Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

Jane Bowles described this problem of sincerity in a letter to her husband Paul, the “better” writer:

August 1947:

Dearest Bupple,

…The more I get into it… the more isolated I feel vis-àvis the writers whom I consider to be of any serious mind… I am enclosing this article entitled New Heroes by Simone de Beauvoir… Read the sides that are marked pages 121 and 123. It is what I have been thinking at the bottom of my mind all this time and God knows it is difficult to write the way I do and yet think their way. This problem you will never have to face because you have always been a truly isolated person so that whatever you write will be good because it will be true which is not so in my case… You immediately receive recognition because what you write is in true relation to yourself which is always recognizable to the world outside… With me who knows? When you are capable only of a serious approach to writing as I am it is almost more than one can bear to be continually doubting one’s sincerity…

Reading Jane Bowle’s letters makes me angrier and sadder than anything to do with you. Because she was just so brilliant and she was willing to take a crack at it—telling the truth about her difficult and contradictory life. And because she got it right. Even though, like the artist Hannah Wilke, in her own lifetime she hardly found anybody to agree with her. You’re the Cowboy, I’m the Kike. Steadfast and true, slippery and devious. We aren’t anything but our circumstances. Why is it men become essentialists, especially in middle age?

And at Joseph’s party time stands still and we can do it all again. Marshall walks me over to two men in suits, a Lacanian and a world banker from the UN. We talk about Microsoft and Bill Gates and Timothy Leary’s brunches in LA until a tall and immaculately gorgeous WASP woman joins us and the conversation parts away from jokes about interest rates and transference to make room for Her…

(As I write this I feel very hopeless and afraid.)

Later Marshall made an academic birthday speech for Joseph that he’d been scribbling on all night. And Glenn O’Brien, looking like Steve Allen at the piano, performed a funny scat-singing recitative about Joseph’s legendary womanizing, wealth and art. Everybody clapping, laughing, camp but serious and boozy like in the film The Girl Can’t Help It , men in suits playing TV beatniks but where’s Jayne Mansfield as the fall girl? Then David Byrne and John Cale played piano and guitar and people danced.

Sylvère got drunk and teased Diego, something about politics, and Diego got mad and tossed his drink in Sylvère’s face. And Warren Niesluchowski was there, and John and Anya. Later Marshall marshalled a gang of little men, the banker, the Lacanian and Sylvère, to the cardroom to drink scotch and talk about the Holocaust. The four looked like the famous velvet painting of card-playing dogs.

And it got late and someone turned on some vintage disco, and all the people young enough never to’ve heard these songs the first time round got up and danced. Funky Town, Le Freak, c’est Chic and Upside Down …the songs that played in topless clubs and bars in the late ’70s while these men were getting famous. While me and all my friends, the girls, were paying for our rent and shows and exploring “issues of our sexuality” by shaking to them all night long in topless bars.

Gabi Teisch’s life was very hard.

She hardly slept or ate, she forgot to comb her hair. The more she studied, the harder it became to speak or know anything with certainty. People were afraid of her; she forgot how to teach her classes. She became that word that people use to render difficult and driven women weightless: Gabi Teisch was “quirky.”

On New Year’s Eve in Germany, 1977 it was snowing very hard. Gabi Teisch invited several of her women friends around to celebrate the holiday. The camera keeps its distance, circling round the table of drinking smoking laughing talking women. It’s happiness. A bright island in the snowy night. A real cabal.

This morning it’s my birthday and I drove out to Garnet Lake. Upstate March is the moodiest, most desolate time of year. February’s glistening cold becomes unsettled. Water in the streams and brooks begins to move under melting ice: stand outside and you can hear it rushing. The Torrents of Spring . But the sky’s completely gray and everybody knows the snow’ll be around at least until the end of April. The weather’s dull, resentful. I drove out through Thurman, Kenyontown, past the “burnt-down store” (a landmark and epistemological joke—in order for it to mean anything you would’ve had to be here 20 years ago when the store was standing), the Methodist church and schoolhouse where as recently as 30 years ago local kids between the ages of 5 and 17 arrived by foot and horse from within an 8 mile radius. “What do you consider to be the greatest achievement of your life?” a teenager from the Thurman Youth Group asked George Mosher, a 72-year-old trapper, farmer, handyman and logger. “Staying here,” George said. “Within two miles of where I was born.” Dear Dick, The Southern Adirondacks make it possible to understand the Middle Ages.

There were two guys out ice fishing on Garnet Lake, skinny speckled fish, pickering or mackerel. My long black coat open, dragging through the snow as I walked around the lake’s perimeter. When I was 12 it occurred to me for the first time it might be possible to have an interesting life. Yesterday when I phoned Renee up over at her trailer to find out if her brother Chet might be able to come over and unfreeze the kitchen pipes she said Yeah, but I don’t want to put a time on it because I’m high.

In all the books about the 19th century New England Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, they tell this story about her and the English critic George Carlyle. When she was 45 she ran away to join the Italian liberal revolution of 1853 and fell in love with Garibaldi. “I accept the universe,” Margaret Fuller wrote in a letter postmarked out of Italy. “Well she’d better,” Carlyle replied. She was drifting further and further on a raft out into the Caspian Sea. Today I’m going to New York,

3/14/95

East Village

DD,

This afternoon I went to see the R.B. Kitaj exhibition at the Met. He’s a painter you’re probably familiar with because he lived so many years in London.

I went to see the show because my friend Romy Ashby told me to. She liked the charcoal drawing of two black cats fucking ( My Cat and Her Husband , 1977). The show, which opened last year in London, was panned by all the critics there on weirdly specious grounds. Kitaj has followed Arnold Schoenberg in proclaiming “I have long since resolved to be a Jew… I regard that as more important than my art.” And his work’s been called a lot of things that Jews are called: “abstruse, pretentious”; “shallow, fake and narcissistic”; “hermetic, dry and bookish”; “difficult, obscure, slick and grade f.” Too much in dialogue with writing and ideas to be a painter, he’s been called “a quirky bibliophile… altogether too poetic and allusive… a little too literary for his own good.”

It’s hard to figure out just why Kitaj’s been criticized this way. His paintings are a little bit Francis Bacon, a little bit Degas, a little bit Pop Art, but mostly they are studies. Thought accelerates to a pitch where it becomes pure feeling. Unlike the Abstract Expressionists or the Pop artists who he’s been unfavorably compared to, his paintings never are one single statement or one transcendental thing. It’s like he’s conscious he’s the Last Remaining Humanist, using painting as a field for juggling ideals that don’t quite hold. Unlike painters of the ’50s whose works celebrate disjunction, Kitaj’s paintings recognize disjunction while in a certain sense lamenting it. Melodies floating across a cafe patio that evoke another world. Walter Benjamin smoking hashish in Marseilles to enjoy the subtle pleasures of his own company. An intellectual rigor that allows the possibility of nostalgia.