On Being Blue

Review

I picked this up sight-unseen from the NYRB sale earlier this month. I went in thinking it was going to be more of the ‘blue’ as in sadness, and maybe as a nice modern accompaniment to one of the other books I bought, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Not so! This little book ends up being quite a bit about fucking and fondling and writing about fucking and fondling. Fun! But actually that is oversimplifying it. Glass is interested in how we write about sex and how we write ‘dirty words’ in general, among other things.

It’s a quick read, and there are a lot of things in here to give the reader a big chuckle. There’s a nice little rhyme on page 37 that might frustrate Glass just a little (or at least enough for him to poke fun at it), but it made me laugh, loud enough to make my cat jump.

It’s also quite thoughtful, and clothes its ponderings in funny little asides that I quite like. There is a long passage on page 50 that really gives you a sense of Glass’s sarcasm and mocking tone:

‘Fuck you,’ I mutter to the backside of the traffic cop. Fuck-yous are in fact the principal item of macho exchange. Since I do not want to fuck the cop I must want someone else to, and since that ubiquitous ‘you’ is almost certainly another male (as it is in this instance), I can only desire your sodomization. To be entered as a woman is, to be so demeaned and reduced and degraded: for us gaucho machos, what could be worse? In a business deal, if you find you have been screwed, what should have been *up theirs* is disconcertingly *up you* These aggressive wishes, expressed so fervently and often and in practiced ignorance of their meaning, reveal the depth of the desire for buggery among our bravados and our braves.

What I thought about reading this is the crushing heteronormativity of these fuck yous, the up yourses and the ‘suck my dicks’ of it all. I’ve thought many a time of what a nice reply, ‘well show us what you’re offering’ might be. ‘Suck my dick’ is something hurled out by fratbros and presumably others often enough, and one would guess they like getting their dicks sucked if they go around demanding it all the time. But why do they think it is demeaning? Surely, if they tried it once themselves they’d realize what a nice bit of fun it can be. And sodomy! My what a lot of work it takes to get ready, but how pleasant it can be with someone who isn’t a dingus with their dangler! These remind me a little of how straight men sometimes say there are no good looking penises, what a tragic mistake! I’m sure this hasn’t stopped them from sending pictures of theirs to unwitting women, poor sods.

On a different note, Glass quotes Rilke early in the book, and Rilke is discussing the ‘sources of our desires’ as a comingling of the senses, and I thought this was a beautiful way to phrase it. Love as a coalescence of the sense organs and chemical reactions provoked by another person, so strong as to penetrate dreams and all life’s dullness. It’s very sweet. I love that language can be as teasing and raw as we discussed earlier, but as tender as dew on a leaf.

A fun read! I thought it dragged a bit in the last quarter. I’d recommend it though!

Notes

• p10 - As we shall see, and be ashamed because we aren’t ashamed to say it, like that unpocketed peppermint which has, from fingering, become unwrapped, we always plate our sexual subjects first. It is the original reason why we read . . . the only reason why we write.
• p18-19 - So it always is as we approach the source of our desires. As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks; I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour. And as we blend, sight, the sovereign sense and concept’s chief content, blurs. ‘The lover,’ Rilke wrote, ‘is in such splendid danger just because he must depend upon the co-ordination of his senses, for he knows that they must meet in that unique and risky centre, in which renouncing all extension, they come together and have no permanence.’
  • TB: emphasis mine. I think this is a beautiful way of conceptualizing love, as a coalescence of the sense organs and chemical reactions provoked by another person, so strong as to penetrate dreams and all life’s dullness.
• p22, quoting Christian Enzensberger - Its [language’s] reaction to smut is inevitably one of impotence if not downright hostility. It resists, begins to stammer, if dirty words have to be pronounced it does so, but sulkily, dutifully as it were, in the most unfeeling way, which is to say by means of onomatopoeia; in short, language becomes as embarrassed as the speaker himself and prefers to take refuse in indirect speech. (Smut: an Anatomy of Dirt)
• p24 - There are a number of difficulties with dirty words, the first of which is that there aren’t nearly enough of them; the second is that the people who use them are normally numskulls and prudes; the third is that in general they’re not at all sexy, and the main reason for this is that no one loves them enough.
• p50 - ‘Fuck you,’ I mutter to the backside of the traffic cop. Fuck-yous are in fact the principal item of macho exchange. Since I do not want to fuck the cop I must want someone else to, and since that ubiquitous ‘you’ is almost certainly another male (as it is in this instance), I can only desire your sodomization. To be entered as a woman is, to be so demeaned and reduced and degraded: for us gaucho machos, what could be worse? In a business deal, if you find you have been screwed, what should have been up theirs is disconcertingly up you These aggressive wishes, expressed so fervently and often and in practiced ignorance of their meaning, reveal the depth of the desire for buggery among our bravados and our braves.