On Being Blue is a book about everything bluesex and sleaze and sadness among other thingsand about everything else. It brings us the world in a word as only William H. Gass among contemporary American writers can do. Gass writes Of the colors blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements blue occurs everywhere in ice and water in the flame as purely as in the flower overhead and inside caves covering fr