Kraus, Chris. I Love Dick. Pasadena: Semiotext(e) Native Agents Series, 1998, 2006.
Read: 12/22/20 (on the way to pick up Craiglist trash can) – 1/1/21, 6:04 PM.
1/1/21: I want a better word for it, but, there is a form of hyper-intellectual hyper-sexual woman (manic was the word) of which [] is one and Chris Kraus another and I somewhat that are always devising projects. Intro by Eileen Myles amazing. Of course. Crazy that they come up in the text lmao.
• (13) “i just knew in a quiet way i was ruined. if i agreed to be female.”
• carl dreyer: use ‘artifice to strip artifice of artifice”
• (14) martial and sublime
• “chris’ powerful account makes me wonder if all those bible stories that warn women not to turn around are just ’cause she might see something.”
• (23) compressed like thought
• “how the loved person can become a holding pattern for all the tattered ends of memory, experience, and thought you’ve ever had”
• (25) billet doux
• 4:43pm: smell smoke. does no one else? what i thought the light of a lighter or vape a bike light. scared for the moment burning plastic again — did i leave the heat on the proofing pizza dough, on the burner? but how would i smell it? maybe in the book — a sharp acrid smell cutting through
• 30 kieerkegaard 3rd removid juliet at 32, irony
1/1/21: “You talk about Kierkegaard’s “Third Remove” as a means to concurrently do something and analyse it at the same time.” [Epps, Philomena. “Chris Kraus on Her Radical 1997 Novel ‘I Love Dick.’” Dazed. Dazed Digital, May 31, 2016. https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/31239/1/author-chris-kraus-on-her-radical-1997-novel-i-love-dick.]
30: “The Ramones give Needles & Pins the possibility of irony, but the irony doesn’t undercut the song’s emotion, it makes it stronger and more true.”
• “mobile, craggy, beautiful”
• “all the prettiness in the world contained in these two objects”
• 33 bataille. china.
• 12/23
• 1:54pm: 101: arnold schoenberg (about): “when the form’s in place, everything within it can be pure feeling”
• 104: “you’re shrunk and bottled in a glass jar, you’re a portable saint”
• 117 interesting why they fell in love with each other. [1/1/21: Chris b/c Sylvere said “all the time” when she asked if he thought about history; he, I believe, because of her sickness (thinking about tuberculosis and Sontag on sickness)… Crohn’s disease? Bruised body.]
• 12/25
• 12:53pm:
• “thick and strange charisma”
• 152 kierkegaard the sign will always triumph trough the screen of the ironic signifier
• 153 “don’t you think it’s possible to do something and simultaneously study it?” amen girl this is how i wanna study art
• 155 OH EGYPT I AM WASHING MY HAIR TO GAIN KNOWLEDGE OF YOU
• 157 h f searles the etiology of schizophrenia
• 170 on shame [1/1/21: Now I’m not so struck by this. But: “Shame is what you feel after letting someone take you someplace past control — then feeling torn up three days later between desire, paranoia, etiquette wondering if they’ll call.”]
• 173 “like most conceptual art, delirium can get so referential”
• 181 on sincerity [1/1/21: “Dear Dick, It hurts me that you think I’m ‘insincere.’ Nick Zedd and I were both interviewed once about our films for English television. Everyone in New Zealand who saw the show told me how they liked Nick better ‘cause he was more sincere. Nick was just one thing, a straight lear line: Whoregasm, East Village gore ’n porn, and I was several. And-and-and. And isn’t sincerity just the denial of complexity? You as Johnny Cash driving your Thunderbird into the Heart of Light.”
• 184 “when i was 12 it occurred to me for the first time it might be possible to have an interesting life.”
• 207: wittgenstein: “understand or die.”
• diane di parma: “i have just realized that the stakes are myself.”
• “why is female vulnerability still only acceptable when it’s neuroticized and personal; when it feeds back on itself? why do people still not get it when we handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?”
• 208 “dear dick… what happens between women now is the most interesting thing in the world because it’s least described.”
• 1/1/21 239 “its my translation, ie a cross be what he wrote and what i wanted him to say”
• desire isnt lack, its surplus energy — a claustrophobia inside your skin—
• 244 naif-imbecile
• 251 rocked back and forth like a drunken boat
• 261 so fascinated by this xerox copy. and opening sylvere’s first
• 274 always already perhaps
• finished new years day 6:04pm