| Title | : | Kissing Other People or the House of Fame |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780645239218 |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | - |
| Publication | : | Published October 1, 2021 |
hold in gasses kiss and flip off the one or two remaining pigs
A book in two halves, Kissing Other People or the House of Fame opens with a sequence of poems that roam the grotty, sublime streets: patting rats, reading pamphlets, enduring labour, acquiring falafel, waving to friends. Then the book flips on a seam and invokes Chaucer as an unlikely guide through a series of dream-blocks, each autonomous yet resonant with attachments and perversions as they come and go, repeat and echo. The book is as staunch as it is warm – one arm extended in a hug and the other cupped over the mouth to shield a secret (weapon).
‘Kay Gabriel inherited Bernadette Mayer and Geoffrey Chaucer’s dreams. For this, I could denounce her, as Gabriel herself denounces friend and poet Stephen Ira in this book’s “Blind Item” (in exchange for his 78 cents). Instead, I accept her generosity, which offers a year’s worth of visions—between the Aprils of 2019 and 2020—rather than a single December day. She’ll tell you that her Personism is for the less fabulous, but it’s simply more collective: even sleep is a social matter, sending her to protests and parties and picket lines and visiting fellowships, demanding complicated schematics of love and its construction by meals. We get the chaise without the bother of an analyst. Minding our resistance, we ingest our theory as prescribed, but it’s okay because “‘sublate’ is a little gay.” This is no record of imaginary teeth with real fears; in dreams she drives capably. I’ve ended love and rearranged my days on the strength of advice Kay’s given me in my sleep, though I’m modern enough to know that dreams define their recipients, not the gods who deign to offer them to poets. Kierkegaard says city life made us lose faith in the dream as a source of divine will, but Kay takes God’s place. When her dream sorts us all into rooms marked kissing and not kissing, you’ll want to be on the right side.’ — Diana Hamilton
Kissing Other People or the House of Fame Reviews
-
By way of review I will just put this here: "The dream of those who are dreaming concerns those who are not dreaming. Why does it concern them? Because as soon as someone else dreams, there is danger. People's dreams are always all-consuming and threaten to devour us. What other people dream is very dangerous. Dreams are a terrifying will to power. Each of us is more or less a victim of other people's dreams. Even the most graceful young woman is a horrific ravager, not because of her soul, but because of her dreams. Beware of the dreams of others, because if you are caught in their dream, you are done for." (Deleuze, "What is the Creative Act?", in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975-1995, p. 318)
-
good not great
-
“there is also a man here I badly want / to kiss but I am too busy being congratulated for / something I haven’t done”
-
Kay has accomplished something extraordinary in this short book: representing grad school realistically. The book is written as a series of dreams. Some of these dreams are raunchy, some are Hegelian, all of them recounted with humor and insight. There's no plot, nor should there be; more interesting to dwell in liminal dreamworld than to flatten complexity to fit the line of a straight marriage plot. I was delighted to discover that I'm not alone in dreaming about Kant's analytic of the sublime.
***
Take two. Kay and I occasionally diverge, both politically and philosophically, but I think I'm convinced she's a Hegelian in the way that I care about. When people are similar, the narcissism of small differences can kick in. I'm slightly embarrassed to confess I discounted her along such petty psychological lines. Unlike most people who talk about aufhebung, Kay means it, and that's sufficient for me.
