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A review by livbness
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
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.”