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akekibona's review against another edition
5.0
Great piece of literature! The characters and their thought process so clearly depicted and the letter formatting make the chronology emphasises the feeling of obsession throughout.
This book truly does what it describes and creates a new genre of novel. It’s a mix of art criticism, feminist messages, critical theory, memoir, dissection of men, but inherently it’s a writers inspection of herself.
This book truly does what it describes and creates a new genre of novel. It’s a mix of art criticism, feminist messages, critical theory, memoir, dissection of men, but inherently it’s a writers inspection of herself.
livbness's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
funny
informative
reflective
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Despite predating (and clearly paving the way for) All Fours, the best way I can describe I Love Dick is: like All Fours, but if the husband got involved.
Chris is an unsuccessful experimental artist, her husband Sylvere a respected academic. When the pair spend an evening at the home of Dick ____, Chris interprets Dick’s flirting as akin to “a conceptual fuck”, and falls quickly and disconcertingly in lust; Sylvere joins her on her haunted pursuit. Autofictional and entirely mad, Chris plays with form to transcribe pure feeling: mixing letters, diaries, recorded phone calls, essays, theoretical frameworks and art criticism into a smorgasbord of sexy insanity. Intertextual and endlessly exciting… and somehow so very funny too?
So when I read I like to note down all the sentences I particularly love… with I Love Dick, I’ve essentially copied out the entire book.
———
Ok here are all my fave quotes:
“When the form’s in place, everything within it can be pure feeling.”
“As an artist she finds Dick's work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active.”
“But I'm a sucker for despair, for faltering- that moment when the act breaks down, ambition fails.”
“You understand the game is real, or even better than, reality, and better than is what it's all about. What sex is better than drugs, what art is better than sex? Better than means stepping out into complete intensity.”
“I feel so teenage. When you're living so intensely in your head you actually believe when something happens you've imagined, that you caused it. When Leonora OD'd on bad acid from my boyfriend Donald, he and Paul and I sat up all night in the park and made a pact that if Leonora wasn't out of Ward 16 tomorrow we'd kill ourselves. When you're living so intensely in your head there isn't any difference between what you imagine and what actually takes place. Therefore, you're both omnipotent and powerless.”
“S: Chris, what sort of strange zone are we entering? To write to him is one thing but now were writing to each other. Has Dick been a means of getting us to talk, not to each other but to someTHING?
C: You mean that Dick is God.
S: No, maybe Dick never existed.
C: Sylvère, I think were entering the post-mortem elegiac form right now.
S: No. Were just waiting for his call.”
“It was another glorious California day and I thought about how different it is here from New York. A land of golden opportunity, freedom and the leisure to do-what? Become a serial killer, a Buddhist, swing, write letters to you?”
“Sylvère and I are twinned in our analytic bent, content with ‘scrambling the codes.’ Oh Dick, you eroticize what you're not, secretly hoping that the other person knows what you're performing and that they're performing too.”
“The risk is that these feelings'll be ridiculed or rejected, & I think I'm understanding risk for the first time: being fully prepared to lose and accept the consequences if you gamble.”
“Ann Rower says ‘When you're writing in real time you have to revise a lot.’ By this I think she means that every time you try and write the truth it changes. More happens. Information constantly expands.”
“I'm wondering why every act that narrated female lived experience in the '70s has been read only as ‘collaborative’ and ‘feminist.’ The Zurich Dadaists worked together too but they were geniuses and they had names.”
“At any rate in order not to feel this hopelessness, regret, I've set myself the job of solving heterosexuality (i.e., finishing this writing project) before turning 40. And that's tomorrow.”
“Richard seemed to like our morning conversations about Brecht and Althusser and Andre Gorz, but later on he turned the group against me for being too cerebral and acting like a boy. And weren't all these passionate interests and convictions just evasions of a greater truth, my cunt? I was an innocent, a de-gendered freak, 'cause unlike Liza Martin, who was such a babe she refused to take her platforms off for Kundalini Yoga, I hadn't learned the trick of throwing sex into the mix.”
“To experience intensity is to not know how things will end.”
“To be female still means being trapped within the purely psychological. No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope's turned back on her. Because emotion's just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form.”
Chris is an unsuccessful experimental artist, her husband Sylvere a respected academic. When the pair spend an evening at the home of Dick ____, Chris interprets Dick’s flirting as akin to “a conceptual fuck”, and falls quickly and disconcertingly in lust; Sylvere joins her on her haunted pursuit. Autofictional and entirely mad, Chris plays with form to transcribe pure feeling: mixing letters, diaries, recorded phone calls, essays, theoretical frameworks and art criticism into a smorgasbord of sexy insanity. Intertextual and endlessly exciting… and somehow so very funny too?
So when I read I like to note down all the sentences I particularly love… with I Love Dick, I’ve essentially copied out the entire book.
———
Ok here are all my fave quotes:
“When the form’s in place, everything within it can be pure feeling.”
“As an artist she finds Dick's work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active.”
“But I'm a sucker for despair, for faltering- that moment when the act breaks down, ambition fails.”
“You understand the game is real, or even better than, reality, and better than is what it's all about. What sex is better than drugs, what art is better than sex? Better than means stepping out into complete intensity.”
“I feel so teenage. When you're living so intensely in your head you actually believe when something happens you've imagined, that you caused it. When Leonora OD'd on bad acid from my boyfriend Donald, he and Paul and I sat up all night in the park and made a pact that if Leonora wasn't out of Ward 16 tomorrow we'd kill ourselves. When you're living so intensely in your head there isn't any difference between what you imagine and what actually takes place. Therefore, you're both omnipotent and powerless.”
“S: Chris, what sort of strange zone are we entering? To write to him is one thing but now were writing to each other. Has Dick been a means of getting us to talk, not to each other but to someTHING?
C: You mean that Dick is God.
S: No, maybe Dick never existed.
C: Sylvère, I think were entering the post-mortem elegiac form right now.
S: No. Were just waiting for his call.”
“It was another glorious California day and I thought about how different it is here from New York. A land of golden opportunity, freedom and the leisure to do-what? Become a serial killer, a Buddhist, swing, write letters to you?”
“Sylvère and I are twinned in our analytic bent, content with ‘scrambling the codes.’ Oh Dick, you eroticize what you're not, secretly hoping that the other person knows what you're performing and that they're performing too.”
“The risk is that these feelings'll be ridiculed or rejected, & I think I'm understanding risk for the first time: being fully prepared to lose and accept the consequences if you gamble.”
“Ann Rower says ‘When you're writing in real time you have to revise a lot.’ By this I think she means that every time you try and write the truth it changes. More happens. Information constantly expands.”
“I'm wondering why every act that narrated female lived experience in the '70s has been read only as ‘collaborative’ and ‘feminist.’ The Zurich Dadaists worked together too but they were geniuses and they had names.”
“At any rate in order not to feel this hopelessness, regret, I've set myself the job of solving heterosexuality (i.e., finishing this writing project) before turning 40. And that's tomorrow.”
“Richard seemed to like our morning conversations about Brecht and Althusser and Andre Gorz, but later on he turned the group against me for being too cerebral and acting like a boy. And weren't all these passionate interests and convictions just evasions of a greater truth, my cunt? I was an innocent, a de-gendered freak, 'cause unlike Liza Martin, who was such a babe she refused to take her platforms off for Kundalini Yoga, I hadn't learned the trick of throwing sex into the mix.”
“To experience intensity is to not know how things will end.”
“To be female still means being trapped within the purely psychological. No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope's turned back on her. Because emotion's just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form.”
xk8linx19's review against another edition
2.0
DNF
Okay y’all, I really wanted to like this book. It sounded fun, Eileen Myles wrote the intro, etc. There’s a great pic of me reading this book in a hammock. But the book itself is too weird to function. It collapses under the weight of how unbearably pretentious and artsy all the people involved are, and I was completely put off after Part One. Soooooo can’t do it. Sorry not sorry.
Okay y’all, I really wanted to like this book. It sounded fun, Eileen Myles wrote the intro, etc. There’s a great pic of me reading this book in a hammock. But the book itself is too weird to function. It collapses under the weight of how unbearably pretentious and artsy all the people involved are, and I was completely put off after Part One. Soooooo can’t do it. Sorry not sorry.
isabeloakes's review against another edition
2.0
Though it is unlike anything I've read before I am struggling to find it engaging and finishing it seems like a bit of a chore.
abelsey's review against another edition
5.0
I always thought I needed to have some respect for the people I was reading about, even if it was a grudging respect, in order to enjoy a book. This book has turned that notion on its head. Everyone involved is awful and they all get worse as the book goes on, but that turns out to be irrelevant.
This book is absolutely jam packed with things to think about, from art criticism to philosophy to politics, to classism and sexism, to healthy and unhealthy relationships, to personal agency vs the weight of cultural expectation, to the nature of obsession, to pretentious modes of speech and writing to incessant namedropping and What They All Mean. I mean I could go on and on.
If the whole book were true (in the sense of a set of Actual NonFiction Facts, rather than aiming at an Observed Trueness about the world)--well, that's obviously debatable. If it's non-fiction, it's awfully sad.The Chris Kraus in I Love Dick wants a life of genuine experience, but also wants to put her experience at a remove and run it through a set of analytics. What we have as a result is an amazing book, perhaps at a huge personal cost to Ms Kraus, who still can't seem to squeeze any genuineness out of her contrived situation, surprise surprise. But it's art! It's definitely art.
This book is absolutely jam packed with things to think about, from art criticism to philosophy to politics, to classism and sexism, to healthy and unhealthy relationships, to personal agency vs the weight of cultural expectation, to the nature of obsession, to pretentious modes of speech and writing to incessant namedropping and What They All Mean. I mean I could go on and on.
If the whole book were true (in the sense of a set of Actual NonFiction Facts, rather than aiming at an Observed Trueness about the world)--well, that's obviously debatable. If it's non-fiction, it's awfully sad.The Chris Kraus in I Love Dick wants a life of genuine experience, but also wants to put her experience at a remove and run it through a set of analytics. What we have as a result is an amazing book, perhaps at a huge personal cost to Ms Kraus, who still can't seem to squeeze any genuineness out of her contrived situation, surprise surprise. But it's art! It's definitely art.
teohlb's review against another edition
3.0
This was difficult. I feel like the afterword made me appreciate it more, but also the fact I needed an afterword to justify or explain it to me says a lot.
To be fair, I enjoyed it to begin with. I thought it was manic and over the top, but I was intrigued by the way it began, the endless letters to Dick, what it said about Chris and her husband, how they started to play things out.
But then it just felt like a book that went on and on while we rolled around in her obsessions. I guess that’s the point tho? And the fact the author is the main character, the blurring over what is and isn’t fiction - I guess it’s brave to put something out so boldly showing yourself in an obsessive light. But it just felt uncomfortable.
Then at the same, she riffs on the history of women in art, how they’ve been perceived, and then sort of makes you feel guilty for feeling uncomfortable. As if, by you not seeing what is so magical and feminist about her act of exposure and debasement, that you are in the same way part of the problem.
So I don’t know. It felt like the author was playing intellectual checkmate with me constantly to cover up her own obsessive behaviour.
I found her a completely unreliable narrator. And when Dick wrote back to her and was an absolute Dick to her, instead of sadness, I found it cathartic. And yet I feel bad about that. Ugh.
To be fair, I enjoyed it to begin with. I thought it was manic and over the top, but I was intrigued by the way it began, the endless letters to Dick, what it said about Chris and her husband, how they started to play things out.
But then it just felt like a book that went on and on while we rolled around in her obsessions. I guess that’s the point tho? And the fact the author is the main character, the blurring over what is and isn’t fiction - I guess it’s brave to put something out so boldly showing yourself in an obsessive light. But it just felt uncomfortable.
Then at the same, she riffs on the history of women in art, how they’ve been perceived, and then sort of makes you feel guilty for feeling uncomfortable. As if, by you not seeing what is so magical and feminist about her act of exposure and debasement, that you are in the same way part of the problem.
So I don’t know. It felt like the author was playing intellectual checkmate with me constantly to cover up her own obsessive behaviour.
I found her a completely unreliable narrator. And when Dick wrote back to her and was an absolute Dick to her, instead of sadness, I found it cathartic. And yet I feel bad about that. Ugh.
amkclaes's review against another edition
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
Clever and intriguing but lost me in the last third. Great ending however
limeywesty's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
funny
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
I actually don't love Dick, but I do love Chris Kraus!