Kathy Acker

by Kathy Acker

  KUIPERS: Same sort of tactic as disinformation.

  ACKER: Yeah. Obviously, we’ve seen that, too.

  KUIPERS: What’s the difference between the terrorists peopling the earlier novels and the pirates in Empire of the Senseless? Where did that title come from?

  ACKER: Empire of the Senseless? Mainly because the ICA—this art institute in London—was doing a show of sci-fi, slash-and-gash films, like Reanimator and things like that, and they called the whole thing Empire of the Senseless. I’ve always loved the movie Empire of the Senseless. I went, “Ooh, that sounds so great.” I appropriated it.

  The pirates. You mean Blackbeard and all that? That whole section taken from Huck Finn. The reason I used Huck Finn is ’cause that seems to be the text about American freedom. And that’s kind of what the book is about, is how when you live in this kind of creepy society you can have any freedom. Maybe that’s about racism, but I was more interested in sexism and the relations between the sexes. There’s a section about pirates in Huck Finn, so that’s how the pirates got in there. And to be a pirate—that’s kind of like the dumb myth of freedom; go make our own laws and control our own ship.

  KUIPERS: It doesn’t come off as being dumb. There’s a certain amount of belief in it.

  ACKER: Oh, yeah! By dumb, I just mean that it’s idealistic. It’s when the idealism meets the actuality that you have your complexities; obviously, neither I, you, nor Abhor and Thivai are going to go off and be pirates. I’ve heard that there are pirates now on the China Sea, but I can’t imagine us actually…I don’t really want to go to the China Sea and be a pirate!

  KUIPERS: Or on the Caribbean…

  ACKER: Yeah.

  KUIPERS: Is it more a freedom move to be a pirate than a terrorist?

  ACKER: You’re asking about degrees of romanticism…who are the terrorists—the IRA? Is that a move of freedom? Whether they’re wrong or they’re right, they’re certainly looking for self-control, which is a better word than freedom, and they’re certainly fighting for political self-control. The pirates are obviously a reaction to political repression, again, but it’s a different sort of move, isn’t is? It’s a much more individualistic move. That your lone terrorist would just come along—I’ve heard about the days of kneecapping in Italy, when kids would go out and kneecap, but that’s not what either of us are talking about.

  There’s a lot of anarchic violence going on in England right now, a lot of cop-bashing, especially outside the urban areas. And they’re all saying: “Oh, it’s just the hooligans; they drink too much.” It’s not exactly the situation. I don’t think that’s terrorism, and I don’t think that’s acts of piracy. But there’s something there that’s a reaction to the oppression.

  KUIPERS: It’s more like gang violence.

  ACKER: Yeah; it’s very anarchic. It’s what you have in England ’cause they’ve never had a revolution there. Maybe what you’re asking me is whether it’s better to work in a political group like the IRA.

  KUIPERS: Is it more effective?

  ACKER: I don’t know. Historically, I don’t know.

  KUIPERS: Should we be seeking personal freedom or working toward…

  ACKER: Don’t they work together? Weren’t the nihilists in Russia the precursors to the revolution? I don’t see that it’s dualistic.

  KUIPERS: Change of direction. There’s a place in the book where you find yourself in what’s essentially a feminist utopia, and denying it.

  ACKER: Oh, that’s in the brothel.

  KUIPERS: Yes; there’s only women, there’s no me…

  ACKER: That’s Thivai talking, right? It matters; my memory is that Thivai’s in the brothel and there’s all women.

  Would I want to live in a separatist society? No. There’s stuff in Don Quixote which is an argument against separatism, very directly. It could have come out unconsciously; I’m very much not a separatist. I mean personally, emotionally, and politically. If other women are, it’s fine; everyone has their own tastes, their own decision. For me, the feminist struggle—which is not for every woman—is not about denying men. It’s about self-control in a world that’s both men and women.

  KUIPERS: You talked about pirates as a “mirror of our sexuality.”

  ACKER: That’s pretty cool. I kind of like that. Sexuality. I have a friend staying with me and we had a discussion about sexuality, and I said: “You either accept it or repress it, but don’t go getting guilty and moralizing it!” Yeah, it is ‘ol piracy. Good bourgeois behavior and sexuality don’t quite go hand-in-hand.

  KUIPERS: Temporal structure in narrative. What we get in your books is little chunks of time and space, and in the next chunk there’s a new time and space. Unlike some literature and music, which attempt complete breaks with the past, or an historical location, there seems to be a sense of inclusion. All times on top of each other.

  ACKER: My effects are usually more about thematics. Once revolution happens in Paris [Empire of the Senseless], that’s not true, ’cause it all happens in Paris from then on. So this is prior to Paris. My model for that whole section prior to Paris was a book called Neuromancer by William Gibson. It’s part of a whole movement called cyberpunk, and it’s very much what will happen in cyberpunk. I was very enamored; sometimes I copy books ’cause I want to do what they’re doing, and I really wanted to find out how to do it and I want to understand it. Gibson, in Neuromancer, is doing something I really want to understand. Absolutely brilliant. In some ways, he’s taking some of the things Burroughs had done and taking it further. Burroughs has lost it a bit by now, and Gibson hasn’t. Neuromancer is a great book.

  KUIPERS: What time period are we talking about?

  ACKER: Neuromancer just came out a few years ago. It changed the face of science fiction and started this thing called cyberpunk.

  KUIPERS: Not a sci-fi reader; just read my first one at Christmastime.

  ACKER: No, it’s a closed world. He invents language in it; what it is is that Burroughs is a lot about minimizing and narrowing and cutting out. What fascinates me about Gibson is that he took some of that, but he was about enlarging. Like you say, it was about totalizing. He goes: “Now we’re in Japan. Now we’re in here. Now we’re here. Now we’re here.” It seemed to be more positive than negative, and I want that positive.

  KUIPERS: An ever-widening structure; inclusiveness…

  ACKER: Yeah, yeah. So I use some of these structures in there, from Neuromancer, to structure the first part.

  KUIPERS: A few quick biographical things. How accurately do your books reflect your travels? Are you widely traveled?

  ACKER: Oh, yeah. Well, naw; I’m only widely traveled in Europe and a bit in Mexico and I’ve been to Haiti, but in the Third World I’m not widely traveled at all. But America, Canada, and Europe, yes. Some people are much more widely traveled than I am. But for the average person, yes, I am.

  KUIPERS: Education?

  ACKER: I went to Brandeis University for two years, then I transferred to the University of San Diego, finished my B.A., did two years toward a Ph.D. Came back, did a year in the joint course in Classics and Philosophy at CCNY and NYU, and then just got out of the whole system. So I was somewhere toward a Ph.D.

  KUIPERS: What are you working on now?

  ACKER: I’m working on a life of Rimbaud. I’m also broke, so I’m going to do this bodybuilding book, but let’s not talk about that. I’m just broke. That ought to be enough for about two years.

  KUIPERS: Are you doing short stories and stuff?

  ACKER: Yeah. I do about an article a month.

  KUIPERS: Freelancing?

  ACKER: Freelancing, yeah. I do readings all the time. I do TV spots now and then…this is in England; I would never be on TV here. I make a living that’s all. Basically, I do my books and I do all this other crap in order to make a living. Many book reviews. I don’t like doing articles unless I have the subject. When they do these opinion things, I can’t stand it. Dumb.

  If it’s a
good book, it gives you an excuse to talk about something else. For example, I had to review this really great book called Loft Living, for City Limits by a woman named Sharon Zukin—it was a great excuse to talk about the industrialization in London.

  KATHY ACKER/SYLVÈRE LOTRINGER (“DEVOURED BY MYTHS”)

  INTERVIEW BY SYLVÈRE LOTRINGER

  UNEXPURGATED TRANSCRIPT

  1989–1990

  1. MEMORIES

  LOTRINGER: Before I met you, I had heard of that writer called the Black Tarantula. I was very intrigued. I must say I had a visual picture that was quite different from what I discovered. Why did you take that name?

  ACKER: I was living in ’Frisco with Peter—Peter Gordon—in the Haight-Ashbury section right after the hippy period. The section became a very whoppy town for about two years, and then it became gay and started to spruce up. There was a wonderful theater group that used to be the Cockettes, and right before I came to San Francisco, in the early seventies, changed to the Angels of Light. Some of the Angels of Light lived up the street from us, and I became friendly with them. According to the guide, every bar at the time was gay, but it’s not quite true. It was this ambience in which everyone was sort of androgynous. You weren’t gay, you weren’t straight, it was very loose. And everybody changed their names, everybody wore makeup, everybody dressed up all the time.

  LOTRINGER: Even Peter?

  ACKER: Peter enjoyed watching. Peter’s eyes got very big at all this. [laughs] I would go up the street for these orgies. Peter never came. I remember I had a girlfriend for a time, Vanessa, who used to sing with Prissy Condition. Vanessa was this beautiful, beautiful black girl, and she would come in and sort of whop Peter around. She would say, “I’m gonna fuck your girlfriend now,” and Peter would just giggle. He didn’t know what else to do! Ah, Vanessa was something. And so everyone changed their names. I was writing, but I didn’t want to make a thing about it, you know; it was as if I had two lives. I hang around them and also I was a writer. So I made up a sort of name for myself, and that name was Rip-Off Red. And I wrote a novel at that point, Rip-Off Red Girl Detective, which is the first novel I’ve ever written. Very luckily it has never been published [laughs]. It was a pornographic mystery story, and it was supposed to earn me lots of money (in my very deluded brain).

  LOTRINGER: How old were you then?

  ACKER: When I wrote Tarantula, I was twenty-three. So I was around twenty-two. Where did I write The Black Tarantula? Oh, memory, it gets everything mixed up. I definitely was with Peter when I wrote Rip-Off Red. And we were in ’Frisco. Before that I was doing The Black Tarantula down in San Diego. I was the Black Tarantula before I was Rip-Off Red. So there goes that apocryphal story. [laughs]

  LOTRINGER: Why the Black Tarantula?

  ACKER: I don’t remember. I honestly don’t. I liked it. I liked tarantulas in those days, and I probably like them now. Mexican kids keep them as pets. And they’re really, like, sensual…they’re really soft and furry. Everyone thinks they’re horrible but they’re not terribly dangerous. The worst they do is sting like a bee.

  LOTRINGER: That was quite a punk name…

  ACKER: Yeah, but this was way before punk. I guess I was kind of punk. I wasn’t a very good hippy. We just liked the Velvet Underground—we didn’t have anyone really to like in those days. Well, I sort of eat like a hippy, I mean I eat health food, but I never really was into free love. I am just not that loose. And plus those days, the men really had all the power, all they did is to get these women pregnant. It wasn’t really much fun, you end up with five babies and no boyfriend.

  LOTRINGER: You moved back to New York for a while, didn’t you?

  ACKER: I went to school in San Diego, then I came back to New York and I hung out in the poetry scene. That was the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. I was working in a sex show in 42nd Street and I had two lives, the poetry and the sex show. And the sex show really didn’t make you feel very nice about sex. It was all about money, and that’s how I thought about it. Then there were all these hippies in the St. Mark’s Project fucking each other, and I didn’t think it was like, Hew, Let’s fuck! I was like, Shit, that’s what I do! It’s not that I fucked for work—because it was just fake—but still it was enough. I didn’t need it back in the home base. They thought I was weird. Here’s this girl, works in a sex show and she dresses weird. Everyone was very much in blue jeans, and I had shaved my head because that was my sort of radical stance against working in a sex show. [laughs] It wasn’t very radical, but what can you do when you need money?

  LOTRINGER: You’re still working in a sex show…

  ACKER: No, why?

  LOTRINGER: Because you’ve kept your head shaved…

  ACKER: I never had hair really long since then. I hated men at that point, even though I was living with a guy. It just made me hate men. He was a real creep anyway.

  LOTRINGER: It was not Peter.

  ACKER: No, it was before Peter. Peter was a really nice guy. I met Peter when I first escaped New York. It was in 1973–74 and we lived together until about 1980–81. Six years, almost seven. A long time. When you met me I was living with Peter, and Peter broke up the marriage. So that was…Wait, I can remember exactly because that’s when my mother suicided. Three months after the marriage split up. I was thirty, so it was twelve years ago.

  LOTRINGER: That’s 1977.

  ACKER: Yeah. So I was with Peter from 1970 to 1977. I must have been in California earlier than I thought. I split up with this creep I had been living with, from the sex show, and I moved out to California to live with Peter in 1970. So that gets the dates right.

  LOTRINGER: The sex show was before you went to California?

  ACKER: YEAH. I was in it only six months, but it pretty radically changed my view of the world.

  LOTRINGER: In what way?

  ACKER: It changed me mainly in two ways: one, it changed my politics. When I was in university I was sort of SDS, but the student Left was a very elitist thing. The 42nd Street experience made me learn about street politics. It’s not that I was that interested in sex, it more gave me a viewpoint of whatever goes on in actuality through the kind of sexual perspective. I think Genet has the same kind of perspective. You see people from the bottom up, and sexual behavior, especially sex minus relationship, which is what happens in 42nd Street, is definitely bottom. Then you see it in a different way, especially power relationships in society. And I think that perspective never left me.

  LOTRINGER: Then you stayed in California for how long?

  ACKER: Two years in San Diego…

  LOTRINGER: You went to art school there?

  ACKER: No, I was in Classics. I studied Greek and Latin.

  LOTRINGER: And you were connected to the art world there?

  ACKER: David Antin had been my mentor and had introduced me to the early conceptual artists Dan Graham and Joseph Kosuth. When I first was in New York I didn’t know any artists. Then we lived in San Francisco for a few years, where Peter was studying with Bob Ashley, and we were involved with a number of artists up there. Then I moved back to New York because Ted and Leandro—Ted Castle is an art critic and Leandro Katz a filmmaker, both of them very well known—published me, and they knew all the artists around, and that’s when I really entered the art world.

  LOTRINGER: You didn’t go back to the St. Mark’s Poetry Project.

  ACKER: No. I really wasn’t comfortable there, and I think they only really were interested in my work after it was accepted by the art world.

  LOTRINGER: How was the art world then?

  ACKER: When I came back it was all Keith Sonnier and Joseph Kosuth. I hang out at first with Marcia Resnick and Pooh Kaye. You know, people my age. It was about a year or two before I met Diego [Cortez]. When did I meet you? 1976, 1977? It was just before the punk thing was happening.

  LOTRINGER: That was the X-magazine benefit in East 4th Street. For the first time, art met punk.

  ACKER: Yeah, it all happened that year
. That’s when it all started. There was Michael McClard and Robin Winters, who were solidly artists, and Diego Cortez. Betsy Sussler was part of the group, and there was me. I was never an artist.

  LOTRINGER: That was an exciting time. The art world was beginning to open up.

  ACKER: Yeah. There never was a better time. The community was absolutely strong. Most of my friendships have really come from that time.

  LOTRINGER: What was your writing like when you came back to New York?

  ACKER: I was in the middle of Toulouse Lautrec. It was the end of the trilogy, so it was the beginning of my writing really. Yes, because I wrote Kathy Goes to Haiti when I got that grant to go to there.

  LOTRINGER: Oh, you actually went to Haiti? I was convinced you had never set foot there!

  ACKER: I wish it were true. That would be better than Kafka and America. No, the last part, the voodoo doctor business, is absolutely journalistic. The rest is a bit fudgy…

  LOTRINGER: What brought you to…

  ACKER: It’s funny being interviewed by you. I sort of like it. So what what what?

  2. IDENTITIES

  LOTRINGER: How did you get into this new kind of writing?

  ACKER: I had been taught mainly by the Black Mountain poets, but I had always wanted to write prose, not poetry. I learned a lot from David Antin, who was very much of a conceptualist. So I had really been trained in the idea that you just don’t sit down and write, you have to know why you write and why you use certain methodologies. In that first book of mine, Politics, I was kind of searching for what I wanted to do. I was looking for models. And the only model I found in my world, not looking for the Iowa school of writing stuff, was William Burroughs—I like Kerouac’s work, but I wasn’t that interested in that kind of autobiographical work. Burroughs was the only prose writer I could find who was sort of conceptualist. Oh, he’s very much a conceptualist. So I used The Third Mind as experiments to teach myself how to write. Using tapes and changing tapes. And I think myself how to write. Using tapes and changing tapes. And I think this is part of the trouble I had with the St. Mark’s people at that time, because this was not the usual thing to do. I remember that time because this was not the usual thing to do. I remember I used to go to the sex show every day and write two pages and play with dream stuff and do inserts and start cutting things up.