Read about a crushing forty-three year old lawyer. Passionate about human rights, she's a volunteer for the Reprieve charity, a guardian angel to Guantanamo Bay inmates facing death penalties. She's two streets away from her work at Keystone Law, when a wooden window frame weighing more or less than a ton drops on top of her. No time for one last frappuccino.
To Chris Kraus, a crushing woman: What were people like in your twenties? People don't feel your emotions. You do. People aren't "OK" hurting your feelings, because they don't. You react to people's words and actions the way you perceive them. You're teaching me how to be a feminist by reflecting repugnance. I like it. Michael Tolkin couldn't, wouldn't do anything to help you with the film. Let's think about the cab driver who took you into the city. You know the one, who reads William Burroughs and that makes him different from all the other cab drivers. Could you tell him how to make a living as an artist? Well, no, and neither could Michael Tolkin.
As for Dick, you don't love him. You're extremely unfair to him. Woman as a concept, as an object, man as a cowboy, a hero, a super-human, as a concept. A subject for your letters and desires. Puff a cigarette and dream big. I would have loved to have known you in your twenties. Something tells me you wouldn't have given me the time of day. Enigmatic, Chris Kraus, is to have a normal childhood, a steady and happy growing up, free of self-delusional self-analytical insecure self-consciousness, an anxious disposition to losing touch with reality. A real enigma would be to meet a girl who didn't fight with her mother, who's self-image is so certain that she's able to trust others. No one ever thinks about you, because no one ever thinks of anyone other than themselves. The real enigma is to have a placated confidence in life, because we all die, in grips with the world alone, the only solace to find someone as lonely as you who understands and who holds you, man or woman, child or dog, sexual or religious. You left that person, for an ideal of yourself.
I read four different reviews of your books. They were all positive, don't get me wrong, but they all use the word narcissistic. Is it legitimate criticism, or are they using subtle veil to dismiss female writing?
Which of course confuses this simple, dull and homicidal man. I don't understand feminism. I'm incapable of stepping into your femme shoes. Are you incapable of thinking with my dick? I have a child's heart. It's true.
Quando a gente era pequeno,
pensava que quando crescesse
ia ser namorado da Brigitte Bardot
In my fantasy you sit in my bunk bed while I play "you've really got a hold on me" but you'd never. Writing in Portuguese I sound like a poet. "My homework assignment is to sit and read the feminist expression book and think of Lauren and Kristina because I love them. That is my duty." Doesn't translate well. A man's ego is only as frail as his crystal emotions. Think I was five when I learned not to cry in front of anyone ever. Think I was six when I was slapped in the mouth and taught to suck it in, that you have to take what you want. Seven, eight, nine, ten and eleven learning the virtues of trust to have them crumble at twelve through eighteen. Chris, Kraus, I'm only twenty-four and all I know so far is of man and not of woman. Will I be like you when I'm forty, and not understand myself, and mystify the opposite gender like I do today? Will my gender change with time? Or maybe, and this has been my mood lately, but can I look past all this bullshit about the gender? No one else will do that with me, will they?
Sylvére loves you. I am Sylvére. Blues and pinks, women don't ask. Think I was working two weeks at my job the first time I asked for a raise. Read insulting articles on the atlantic schmalantic every day.
It's unfair to call you out on your narcissism. It is a form of dismissal. You cannot look past what you pick on. It's not like anyone ever gave John Updike any shit for being narcissistic. Except they did. Lots of it. They also gave him a ton of praise, but, do these two relate? But doesn't the amount of success you achieve as an author result from the quality of the content that eclipses the vacuum of flaws we live our lives in?
I am still on part one at this point.
