Week 5: Blue Blue and More Blue

1. It is perhaps unsurprising that reading a book like Maggie Nelson's Bluets would make one start seeing blue. But that's too simple. It's not that the book causes one to see more blue; it's that it pulls out the connections and resonances in the blue things one has always seen and become accustomed to.

2. This book contains hints of all the interesting historical and cultural and scientific facts one could ever really want to know about blue. Did you know, for example, about the blue-robed and therefore blue-skinned Tuareg people, who roam the desert, refusing to convert to Islam and also refusing to call themselves Tuareg, preferring the term Imohag instead? This book is also a story of heartbreak and loss.

3. I found this slim blue book in the "Poetry" section of my local bookstore. (That's a lie: I found it in a Barnes & Noble, but that's not the story I want to tell.) The print above the ISBN on the back of the book, however, lists it as "ESSAY/LITERATURE." This seems a fair compromise for what this book is.

4. The esteemed director of my MFA program recently published this blog post: http://ddstevenson.blogspot.com/2018/09/notes-marginalia-ephemera.html It and Bluets operate on similar structural principles, present life as a collection of loosely connected ephemera.

5. Maggie Nelson writes about sex and alcohol with more forthrightness than any other woman I've read. I would like to be able to write about such things, all things, with that same attitude. Not soft or sentimental, not with the intent (seemingly) to shock or bewilder, but simply and truthfully as they are.

6. I like reading books that expand my conception of what literature can be, what form it can take. I liked reading this book.

#bookaweek