Word: gass
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...BEING BLUE: A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY by WILLIAM GASS 91 pages. David R. Godine...
...idle after all? William Gass is not only a philosopher in the business of posing paradoxes but a writer (Omensetter's Luck, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country) to whom words matter. Blue, for instance. Gass notes that "a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects." Gass would like to know why, and he is writer enough to make his inquiry far more entertaining than just another academic trip through the wild blue yonder...
...since Herman Melville pondered the whiteness of Moby Dick has a region of the spectrum been subjected to such eclectic scrutiny. Gass hoards azure words and holds them up to the light: "Blue poplar. Blue palm ... the blue lucy is a healing plant. Blue John is skim milk. Blue backs are Confederate bills. Blue bellies are yankee boys." He squints at past authorities on physics (Democritus, Aristotle, Galen), the bet- ter to glimpse the essence of this protean color in the corner of an eye. The mystery remains, more mysterious because Gass so thoroughly exposes its complexities. Yet the humanist...
Many educators agree with James R. Gass, head of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's educational-research arm: "Educational action to prepare for work and active life should aim less at training young people to practice a given trade or profession than at equipping them to adapt themselves to a variety of jobs." According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the typical American changes his job seven times during his lifetime, and his career three times. Francis Fisher, director of Harvard's career services office, goes further, arguing that "we must break the assumption that...
What makes the honesty questionable is Gardner's reputation as an anti-novelist. He is associated with names like John Barth, Donald Barthelme, William Gass and Thomas Pynchon, whose styles often reflect the immense panorama of futility and anarchy they see around them. For these men literary conventions only pose limitations and rules to be broken, and narrative becomes hopelessly narcissistic. In John Barth's story, Lost in the Funhouse, for example, the author interrupts to explain the narrative techniques of the short story while the tale is in progress. Barth then shows contempt for these forms and simultaneously complains...