Kathy Acker

by Kathy Acker

  LOTRINGER: And you were doing that while you were working at the sex show?

  ACKER: I had two, three half-hour shows. And I would have an hour in between each show. So I would go to Tad’s Steakhouse and I would write. Just to keep my mind together, otherwise I would have flipped out. I performed with this guy Marc Stevens. I think he became a famous porn star. And he was totally gay. I mean if he tried to kiss me, he’d start giggling. It was so fake.

  LOTRINGER: So you started writing in New York?

  ACKER: No, when I went to California to live with Peter…Oh I know what happened. David Antin said to me, there’s one magazine of prose work that you could publish in that’s in the poetry world—Carol Bergé’s magazine. So I sent her some material. I was working as a stripper to earn money and I would spend most of my time hanging out in the dressing room with all the other strippers hearing stories. It was the days of a lot of drugs, especially hallucinogens, so the girls just got totally wacked out of their minds and would tell great stories. I started writing the stories down, but I didn’t want to be a sociologist. The stories were very immediate to me, so I put everything in the first person, plus some of my dreams. I sent this material to Carol Bergé, and she sent back the sort of usual note: Oh great stuff, lots of energy, send more. So I’m babysitting one night for David, and I see this letter on the floor. I see my name, so, of course, I read the letter and it’s from Carol Bergé saying, This woman is a total nut-case, lock her up in a loony-bin (thinking that these stories were all about me). I mean it’s very hard, I was sensitive in those days, but I remember being very fascinated that the work had had that kind of power. So I became very interested in the use of the word “I.” And then I had a crush on this guy, and the crush wasn’t returned, and for some reason that also made me really interested in the model of schizophrenia. So I started reading whoever you could hold of, it was R. D. Laing–David Cooper times, and sort of started doing this kind of writing, you know coming out of that conceptual view towards writing, the art stuff I’d been through…

  LOTRINGER: What do you mean exactly by the conceptual stuff?

  ACKER: Well, that most poets in those days didn’t think why did they write the way they wrote. They thought all the Surrealists had done this, so we’ll do this. There was still, and still is, the lingering idea of good poetry in the right image and good images in the right word, you know the perfect word, precise place in the line and things like that. And what David really taught is, you know, the hell with all that. Just think what do you want to do and then do it. Form is determined not by arbitrary content but by intention. And intentionality is all, I guess that’s what you’d say. You don’t look at the finger pointing at the moon, you look at the moon. You look at what you want to do. And what I wanted to do was to explore the word “I.” That’s what I meant by this kind of emphasis on conceptualism, on intentionality. And I wanted to explore the use of the word “I,” that’s the only thing I wanted to do. So what I did is that I placed very direct autobiographical—just diary—material, right next to fake diary material. I tried to figure out who I wasn’t, and I went to texts of murderesses and I used pre-Freudian texts because I didn’t want to deal with Freudian jargon. I just changed them into the first person, really not caring if the writing was good or bad, and put the fake first person next to the true first person. And then continued this to see what would happen. I mean, a very naive experiment at first. I was experimenting about identity in terms of language. So that’s how I started out.

  LOTRINGER: I had a similar experience when I went to this de Sade convention in Binghamton, New York, a few years ago. I didn’t want to talk about de Sade, so I read this stuff that had actually been written by heavy S&M guys meeting in a dungeon to do these ghastly kinds of torture to themselves, like pinning their penises down with a knife on the kitchen table. I presented it in the first person and I was really shattered that everyone believed it and started asking me questions…

  ACKER: It’s really incredible, isn’t it? It really makes you think about what the people believe and why do they believe what they believe and what are these sort of, like, signal words, like when you read a newspaper. You’re thinking then, Why do a lot of people believe this? and What kind of writing says, “Believe me”?

  LOTRINGER: You wanted to play with belief then.

  ACKER: I didn’t at that time, afterwards I did. I just wanted to figure out how the word “I” worked.

  LOTRINGER: And the I belongs to everyone. It’s a free-for-all word, a grammatical shifter. Anyone who wants it can grab it.

  ACKER: Well, I came to the decision that it was a false problem because it’s a thing that’s made. You create identity, you’re not given identity per se. And so what became more interesting to me wasn’t the I, it was text, because it’s texts that create the identity. So I became much more interested in plagiarism. But that took a few years to go from one interest to the other.

  LOTRINGER: What happened during these few years then?

  ACKER: Uh, I was doing experiments about memory. It was always about how this I works, what is memory, how does memory and language work. I didn’t terribly have the theory in those days, not that I have a theory now, but I didn’t have much theory to play with. I had read earlier R. D. Laing and David Cooper for stuff, and then I had worked on memory, mainly Bergson…

  LOTRINGER: About Laing and Cooper, was it the idea of dissociation in language?

  ACKER: I wasn’t using them for language, I was using them for models of schizophrenia.

  LOTRINGER: So that was the I.

  ACKER: Yeah. The idea that you don’t need to have a central identity, that you could have a split identity and that was a more viable way in the world. I was splitting the I into false and true I’s and I just wanted to see if this false I was more or less real than the true I, what are the reality levels between false and true and how it worked. And of course there’s no difference. By the end of the Tarantula, when I do the de Sade business, I can’t tell what’s true or false. And the only reason I can tell there’s the truth is that I’m remembering the fact. I took a biography of de Sade and placed it next to my own biography, and except for actual dates that I remember—if I say I was born in 1848 I know that’s false—I can’t tell what’s me and what’s de Sade.

  LOTRINGER: Did that happen when you were writing it, or afterwards?

  ACKER: When I read it afterwards. When you’re writing it, your mind is focused on the present, everything’s true. And then the next book, I did things with repeating texts. If I repeated the same text, would it be the same text? Anyway, that’s the early work. And I was playing with other things too. The poetry world was very elitist, there was high literature and low literature. High literature was like the poetry world and great novels, and low literature was porn and horror books and what not. So I played with using a lot of horror books, well mainly porn, and putting them in my stories. And writing badly. Basically, I was interested in doing everything I wasn’t supposed to do. I’d been to too many writing schools and I was in a bad mood. [laughs]

  LOTRINGER: You went to writing schools?

  ACKER: When I was at the university I took writing courses and they were awful, absolutely terrible.

  LOTRINGER: A story has a certain logic, a certain development. Everything is positioned in a significant fashion and meant to contribute to the story. As soon as you give that up, how do you make things hold together?

  ACKER: I couldn’t have cared less in those days. I wrote so many pages a day and that was that. What I do is that I set up guidelines at each piece, such as you’ll use autobiographical material and you’ll use fake autobiographical.

  LOTRINGER: That was the intention.

  ACKER: Yeah, that was the intention. I would make a few other rules, such as you’re not allowed to rewrite. I was very very influenced by certain artists’ work—you know, you’ll do this in this amount of time. It was task work. I really didn’t want any creativity, so I se
t up this task, this nutty task basically, and I’d do it! And that’s how I thought of it.

  3. INSPIRATIONS

  LOTRINGER: The idea of using your imagination to write a story never appealed to you.

  ACKER: I hated it really. I use the word imagination—I just used it in a review—but I think it’s a bit of a bugaboo. They’ve used the words creativity and imagination to sort of place literature on a pedestal, which makes it both unavailable and really doesn’t allow it to have the range that it should have. I wonder sometimes about those things.

  LOTRINGER: I remember one time, years ago, we were walking on First Avenue, near the Japanese restaurant, and you told me: I don’t have any imagination…

  ACKER: I never thought I had imagination. I never fantasized, I never imagined it. I’ve never imagined anything. I’ve used other texts or I’ve used friends or I’ve used memories. I’ve never created stories in that way by making things up.

  LOTRINGER: Most writers use what they’ve been through…

  ACKER: Yes, but they always talk about creation…

  LOTRINGER:…as if it came out of nothing.

  ACKER: Yes.

  LOTRINGER: That’s the idea you don’t like.

  ACKER: Yeah.

  LOTRINGER: Poets don’t write out of nothing. They use a sticker on a bottle, or an ad. They use things as material to start with.

  ACKER: Yeah, but they talk about inspiration. I think it was mainly inspiration that I was against. I thought there’re reasons I’m doing this, so I can tell people why I’m doing it and I can talk about the end result. There’s nothing mysterious.

  LOTRINGER: And what did you do with all these tasks and texts?

  ACKER: A friend told me, Oh, just send those out, so I sent the first part of the Tarantula out and the people liked it. Lots of people wrote back to me—I think I sent it to about a hundred people—and so I thought, Oh, this is fun, I’ll send the next section. And it became a sort of serial novel. It was a time when there was this—there’s always been male art, but this was mail art—and people were mailing things to each other. There was a whole network of mail art, and I was part of the Network. A lot of people said, Gee, we’d like to get this, so the next time I did another six installments, which is Nymphomaniac, there were two hundred of them. And we just talked everybody into doing it for free. I hustled printers, Peter and I would go and staple them together ourselves, it was a home-production industry. Only no money was made. I did the last part, Toulouse, when I was in New York. By then, too many people wanted them, you know, and I guess I also thought—I don’t think I thought about money in those days—it would be nice to be really published. No, that wasn’t Toulouse…I don’t remember this stuff. I came back to New York when Ted Castle and Leandro Katz wanted to republish Tarantula. Maybe Toulouse was done by then. Anyway, that’s how it happened. I had this kind of community, when I was sending them out, which I’ve never had since—but you can’t go backwards. I mean it sort of just happens, what can you do?

  LOTRINGER: It was like artists showing their work to other artists. The outside world wasn’t really involved too much, and that was great.

  ACKER: It was great. I met Larry Weiner, Phil Glass helped out, lots of people, you know, through this…little bit of madness. And then…

  LOTRINGER: And then what? [both laugh]

  ACKER: That’s it for that bit of messed up memory. [laughs]

  LOTRINGER: It was also a time when things were kind of cohering, not just in your writing, but everywhere.

  ACKER: I had the whole community. Women were doing a lot of performance art about identity. I mean, they weren’t in the poetry world for me, but they were in the art world, and for other people too. It was a great time for artists.

  LOTRINGER: That was the time when painters were still indirectly subsidizing the art world.

  ACKER: Yes. That was it. Sol LeWitt subsidized me, that’s what happened. ’Cause Sol went to Ted and Leandro and said I want to print these things as real books. And he basically became my patron. I think artists were doing that. They were practically subsidizing other artists. I didn’t know who Ted and Leandro were, I thought they were part of the St. Mark’s poetry scene, so I came to New York and lo and behold it wasn’t the St. Mark’s poetry scene at all. They had a party for my book, and Joseph Kosuth and Keith Sonnier were there. I was absolutely flabbergasted ‘cause I’d been reading Artforum regularly—worshipped these people—and suddenly I’m in a room with them. I don’t think I could open my mouth the whole evening. And from then on I was just in the art world. I never had anything to do with the St. Mark’s poetry scene after that.

  LOTRINGER: Did the art world reinforce what you were already thinking?

  ACKER: Oh, they were doing the sort of work I was doing. And I was doing the sort of work verbally that they were doing visually. So it made sense. I mean the language was the same. So I had a lot of encouragement for my own work. I mean I read a lot of novels, but I don’t really like talking to other writers because you can’t really exchange things and it’s very competitive. You can’t really get ideas. But to hang around artists, I could get tons of ideas and I could translate back and forth.

  LOTRINGER: What kind of things did you derive from it?

  ACKER: Let me think. Kathy Goes to Haiti was kind of a straight book. Then after that I went to San Francisco and wrote Great Expectations. I wrote Blood and Guts in High School around the punk time. And it’s at the end of that book when I start really using plagiarism, like when I do the Genet stuff. So I think that was in the air. David Salle and Julian Schnabel, when did they come along? I can’t remember. I mean, you’re asking me about direct influences…

  LOTRINGER: No, I’m just interested to see how the “translation” works. Because it’s not even plagiarism, its ideas that you can use in your own medium. That’s the conceptual part. I mean concepts travel.

  ACKER: I can’t remember who or what I saw and who I was influenced by until it comes to the Metro Pictures times. Then I know like Richard Prince’s work and Sherrie Levine’s work and David Salle’s work really influenced me.

  LOTRINGER: Actually, I don’t like the word “influence.” It sounds all too mechanical.

  ACKER: Well, you know what I mean. When I knew Diego and those people I was friendly with, I don’t think we ever talked theoretically at all. I don’t even remember talking to anybody really. It sort of entered.

  LOTRINGER: What was very interesting is that it wasn’t really ideas—like the ideas of the French theorists—it was not like abstractions, concepts, it was more like a certain way of looking at objects and dealing with them.

  ACKER: Well, meeting you influenced me—you don’t like influence—but it changed me a lot because by introducing me to French philosophes, you gave me a way of verbalizing what I had been doing in language. I didn’t really understand why I refused to use linear narrative; why my sexual genders kept changing; why basically I am the most disoriented novelist that ever existed. [laughs] I knew that’s how I wanted to do things but I didn’t…The work of Laing and Cooper and whoever else I was going to gave me no way of really understanding why I was writing the way I was writing. And then when I read, I think it was the way I was writing. And then when I read, I think it was mainly Anti-Oedipus and then Foucault’s work, I had this whole language…And I remember thinking, Why don’t they know me! I know exactly what they’re talking about! And I could go farther, that was the big thing for me. I had a real sense, until that happened that I was like this kind of death-dumb-and-blind person for years; I just did what I did but I had no way of telling anyone about it, or talking about it. And then suddenly I had this language and I could say, Hi! And that other people were doing the same thing. We could have some way of talking.

  LOTRINGER: That’s what, in Don Quixote, you call semiotics, which is quite different from the work of these philosophes…Actually it was everything that happened after semiotics. But that was a catch-all word at the tim
e. That was after the art world.

  ACKER: Yes, that was after the art world. I mean when I entered the art world it was great and I loved looking at everyone’s work and hanging out with them, but I never talked to them. I was so shy. They were just taking me along.

  LOTRINGER: Do you think painters talk more about what they’re doing than writers?

  ACKER: No, they just talk about galleries. All they talk about is money. [laughs]

  LOTRINGER: And you still think that art has some sort of connections to what you’re doing?

  ACKER: Yeah, and more so since I moved to England. I’ve just been through five years of deprivation in England, where everything either has a moral imperative or it’s worthless. And I’m antisocial and against the community—and individualistic! I can’t believe it…I went with some friends the other night to the Wooster Group and I just loved it. And they’re going, Ah, Kathy, it’s so old-hat! And I said, not to me—I’ve been in England! [laughs] I mean it’s where I will use the word “imagination,” the realm of imagination. It’s about possibility, and more and more life’s not about possibility. More and more they’re trying to be fundamentalist, to shut things down. You know, to take away history in every possible sense. The history of our souls, the histories of where you came from, all the history in every sense. And that’s what gives you the possibility right? If Madame Bovary fucked around, so can I. [laughs] It’s all the fundamentalists who have the control of things. They teach dogma. And the art world, in its best sense, is the opposite.