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Quarantine Reading: I Love Dick + Other Things (Week 3) • Soft Sensibilities
Three weeks in and I’m still reading one book every day during this COVID-19 quarantine. DAY 15: I LOVE DICK I’m not sure why I waited to long to read Chris Kraus’s half-fiction, half-memoir, I Love Dick, except that I was either prudish or sheepish about reading such bold a title outside the privacy of my home. (Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was home only to shower and sleep; else, I’m out of the house). Now that there’s no fear of public shame in sight, I devoured the book in one sitting. Underlined voraciously. Nodded to no one but myself. Where to begin? Without context (except a deceptively raunchy title), the book starts off a little strange, vapid even—but this stream-of-consciousness format (present-day narration mixed with letters, transcribed phone calls, and the occasional fax) soon become insight into the narrator’s innermost workings. It’s a real-time account of a woman who frees herself from the world-at-large—the patriarchy—and in doing so, finds epiphany in her unrequited letters of lovelust. “There is no female ‘I’ in the existing patriarchal language,” she writes, but in writing these letters, she discovers it. DAY 16: ICON On concept alone, I love Icon—and I hope it either becomes…
Kimberly