Screen Tests

by Kate Zambreno

  Kathy was image, fame whore—but then her texts are these wild experiments that fucked with all of this. The texts were the bombs. Acker refused to be invisible, yet she fragmented within her works. This is the compelling distinction. She presented a provocative, even scary image, refusing to be erased, but her texts enacted disappearance.

  Her work was a manifesto for a writing and performance through and against shame and sickness and invisibility, gobbling up texts and vomiting them out, Mary Shelley as an eighteen-year-old girl terrorist. She satirized herself, made herself a grotesque. Her Janey Smith, her alter ego, exorcising her past girlhood.

  * * *

  The moment I turned the page to “Hello, I’m Erica Jong” in my Essential Acker, Elizabeth Wurtzel walked into the West Village Think Coffee with her black dog. Like a wraith out of this essay-in-progress. Her thin leopard scrunchie. The shiny face. The harsh blonde. She ate a sandwich wrapped in plastic and looked at her phone. And I realized she is one of my wounded monsters.

  As am I. My nose dripping. I keep the crumpled dirty tissues in my purse like my mother did. The next day I am back at the same coffee shop, sobbing in public. Wounded over a recently ended friendship. Wondering too how I am going to survive as a writer, whether I’ll ever be considered outside of the box of Angry Woman Writer.

  A weariness to think that my life as a writer will be to just continue cannibalizing myself. I’ve begun to question myself—what is self-promotion and what is inquiry, connecting the self to something larger? The lines for me have become blurred.

  I write in my notebook: “Elizabeth Wurtzel vs. Kathy Acker?”

  The difference is maybe multiplicity. A refusal to commodify a coherent self. Or ugliness. I mean, I don’t know.

  * * *

  That a good girl named Karen Lehmann could shed her skin and become Kathy Acker (Acker her married name). Could shed that skin again and dissolve and fragment.

  She is Karen or Kathy like I am a Katie or a Kate. We have good-girl names.

  All the Karen Lehmanns I google.

  Karen Lehmann is a wedding photographer in North Carolina.

  Karen Lehmann is a librarian in Iowa.

  Karen Lehmann is a real estate agent in Florida.

  Karen Lehmann is an ear, nose, and throat surgeon in South Africa.

  One Karen Lehmann from NYC married a lawyer, announced in the NYT wedding section.

  I realize that my writing is about conjuring up and murdering the girl I was and have allowed myself to become, a tender horror. I channeled my past self into all of these toxic girls . . . An “I” that is not only about my past but also about my present self, still gagging on all of my contradictions. Marguerite Duras with her ravaged face and whisky calling back to the girl she was. Clarice Lispector writing her girl in the markets at São Paulo while dying of cancer. “Am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”

  Kathy Acker’s girls are fools (dogs) for love, forced into humiliating roles within capitalism. Lousy, mindless salesgirls, strippers, daughters in love with fathers. They are not empowered. But she is not (just) (directly) documenting masochism or abjection or a double bind, I don’t think. This is not transcription. It’s alienation. It’s depersonalizing the concept of confessionalism and the self. It doesn’t offer itself up to be easily consumed.

  Romance narratives that colonize our brains she made into campy soap opera. Like the opening of Blood and Guts in High School, my first introduction to Acker—Janey Smith in love with her father. Later Janey is the dog trailing after a cruel Genet. Fucking the ambivalent father. Of Blood and Guts she said, “I wanted to take the patriarchy and kill the father on every level.”

  The contemporary consciousness is not a stream. It is jarring, fictive, evasive, colonized by other fictions and narratives.

  I love the artists who portray the girl as a potential terrorist but who view this skeptically, from a loving yet sometimes satirical distance, understand her indoctrination too into passivity, her ambivalent libertinism—Elfriede Jelinek, Vera Chytilová, Marguerite Duras, Kathy Acker. Rimbaud said he wanted to make himself the experiment and experience itself the poison.

  Kathy Acker is not insincere—sometimes she taps into a vein of such deep feeling.

  She’s conceptual but not bloodless, totally impure.

  * * *

  Anne Carson said of Francis Bacon that with his paintings, his portraits of viscera and horror, he removed a boundary. This is what Kathy Acker did too. She removed a boundary.

  Lately I have been thinking of writing as a visitation. Genet nailing his criminals to the wall. Kathy in a form of drag.

  When one gets crazy and risky, perhaps beautiful things can happen. Can one push against an internalized conservatism?

  “It’s necessary to go to as many extremes as possible.”

  * * *

  In an interview with Sylvère Lotringer (Kathy Acker’s longtime lover), Julia Kristeva speaks of Céline’s “opera of the flood,” how it takes from an aesthetic based on the borderline, the oozy types who go back and forth from publicity to withdrawal.

  Since moving here I have taken to wearing too much makeup. Old-lady makeup. Penciled red lips, Chanel red, penciled-in brows, black eyeliner.

  Sometimes I feel skinless, raw. Like I don’t have a face. How can I be sure that I have any coherence unless I outline it?

  * * *

  This is how I’ve figured out the Internet. Once in a while when I’m feeling particularly fragile I’ll binge on googling myself. But to practice self-care I’ll avoid combinations like my name and “I hate,” things like that.

  Then I go on Twitter and Facebook approximately five hundred times until I feel sick and crazy.

  When I binge online, I feel paranoid, fearful, oozy, weird, itchy, unhealthy, unsafe, stressed.

  “I’m a failure. This is a failure all I’m craving is my own disintegration . . .”

  This psychosis triggered on or by the Internet, our repository of confessions.

  Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms and Kathy Acker’s personas the contemporary condition of our fragmentation.

  I would have loved to have witnessed Kathy Acker terrorize the Internet.

  * * *

  Would a commercial press take a chance on Kathy Acker’s writing now? I think they would say too unfinished, violent, porny, queer, risky, litigious. They would say “too unreadable.” “This is not what the reader wants.” And Kathy responds: “I could give a fuck about what the reader wants.” Her work is not based in continuous character or narrative.

  The promise of success and being self-congratulatory is so seductive here—to turn in bourgeois narratives that prey on identification. Thomas Bernhard, the Great Viennese Hater, flips this and makes his characters total frauds. Kathy Acker, our Great American Hater, makes them fictions.

  There needs to be a word, I’ve realized, for the parasitism of middlebrow art and literature that steals from interesting and radical art but in the process strips it of its ferality, its political urgency, its queerness, its threat. (Sarah Schulman uses the term “gentrified,” also connecting it to Acker.)

  DEAR KATHY—

  How can I plot to throw a bomb in the face of my possible success, which I do not want?

  Kathy antagonized the commercial mind-set. And she is still so often misread, mischaracterized. Seen as a trick or stylistic pyrotechnics that can be easily imitated. That is not to say her works are not readable, which is often what I’m told. Her works are not easy. Because they are not meant to be easily consumed or simply titillating. None of her books need to be finished. They deal with what Sianne Ngai has called “ugly feelings.” Her work engages in tedium, annoyance, revulsion, titillation, confusion, similar to the “selective inattention” of witnessing avant-garde theater.

  There is no room for decorum within a Kathy Acker text. She takes the brutal flood of sex and violence in Guyotat and further dismays it—not only copies it, destabilizing the reader,
a fuck funhouse where she jerks you around after jerking you off. Her porn texts are too prickly to jack off to without feeling the threat of castration.

  “I want to say ‘fuck, shit, prick.’ That’s my way of talking, that’s my way of saying ‘I hate you.’”

  A great artist is not meant to be consumed, but to devour.

  This work that is like a tremendous terrorism against the body of white male literature. Writing against and appropriating and inserting herself into Great Male Texts. Taking on the role of the hysteric, the mimic, like Irigaray. Acker is Pip in Great Expectations. She is Don Quixote the knight having an abortion, trying to awaken as a great artist. At the opening of Don Quixote the green paper of the hospital gown turns into writing paper. Writing the body. Writing sickness. Janey Smith walking around with pelvic inflammatory disease.

  DEAR KATHY—

  You and David W. argue for the political necessity of writing about the sick body, to counteract silencing. Like David W. you contracted a diseased society as well. Your rants against the government, against war and hypocrisy. Anyone that depoliticizes you has essentially misread you.

  DEAR KATHY—

  I know I should wait until I’m like sixty to reject and radicalize my youth in writing, but what if I never make it to then? That’s what I keep on thinking. It feels inevitable to me, to die of cancer of the lady parts. I think of your work’s urgency. How you just kept on writing books. You knew you were finished when you got bored. These games you played. I think of all of them as one book, punctuated by covers bearing your face.

  DEAR KATHY—

  David W. died and you died and one needs to make work of great risk and threat and vulnerability just as one needs to expose oneself to great risk and threat and vulnerability because we will die. Otherwise you will die. But you left behind a body of work—such a grotesque beautiful glittering body. An infuriating body, a provocative body. A body that raged.

  DEAR KATHY—

  I dream of you and you are devouring. I mix you up with my mother in my mind. My mother who died of cancer. Your mother’s suicide. I think of you like my mother, mysterious and hard-nailed, evading with lies and myths. You are as slippery as she was.

  DEAR KATHY—

  You would tell your writing students to write about having sex with their weirdest family member. I feel with you something Oedipal edible. A devouring. The intimacy I feel for you, that would not have been reciprocated in real life. But it is an intimacy, a connection, that I need desperately.

  DEAR KATHY—

  Everyone wants to tell me you didn’t get along with other women writers. I don’t need other people to tell me this. I love Dodie Bellamy’s description in her essay on your clothes—about how you weren’t friends but were suspended in a mutual admiration and respect, on her side love—how when she once passed you at a party or reading she had a moment of true knowledge that intimacy would be impossible. That you would devour each other.

  DEAR KATHY—

  I want to write book after book of repulsive women.

  DEAR KATHY—

  Women writers I now see and admire as fellow monsters, prickly, wounded, devouring, but I feel I can’t get too close. I’ve wanted them to mentor me. It’s impossible, except on the page. They now want me to mother them. Yet I am an unfit mother. I am a barren womb. Don’t approach me and say you want to read me—which is telling me you want to love me—I will devour you, I will fill your life with so many words until you have none.

  DEAR KATHY—

  Was it the same for you?

  DEAR KATHY—

  Maybe this is because we are denied much crucial space in the culture. But you took up space. You never asked for permission.

  DEAR KATHY—

  The prickliness I feel for my peers, a paranoia. I want their respect more than anything. You craved community too but always felt like an outsider.

  DEAR KATHY—

  Kathy, it’s reviews by other women that have hurt the most. I am my texts. My texts are not feminist enough, too feminist, too sickly, too passive, too in love with fashion, etc.

  DEAR KATHY—

  I have begun taking pictures of old ladies on my iPhone. It’s making me love New York. My true jouissance would be getting inside the closet of Manhattan ladies with their art bobs who bought ’80s Comme des Garçons. I think of you in your Gaultier with sweat stains. I look at pictures online of Michèle Lamy, Rick Owens’s wife and muse. Her psychotic crone gorgeousness. The black eyeliner she draws on her forehead to center herself. I love decadent crones, psychotic crones, gorgeous crones who don’t give a fuck. That’s who I wish to be.

  DEAR KATHY—

  I’m glad I haven’t met you, in a way. I can read your texts as sustenance, as encouragement. I don’t feel weird or crazy you won’t blurb my book, or act diva-like with me, or didn’t want to read with me. I’m sure you were sometimes dreadful, sometimes a monster, generous, complex. But I don’t have to feel bitter or wounded or ignored—I can just feel fully your work and influence. I can love you completely.

  One Can Be Dumb and Unhappy at Exactly the Same Time

  On Failure, the Depressed Muse, and Barbara Loden’s Wanda

  Fourth of July, 100 degrees outside. I am an insect trapped in sticky, humid amber. I keep on shifting the thermostat—74, 73, 72. I have been home alone for weeks at our cottage in the small hippie town of Carrboro, North Carolina. My partner, a rare books librarian, is off to Oxford on a fellowship to study Tudor-era books. We flew to Europe together, a small holiday before—Paris, Amsterdam, Antwerp. Now I’m home. I am supposed to write, of course. I am always supposed to write. Some sort of misery, being in between projects. Feeling stuck.

  I leave the house once a day to take our terrier on a walk. It is a sauna outside and the puppy rebels, lies down stubborn on the grass. His coat a magnet for the sun—all black except for the darling silver mohawk, enhanced at my request by the groomer. I occasionally carry him home, him prone like an endangered maiden. Sometimes I try to drag him, an impotent gesture. Not the best idea to name your puppy Genet, especially in the South. I tell people he’s named after a French anarchist.

  The same mile loop around the leafy neighborhood. When I walk, I feel like Duras’s housewife Lol Stein, who is attempting through her circumambulations to get back to her girlhood. Lately I feel like I am sleepwalking through a large strange space that’s something like grief. I have to remember that I’m still jet-lagged. A slowness to everything. A particular sense of drift.

  To walk the dog I dress in costume—a way to alleviate the heat and perhaps the dullness. Sweaty short-shorts and a large floppy fedora and high-heeled sandals, like a thirtysomething zaftig version of the girl in Duras’s The Lover. The narrator, a writer now, remembering the passivity and dumbness of her youth. Something about the meditative quality of the silence here also makes me feel like a Duras heroine.

  Today we have to cross a parade of muscled, fervent marathoners. Genet and I watch them for a time, admiring their bodies’ velocity. Finally I pick the dog up and, breathing apologies, we shuffle through the throng.

  * * *

  When I think about what I want this essay to be, I think about walking through an open space. Maybe when walking, the body is essaying. A wandering, a wondering. An essay attempts, in the tradition of Montaigne. The idea of an essay as an attempt reveals the possibility, perhaps the pull, of its failure. The slowness of all of this.

  When walking in my neighborhood in the sticky heat, clomping carefully in my wooden heels, trying to think through things, I am aware of myself as an absurd yet tentative figure in the landscape. Lol Stein in a trance. The somnambulist Robin Vote in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.

  The actress Barbara Loden trudging up the hill of black coal in her 1970 film Wanda, playing the eponymous Scranton housewife who has abandoned her family, who has been set adrift, who eventually finds herself involved in a botched bank robbery.

  A figure in white, like
a ghost, still haunting a barren landscape where she is no longer functional, making her way almost glacially through rich black. It is meditative, this monotony. A spectral, Sisyphean scene.

  Wanda is a film about an impoverished woman who cannot escape the stagnant circle her life has become. Shot in cinéma vérité style and mostly improvised, it is the only film that the actress and wife of the director Elia Kazan made.

  This was her attempt, her meditation—on failure, on isolation, on being trapped.

  The opening scene. Close-up on a baby screeching in a dirty diaper. Wanda has walked away from being a mother and wife, yet she is still cloistered in a squalling domestic space, crashing at her sister’s house. She is the ghost shrouding herself under sheets on the couch, hungover, hiding.

  Barbara Loden channeling a past of muted poverty for her character, growing up bewildered and stuck in a mountain town of North Carolina, living with her fundamentalist grandparents. She remembered hiding behind the kitchen stove, wondering who she was, wondering what she was doing there. This is why Elia Kazan told her he cast her as the Marilyn Monroe stand-in for the stage version of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall. He cast her because he said that she and Marilyn were both orphans. She was his mistress for years before he married her. Marilyn Monroe also at one time Kazan’s mistress. A mirroring.

  I keep on writing about Barbara Loden. This is not the first time I’ve attempted to write about her. I can’t seem to figure her out.

  To circle: an obsession. Trying to decipher, to imagine past fates.

  * * *

  At midnight I stand outside on the back patio in only a tank top and underwear, staring out at the height of the pine trees. I watch Genet prowl and bark at the deer hiding in the small wooded area behind our fence. The ways in which jet lag mimics depression. I think: Yes, perhaps I am losing my mind. Like I can see this calmly, objectively. Too much isolation. When your voice sounds strange, calling out in the distance.

  I have to remind myself my body is still weak. After two lovely days strolling around Paris with John, I became sick in Amsterdam with a throat infection. For days I lay on the blue velvet sofa of the Airbnb apartment in the Jordaan district, drifting in and out of feverish sleep, listening to the roars of drunk Russian men on booze cruises in the canal, too weak to even walk around except to go to a tourist doctor with a haphazard and somewhat seedy office who wrote me a script for a tri-pak of antibiotics.