Books like On Being Blue

When I arrived on my first year at University, we were given a copy of The Blue Book sometime during our first week. It seemed that the academic authorities did not think that this group of young men and women, in spite of having been selected for a supposedly brilliant intellectual future, really knew what they had in their bodies, nor could they read their own instincts. But it had graphics. We all kept this Blue Book half hidden amongst all the other books although we had the reassuring knowledge that everyone else had a copy as well.When a few years later I arrived for my graduate studies to another University on another continent, for those of us who wanted to tick off from our graduation requirements our knowledge of some foreign languages, we had to then take during the first weeks our tests in translation. For those tests we were told that we had to use Blue Books.Whaaat..?¿!¡?This anecdote came back to my mind in reading Gass’s mental walk through Blue.Blue Book had not translated well into Blue Book The same term, the same language, for both a sex manual and for a booklet with lined paper to be used for university exams. Both blue and both books and the latter one for, ironically, examining abilities in transferring meaning from one language and conventions to another.Gass’s is another Blue Book. Very much another.Colors and languages; projections and conventions; words and correspondences; utterances and literary repertoire. On Desires and Love: love of a person, love of sex, love of learning, chromatic love, love of language.On perception and sensations: consciousness in colors, sounds in colors, sounds in words, on being and consciousness in words, or in colors.What is Blue anyway? I don’t sense it as a color. Is it a word?