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    Bluets
    Bluets
    Bluets
    Ebook74 pages1 hour

    Bluets

    By Maggie Nelson

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    About this ebook

    Maggie Nelson is widely and critically well-regarded as a poet, prose writer and art critic; her works spans various audiences and communities, in academia, art circles and among readers. Maggie Nelson and her work have been profiled in such periodicals as Artforum, Bookforum, the Boston Globe, Modern Painters, The New York Times Book Review and the Village Voice, among numerous other high-profile venues. Bluets is the perfect title for course adoption in the burgeoning MFA/academic field of creative non-fiction/literary essay writing.

    Editor's Note

    Lyricism & soulfulness…

    A rare book from an American writer — a short, achingly beautiful semi-narrative of a woman’s heartbreak, told under the guise of strange love story. A lyrical, soulful exploration of loss.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWave Books
    Release dateOct 1, 2009
    ISBN9781933517643
    Bluets
    Author

    Maggie Nelson

    Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, and nonfiction writer. Her books include The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, Bluets, and Jane: A Murder. She teaches in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts and lives in Los Angeles, California.

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    Reviews for Bluets

    4/5

    398 ratings20 reviews

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    • 2/5
      i loved the language of blue and highlighted some beautiful sentences but i didn’t understand the connections of blue and nelson’s sex life at all lol
    • 3/5
      This was nice, but at some point in time became too much and a little dull.
    • 4/5
      Great buildup of musings, meditations, and expansions on a narrow subject. The introspective philosophizing seems authentic. I breezed through it, but it could be studied slowly.
    • 4/5
      Bluets was like nothing I've ever read before in terms of format, writing style, and subject matter. It's a numbered list of interconnected thoughts and prose poems, all of which centre around the author's depression after a lost love and her obsession with the colour blue. Super interesting, super compelling. I feel like I was given a peak into someone's head and I actually learned something about humanity.
    • 4/5
      As someone who likes the color blue, I enjoyed this piece so much.
    • 5/5
      amazing woman
    • 5/5
      "Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that."It feels like a beloved antique glass that slips from your hand accidentally, however gently, then you stare at its shards partly trying to let it all sink in, partly hoping it will glue itself back together and become whole again. Quite a metaphor for love and loss, loneliness and lust at a palpable distance; and such is Maggie Nelson's eulogy for its kept fragments."How often I've imagined the bubble of body and breath you and I made, even though by now I can hardly remember what you look like, I can hardly see your face."In Bluets, the enduring reputation of the colour blue appears in a number of references and parallels: films (Derek Jarman's poignant Blue, a little surprising she did not mention Kieślowski's Blue), music (Joni Mitchell's unforgettable Blue), and literature (Gass' On Being Blue). Its jack-of-all-trades personification and flexible contradictions are proofs of how it kindles and washes away a spectrum of emotions. A raw and moving prose-poetry — at times disjointed, other times painfully fitting — which reads like a set of persistent memories. They come and go like a thousand thoughts, your mind's a miles away, you're sitting in a bus, the bus continues to take you faraway from somewhere. Only, they all end up on the person you have lost; now unreachable, invisible. You find the person everywhere. It is blue."For to wish to forget how much you loved someone — and then, to actually forget — can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart."Black and blue. Out of the blue. Feel blue. Blue balls. Blue pill. Once in a blue moon. True-blue. Between the devil and the deep blue sea. Bolt from the blue. Blue in the face. Blue sky..."I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. 'Love is not consolation,' she wrote. 'It is light.'"
    • 5/5
      A study/meditation of the color blue, also of loss, pain, love. OMG, heartstoppingly beautiful. I'd read this book 50 more times and never read the same thing twice. I probably will. I liked it that much.
    • 3/5
      This book terrifies me, because it's so nicely written and interestingly formed and also so completely vapid. My fear comes from my absolute certainty that over the next 20 years I'm going to have to put up with dozens of books just like this, insofar as they'll be all 'experimental' (i.e., about fucking) and 'experimental' (i.e., self-obsessed), and 'experimental' (i.e., full of literary existentialism), and 'experimental' (i.e., quasi-educated), but not at all 'experimental' (i.e., interestingly formed and nicely written). Because the history of literature teaches me that authors are very quick to pick up on the content of well-formed books, without really taking the time to worry about, you know, art. It happened with Richardson and Fielding, it happened with Austen, it happened, dear f-ing God did it happen, with the modernists and their absurd/lonely/sad thing.

      And now, I'm deeply afraid, it will happen with Bluets. Those in the know tell me Nelson's Argonauts is dreadful tripe, so maybe it's already happened to Nelson herself. I can only hope the virus can be contained.

      Second thought: In case this isn't clear, this is a kind of fore-handed criticism review: there's nothing even remotely 'interesting' about what Nelson says about the world, or herself, but it's all said almost perfectly, leaving aside the already influential stupidity of numbering paragraphs, because, you know, Wittgenstein and shit.

      Third thought: Any time you see a novelist or poet using Wittgenstein, please know, whatever they think he meant is precisely not what Wittgenstein meant.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Absolutely amazing, a great read for anyone with a poetic heart.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Quick, brutally honest read. It's as if I see blues with a new lens of intensity. Her words ebb and flow like turquoise waters of heartache--random thoughts floating along the river of attempted understanding. Serious love for this one.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Beautiful, sad, somehow esoteric and sexually graphic at the same time... quite a feat! On a personal note, as someone who recently went through a breakup, I was glad I couldn't relate to this more. Good thing I already read The Argonauts and I know she found someone better! The guy in Bluets sounded like kind of a jerk. Anyway, that's not the point of this book. Read it and think about the color blue all the time for days after!
    • 5/5
      Never read anything like this, but I enjoyed it. Poetic, philosophical, and deeply personal. One to read again.
    • 5/5
      Rereading Bluets was necessary. The collective weight of the themes in this book need, loss, guilt, loneliness, despair, all need to be mediated on and I think she really helps to a slow the reading by connecting her thoughts in obliquely, with a backbone of blue. She breaks my heart and gives me some respite that I am alone and but not isolated in my own pain.
    • 3/5
      Disappointing read right after “The Argonauts.” Makes me like her writing less.

      Tired and obtuse in that breakup way. I probably would have loved it at the right time in my life. As it is? Meh.
    • 4/5
      Really deep in some aspects, more a brainteaser and surely worth the read.
    • 4/5
      It’s kind of cliche to say that you don’t choose the people you love. But I’ve been thinking about this recently, maybe because Maggie Nelson starts off the book with this point, that she didn’t choose to fall in love with blue (yes the color). The book continually repeats cliches like this without shame, but then takes it in a slightly odd direction (like being in love with a color) that ends up (because of its strangeness and forthrightness) being oddly effective in terms of getting us to reevaluate those statements."Truth. To surround it with figures and colors, so that it can be seen," wrote Joubert calmly professing a heresy.More specifically, I’ve been thinking about family, and how most of the dreams that I can remember involve my parents. It’s a no brainer that one must love one’s parents, but why? Is it because we are stuck with them? I started thinking whether I loved my parents and of course I do. I’m 33 years old, and still most of my dreams are about them, but it is not a simple love, it is wrapped up in conflicts and tension and knowledge. Love isn’t equated with knowledge often, perhaps because the latter is seen as cold hard facts, but an intimate knowledge is one sign of love, like the native plant specialist who can not only name the different plants on our walk this weekend, but also talk about each one’s temperaments and characteristics. Knowledge becomes internalized. Through it, the people we love live inside of us, and it is no longer a question of choice.This is a simple story, but it spooks me, insofar as it reminds me that the eye is simply a recorder, with or without our will. Perhaps the same could be said of the heart.That you don’t choose your family is a cliche, but also that there are fewer and fewer things that we don’t choose. I made a list: our families (including the decisions they make for us when we are still children), our bodies (including our genes, our gender/race, our talents, our predispositions), our generations (we can’t choose to be peers with Shakespeare for example). That’s about it. We're no longer stuck in our hometowns; we can move anywhere we want. Marriages aren't arranged anymore. The concept of a 'family business' is quickly becoming antiquated. And religion is also mostly a choice, unless you're in a scary cult. Even our characteristics, our qualities, if you borrow Musil’s phrasing, often seem interchangeable depending on the need, so that anyone can be anyone at any time.Do not be overly troubled by this fact.But I wonder if all the choices have crippled our ability to love, if indeed to love is to be surrounded by choicelessness, by a color even, to be bathed in it without choice but only acceptance of the dark along with the light shades. For instance, she talks about her friend who was recovering from an accident that left her disabled:She says, if anyone knows this pain besides me, it is you (and J, her lover). This is generous, for to be close to her pain has always felt like a privilege to me, even though pain could be defined as that which we typically aim to avoid. Perhaps this is because she remains so generous within hers, and because she has never held any hierarchy of grief, either before her accident or after, which seems to me nothing less than a form of enlightenment.I really enjoyed these parts about the disabled friend, but the parts about getting over a breakup with a lover were less moving to me, even though she was sometimes able to move beyond the cliche of the broken heart--while reading it, I always felt the particular effort she put in navigating this dangerous territory. You can really see her awareness of this when she talks about the lyrics to Joni Mitchell's song "River":I’m so hard to handle, I’m selfish and I’m sad. Progress! I thought. Then came the song’s next line: Now I’ve gone and lost the best baby that I ever had.But maybe precisely because she is unafraid to go there, and to be that heartbroken woman (and to be un-progressive) despite knowing of its dangers, that makes this book interesting. But also, I felt like her awareness made her overcompensate at times, like the sections on fucking, which seemed to be about empowering herself so that she is not the object of the male who’s rejected her. At the same time, I wonder why in a book about heartbreak, it seems the only tangible image of this relationship that she allows herself to write about is this fucking. What I most enjoyed about this book was the interweaving of these personal narratives (with all its strengths and flaws) and the poetic ambiguity of blue (what is a color anyway, if not pure ambiguity?) with the collage of anecdotes and thoughts that make up an aimless wandering pattern of mind.despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures the truth nor reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither toward justice nor away from it. It is pharmakon. It radiates.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 1/5
      Just not my cup of tea. Writing style very unusual.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Remarkable work of literature
    • 5/5
      Beautiful. Reminded me of Barthes' A Lover's Discourse. I think I'm going to go read it again right now.

    Book preview

    Bluets - Maggie Nelson

    1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal.

    2. And so I fell in love with a color—in this case, the color blue—as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.

    3. Well, and what of it? A voluntary delusion, you might say. That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this.

    4. I admit that I may have been lonely. I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke—take your pick—an apprehension of the divine. (This ought to arouse our suspicions.)

    5. But first, let us consider a sort of case in reverse. In 1867, after a long bout of solitude, the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote to his friend Henri Cazalis: These last months have been terrifying. My Thought has thought itself through and reached a Pure Idea. What the rest of me has suffered during that long agony, is indescribable. Mallarmé described this agony as a battle that took place on God’s boney wing. I struggled with that creature of ancient and evil plumage—God—whom I fortunately defeated and threw to earth, he told Cazalis with exhausted satisfaction. Eventually Mallarmé began replacing le ciel with l’Azur in his poems, in an effort to rinse references to the sky of religious connotations. Fortunately, he wrote Cazalis, I am quite dead now.

    6. The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless. I returned there yesterday and stood again upon the mountain.

    7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature—in fact blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries)—that culinary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when and where serving food. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.

    8. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it, wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don’t want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any blueness. Above all, I want to stop missing you.

    9. So please do not write to tell me about any more beautiful blue things. To be fair, this book will not tell you about any, either. It will not say, Isn’t X beautiful? Such demands are murderous to beauty.

    10. The most I want to do is show you the end of my index finger. Its muteness.

    11. That is to say: I don’t care if it’s colorless.

    12. And please don’t talk to me about things as they are being changed upon any blue guitar. What can be changed upon a blue guitar is not of interest here.

    13. At a job interview at a university, three men sitting across from me at a table. On my cv it says that I am currently working on a book about the color blue. I have been saying this for years without writing a word. It is, perhaps, my way of making my life feel in progress rather than a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette. One of the men asks, Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. We don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose.

    14. I have enjoyed telling people that I am writing a book about blue without actually doing it. Mostly what happens in such cases is that people give you stories or leads or gifts, and

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