I Love Dick (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
Chris Kraus
Language: English
Pages: 280
ISBN: 1584350342
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In I Love Dick, published in 1997, Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, and Video Green, boldly tore away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expression. It's no wonder that I Love Dick instantly elicited violent controversies and attracted a host of passionate admirers. The story is gripping enough: in 1994 a married, failed independent filmmaker, turning forty, falls in love with a well-known theorist and endeavors to seduce him with the help of her husband. But when the theorist refuses to answer her letters, the husband and wife continue the correspondence for each other instead, imagining the fling the wife wishes to have with Dick. What follows is a breathless pursuit that takes the woman across America and away from her husband ;and far beyond her original infatuation into a discovery of the transformative power of first person narrative. I Love Dick is a manifesto for a new kind of feminist who isn't afraid to burn through her own narcissism in order to assume responsibility for herself and for all the injustice in world ;and it's a book you won't put down until the author's final, heroic acts of self-revelation and transformation.
middle-aged New York City woman bouncing round a house alone more generously than Woodstock or East Hampton. It’s a community of exiles anyway. No one asks me any questions ’cause there’s no frame of reference to put the answers in. For several days now I’ve been wanting to tell you about an installation I saw last week in New York. It was called Minetta Lane —A Ghost Story, by Eleanor Antin, an artist/filmmaker who I don’t know very much about. The installation was pure magic. I sat in it for
us got drunker you found so many ways to talk about yourself, so many ways of making loneliness seem like a direct line to all the sadness in the world. If seduction is a highball, unhappiness has got to be the booze. You said, “There’s no such thing as a good time. It always ends in tears and disappointment.” And when I blundered on about blind love, infatuation, you said, “It’s not that simple.” We had totally reversed positions. I was the Cowboy, you were the Kike. But still I rode it.
jokes. And Kitaj-as-Ford delivers, like movies’re supposed to do, a dazzling punchline: at the upframe center of Ford’s blue wall there’s an Ed Ruscha knock-off framed in black that reads THE END and below it, a tiny painting, window opening out from deep blue walls to deep blue sky. There is no road to immortality but there’s a porthole to it. In this painting objects, people, dance and move but still there’s flesh and weight. Transcendence isn’t only lightness; it’s attained by will. And
implied that what I’d done had helped you burn through some things in your life. And everything seemed as pliant as a macrocarpa branch, fragile as an egg. 33. In the blinding sunlight of the Vagabond Motel parking lot you asked me if I’d call again before I left LA. Perhaps we could have dinner. We embraced, and I was first to break away. 34. Sunday, April 9: Writing in my notebook after visiting Ray Johannson in Elysian Park: Bliss. 35. And so I called you up on Monday night. I was booked to
mover and shaker in the fictional universe created by the author. IN Kraus’ “novels,” debates over Baudrillard and Deleuze and meditations on the Kierkegaardian Third Remove form an intrinsic part of the narrative, where theory and criticism themselves are occasionally “fictionalized.” BUT although theory plays such a key role in Kraus’ books, theoretical discussion is often erased from reviews of HER work. I Love Dick, her first book, is generally described as the story of Kraus’ unrequited