller, and armed with only a two-sentence description I was moved to action by the threat implicit in there being only one copy in the entire Amazon community, the volume seemingly out of print.

Since last week, I have waited anxiously -- either for the package to arrive or for the dreaded email that sometimes follows Marketplace orders, indicating that the item is not in stock after all, so sorry. I waited as though for a distant great uncle on his deathbed to pass, a great uncle by marriage, a great uncle I haven't seen in twenty-five years, but one I love in the strong unquestioning way of family, as a good man who once guided me around his several dozen acres in rural Maine, an undersized boy of seven in bright yellow shirt and burgundy trucker's hat emblazoned with the name of my father's then employer.

The uncle passed this weekend in the rural Maine redoubt he discovered with his family like an unmapped Pacific atoll, rest his soul, at ninety-two years old. Still, though, no book.

Then today it came. Ever so gingerly, I opened the battered manila envelope, stiffened by boards inside, my heart racing. Hardcovered and dustjacketed, two slight tears at the top of the front jacket and the cover otherwise remarkably simple, the paper thick and creamy and textured, like a woven variation on a grocery bag, the endpapers similarly rough, copyright information but no date, no indication whether this is a first edition (although it simply must be), the cover page adorned by a perfectly lovely indigo impress: "On Being Blue." On the last page, however, I learn that this was a limited edition -- 3,000 copies of the trade edition, and only 225 of the "de luxe" edition. A perusal of copyright information and bookjacket identified, by ISBN, my edition as one of the 3,000 trade editions. A limited edition, thirty years old, in fair condition -- for a song.

Inside, under a Roman I on the first page, I found these words:

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 that 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, or, when the sky's turned turtle, the blue-green bleat of ocean (both the same), and, when in Hell, its neatly landscaped rows of concrete huts and gas-blue flames; social registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips and cheese . . . the pedantic, indecent and censorious . . . watered twilight, sour sea: through a scrambling of accidents, blue has become their color, just as it's stood for fidelity.

There's more, of course, and I am grateful for it. But I'll stop there, because that, ladies and gentlement, that is what I call a sentence.

An impulse buy in search of inspiration. I don't imagine Gass will start disappointing me now, after all these years.

Commonplace, Gass

for N., upon Proust

For all those not in love there's law: to rule . . . to regulate . . . to rectify. I cannot write the poetry of such proposals, the poetry of politics, though sometimes -- often -- always now -- I am in that uneasy peace of equal powers which makes a state; then I communicate by passing papers, proclamations, orders, through my bowels. Yet I was not a state with you, nor were we both together any Indiana.

--William Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories 175 (Nonpareil 2000 (orig. 1968)

not so much responding to Proust as prompted by . . . or something.

Fat Free Milk

So stumbling around the blogosphere, as I do entirely too often, especially at work, I came across a new-to-me weblog that I love and I'm not sure why.

Anyway, I like this post most. Excerpt:

You spend most of the day doing things that you don't want to do. In between bouts of busy madness, you keep yourself sane by thinking of porno-type things that make you happy and that you'll do when you get home finally.

When you get home. Activities are road-blocked, slow, or just make the clock go at a spasmodic rate. Then it too late and you should probably be in bed. You accomplish nothing. You wake up tired, fuzzy-headed and with no focus except for getting to your car. You arrive at work. I like vegetables. You spend most of the day doing things that you don't want to do. In between bouts of busy madness, you keep yourself sane by thinking of all of the things that make you happy and that you'll do when you get home finally. How did Thanksgiving come so quickly? You spend most of the day doing things that you don't want to do. In between bouts of busy madness, you keep yourself sane by thinking of things that make you happy and that you'll do when you get home finally.

I'm not sure I can tell you why this piece -- and it really can't be appreciated compositionally unless you read its repetitions, involutions, and subtle variations in full -- satisfies me so deeply. It sounds almost silly to say, because the author, Kevynn Malone, sort of mocks this as a non-serious effort. He does that a lot, in fact. But something of the quotidian, workaday rhythms of most of our lives is distilled here in a way that's quite precious, quite true. And elsewhere, the site gets at something of the frustrated underperforming underachieving writer that resonates rather powerfully with me, also a frustrated, underperforming, and underachieving writer.

Not really sure. But it earned FFM a permanent link under MoonOverWords.

Commonplace, Robbins -- A Propos My Not-So-Secret Valentine

Perhaps a person gains by accumulating obstacles. The more obstacles set up to prevent happiness from appearing, the greater the shock when it does appear, just as the rebound of a spring will be all the more powerful the greater the pressure that has been exerted to compress it. Care must be taken, however, to select large obstacles, for only those of sufficient scope and scale have the capacity to to lift us out of context and force life to appear in an entirely new and unexpected light. For example, should you litter the floor and tabletops of your room with small objects, they constitute little more than a nuisance, an inconvenient clutter that frustrates you and leaves you irritable: the petty is mean. Cursing, you step around the objects, pick them up, knock them aside. Should you, on the other hand, encounter in your room a nine-thousand-pound granite boulder, the surprise it evokes, the extreme steps that must be taken to deal with it, compel you to see with new eyes. And if the boulder is more special, if it has been painted or carved in some mysterious way, you may find that it possesses an extraordinary and supernatural presence that enchants you, and in coping with it -- as it blocks your path to the bathroom -- leaves you feeling extraordinary and supernatural, too. Difficulties illuminate existence, but they must be fresh and of high quality.

--Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Bantam 1990, orig. 1976)

So here's to fresh, high-quality problems, the extreme steps dealing with them requires, and the frayed but still worthy solutions they bear in their fang'd jaws. Salut!

Commonplace, Williams

Say I am les an artist
than a spadeworker but one
who has no aversion to taking
his spade to the head
of any who would derrogate
his performance in the craft.

You were kind to be at such
pains with me and -- thanks
for the view.

William Carlos Williams, "The Visit"

Which is to say, feel free to comment on my poems. Then duck.

Seen, Bumpersticker

Leavening my morning:

This aggression will not stand, man."

And more to be found here.

Commonplace, Robbins

Still don't know what I think of Tom Robbins -- after a decade of putting it off for reasons I can't possibly articulate, I'm finally reading one of his novels -- but I did enjoy this passage:

Heterosexual relationships seem to lead only to marriage, and for most poor dumb brainwashed women marriage is the climactic experience. For men, marriage is a matter of efficient logistics: the male gets his food, bed, laundry, TV, pussy, offspring and creature comforts all under one roof, where he doesn't have to dissipate his psychic energy thinking about them too much -- then he is free to go out and fight the battles of life, which is what existence is all about. But for a woman, marriage is surrender. Marriage is when a girl gives up the fight, walks off the battlefield and from then on leaves the truly interesting and significant action to her husband, who has bargained to 'take care' of her. What a sad bum deal. Women live longer than men because they really haven't been living. Better blue-in-the-face dead of a heart attack at fifty than a healthy seventy-year-old widow who hasn't had a piece of life's action since girlhood

--Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues 63 (Bantam 1990 (orig. pub. 1976))

Don't know that I would gender this in quite so binary a fashion, but certainly it seems a worthy observation of two (among many) modes of living.

Commonplace, W. C. Williams

Good Christ what is
a poet -- if any
exists?

a man
whose words will
bite
their way
home -- being actual

having the form
of motion

-- William Carlos Williams, "The Wind Increases" [my apologies that I cannot seem to duplicate the irregular indentations of this passage's proper formatting -- not for lack of trying]

Commonplace, Updike

". . . thinking about human animals, how marvellous the biological machinery that gives us consciousness, and how we mostly just throw it away; even if we don't commit suicide, we presume to find life dull and be bored most of the time, and discontented, and just waste it; I bet that's why Hamlet appeals to us so much, out of all Shakespeare's plays, it's the one we take personally, it expresses this disregarded quality of life, the waste of our minds, our bodies, of everything that should make us joyful and careful. Am I making any sense?" For she can go too far, she knows; since childhood she has felt her overflowing spirit back up, meeting resistance in the faces of others, the blood in her own face damming in a blush.

--John Updike, Seek My Face 205 (Ballantine, 2002)

I still can't decide whether the comment on ennui is what gets me, or my identification with the parting confession of "meeting resistance" when she "go[es] to far." In any event, a passage that gives me pause, and rings true (and familiar) in many ways.