Saturday, November 21, 2015

Who Loves Me not by Chris Kraus

Half-way into Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick.  Noticed that former student Robbie B, now librarian at New Hampton, had read it (Goodreads notification? which I never look at) and then it turned up on the back shelves as I was rearranging back there in the alcove.  Book first published in 1997.  Way back then.  From now (Paris attacks, Daesh, etc) doesn’t it feel even more dated.  Those heady days of Deleuze and Bataille.  Even refers to the Bataille Boys a couple of times.  I thought I could tell Scott (and Paul H) to read it, that it would plug onto his disseration as perfectly as a Lego.  And since it is from that far back, how did I manage to miss it?  And would anyone who didn’t know much about all that theory be that interested in it?  Would Paul read it?  I don’t think so---as removed from his world as possible and far too self-enclosed, like a hothouse, a small academic coffee house gossipy closet drama.  

Friday Nov 20  

After Kraus I should change my character’s name from Andrew to Andrea Campéon, or Angela.  Would that do anything of value to it?  

Kraus just praised my method---reading lots of books and writing around the edges of them.  Quote coming.  In spite of that I’m really ready for this book to end and really tired of it, tired of her brilliant, brainy and clever whining about all of it, her love for Dick just isn’t as wonderful and she wants it to be and the rest is, finally, pretty tiresome.  I’ll give the New Yorker writer from this past April, Leslie Jamison, the public and last word and then privately I’ll disagree.  I guess my disagreement will be proof positive of Kraus’s great success.  

“How I like to dip into other people’s books, to catch the rhythm of their thinking, as I try to write my own.  Writing around the edges of Philip K. Dick, Ann Rower, Marcel Proust, Eileen Myles and Alice Notley.  It’s better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill--getting larger cause you’re entering another person’s language, cadence, heart and mind.”  207  You’d think Goodreads or somewhere would inscribe that over their lintel.  

Now at 227 & heck, Kraus has turned it all up and around and I love the book again, can’t stop reading it, don’t want it to end.  The best.  What a book.  

“You said: ‘I’m sick of your emotional blackmail.’” 232

whole book is that.  A cabinet of curiosities.   

After Kraus instead of making Andrew into Andrea, better to just take that character out all together.  

Maybe I am mildly schizophrenic?  Have I ever wondered that?  see page 232 ff  Now I am really really tired of the book, so ready to have it over, trying not to rush it.  Too much.  But enough already, let’s put this unexquisite corpse into the grave.  

Finished the book around 1 pm.  Sigh of relief, impatient relief.  Lunch.  After lunch, in the mail, issue of Parabola, Winter issue on Free Will and Destiny.  Kraus’s book has a Foreward and an Afterword.  Isn’t that some sort of warning?  I liked it in the Foreward where Eileen Myles pays Kraus a huge compliment: “Chris knows (like Bruce Chatwin knew) how to edit.”  15.  I wonder.  Maybe in a line-by-line way, maybe, as Myles explains, in a drummer’s pacing way, knowing how to go everywhere and “make it move.”  But maybe not so much in a don’t tire the reader too much way.  Chatwin would have, I’m absolutely positive, shortened Kraus’s 260 page book by at least thirty to fifty pages.  Minimum.  Now that Parabola is here, like a godsend, I can read it cover-to-cover as the perfect antidote to having spent the past week on Kraus’s Dick.  I mean Kraus’s Love.  Well, Kraus’s I.  There it is:  what if she had called the book, from the first, Dick Loves Me.  Would it have been a better book, a better feminist book, much less a period frozen in amber-time and much more of a timeless work?  Or is my very suggestion a sure backslide on my part into the leaden sludge of patriarchist helpfulness?  It is a fascinating cabinet of curiosities, a narrative collection of odd people, trendy oddities, topical themes and obsessions from the 90s, as these floated around in various currents and eddies of the academic and artsy worlds Kraus herself floated around in.  
It seems so dated now.  This is what some parts of those worlds really did feel like back then.  A fragile time-capsule. 


I do like the way Leslie Jamison ends her terrific essay on Kraus.  

"A story that flashes “back and sideways” keeps its emotional pulse live: “To organize events sequentially is to take away their power,” Kraus writes. “Emotion’s not at all like that. Better to hold onto memories in fragments, better to stop and circle back each time you feel the lump rise in your throat.” Taken together, Kraus’s books summon these “contradictory, multiple perspectives” on an even broader level: they approach a recurring consciousness from different angles, dip into the trajectory of a life at different moments. They preserve a certain electricity by refusing to resolve these life materials into a single, coherent narrative. They are all windows to the same exhibit, all doorways to the same club under the same full moon, all promising and winking and opening their legs at once. They are all committed to the live wire of feeling (Ahhh, feelings), committed to circling back to what makes the lump rise in the throat, what makes the heart beat faster; committed to keeping emotions forceful by refusing to slot their evocations neatly into any genre, refusing the divide between authenticity and artifice, refusing to distinguish between reality and performance. It’s all lumpy. It’s all performed. It’s all real. "  "This Female Consciousness"

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