Word: gassing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...erotic overtones of this surmise tinge Gass's entire argument. For he is not finally interested in pinning "blueness" to the wall, but in suggesting what is truly "blue" in the realm of art. Not, he insists, the vivid depiction of sexual activity. Literature can convey only a mechanical imitation of the real thing-and offer a skewed reality to boot: "I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it, a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken...
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...