Bibliography

Books

Algeria: A Series of Invocations Because Nothing Else Works (1984)

Blood and Guts in High School (1984)

My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1984)

Hello, I'm Erica Jong (1984)

Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (1986)

Literal Madness: Three Novels (Reprinted 1987)

The Birth of the Poet (1987)

Empire of the Senseless (1988)

Young Lust (1989)

In Memoriam to Identity (1990)

Low: Good and Evil in the Work of Nayland Blake (1990)

Hannibal Lecter, My Father (1991)

My Mother: Demonology (1994)

Pussycat Fever (1995)

Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996)

Bodies of Work : Essays (1997)

Eurydice in the Underworld (1998)

Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker (2002)

Spread Wide (2004)

Acker – Articles from The New Statesman 1989-1991 (2007)

Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Series V (2015)

I'm Very into You: Correspondence 1995--1996 (2015)

Plays

Desire (1982)

Lulu Unchained (1984)

Birth of a Poet (1985)

Mourning Becomes Electra (1997)

Other media

Film

Audio

Not by Kathy Acker,

but sometimes attributed to her

I Don't Expect You'll Do the Same, by Clay Fear (1974)

The Complete Works of Constance De Jong by Constance De Jong (1975)

Politics

Politics (1972)

Politics was Kathy Acker’s first work, written when she was 21, and is somewhere between poetry and prose. It was written in New York while she was working in strip shows and shows the early influence of the Black Mountain Poets and William Burroughs. At the time Kathy was working through the text experiments in ‘The Third Mind’ these included methods of diarising as well as the ‘cut up’ and ‘fold in’ methods that he made famous. The text consists of personal diary entries, cut in with stories from other sex workers. In an interview with Sylvere Lotringe she explains how each day she would have two or three half hour shows, with an hour between each show and to stop herself flipping out she would go to Tad’s Steakhouse on Times Square and write, putting everything into the first person. This material was then performed at St Mark’s:

“I was writing a book called Politics which was little prose poems. In the middle of Politics there’s this huge diary section – this is what I used to read at St Mark’s – and in the diary section I wasn’t dealing with a fake “I”, with fake autobiography yet, I was cutting in tapes, cutting out tapes, using a lot of dream material, using other people’s dreams , doing a lot of Burroughs experiments. It was all about the sex shows with cut in dreams, cut in politics, cut in everything.”[1]

The first publication of Politics was:

Politics, Kathy Acker,

Paperback, 36 pages

Publisher: Papyrus Press (1972)

ISBN-10:

ISBN-13:

It is currently available in: Hannibal Lecter, My Father (1991)

[1] Devoured by myths, interview by Sylvere Lotringer, 1991 (Hannibal Lecter, My Father)

The Persian Poems (1972)

The Persian Poems, Kathy Acker

Paperback

Publisher: Papyrus Press (1972)

The Persian Poems, Kathy Acker and Robert Kushner

Paperback

Publisher: Bozeau of London Press (1980)

ASIN: B001F3MZGS

The Persian Poems

Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective (1973 – unpublished until 2002)

The Burning Bombing of America (1973 – unpublished until 2002)

The Burning Bombing of America is the next piece of text that Kathy Acker wrote after Politics. It was written in 1973 but it remained unpublished until 2002, when Susan Orlovsky found it in a box in her garage and it was published with Rip-Off Red: Girl Detective through Grove Press via Amy Scholder.

In terms of style and content, The Burning Bombing of America follows on quite closely from Politics and is a dystopian vision of the destruction of America, combining class critique with an apocalyptic surrealism.

Rip-Off Red: Girl Detective was the first novel that Kathy Acker wrote. She says: “I made up a name for myself and that name was Rip-Off Red. And I wrote a novel: Rip-Off Red-Girl Detective, which was the first novel I’d ever written. It was a pornographic mystery story and it was supposed to earn me a lot of money in my very deluded brain.”[1] In another interview she said that it was unpublishable and was glad that it hadn’t seen the light of day. As such it is a little bit of a curiosity.

Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America, Kathy Acker

Paperback: 144 pages

Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press; 1st edition (12 Sept. 2002)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0802139205

ISBN-13: 978-0802139207

[1] Devoured by myths, interview by Sylvere Lotringer, 1991 (Hannibal Lecter, My Father)

Rip Off Red

the childlike life of the black tarantula

Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula By the Black Tarantula (1973)

The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula is the first of Kathy Acker’s proper novels and is part of a trilogy that includes: I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining, and The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec. It is currently available in in the 1992 collection Portrait of an Eye.

In The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula Kathy Acker plays with notions of the “I” – the first-person narration by combining autobiographical and textual material. At the beginning of this conceptual work, she sets out the premise of the project: “Intention: I become a murderess by repeating the words of other murderesses.”

Acker mixes entries from her own diary with accounts from the lives of murderesses and other historical and fictional figures, taken from pre-Freudian texts because she didn’t want to deal with the Freudian jargon.[1] By writing the whole text from the position of a first-person narrator she demonstrates how texts create identity.

She later came to view it as a very naïve experiment: experimenting with identity in terms of language and came to the decision that it was a false problem because identity is a thing that’s made. “You create identity, you’re not given identity per se. What became more interesting to me, wasn’t the ‘I’, it was text because it’s texts that create identity”.[2]

It was in The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula that Acker started her use of appropriations, which continued for much of her career. Although this is often related to the cut up technique of William Burroughs, she was originally introduced to it by the conceptual poet David Antin. This was a ball that Acker picked up and ran with as it enabled her to experiment with notions of identity and originality as well as challenging fundamental notions of authorship and copyright, which she politically related to bourgeois capitalism.

The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula was first self-published in 1973 and mailed out to a number of the most famous artists and critics in America, using a mailing list that she appropriated from the conceptual artist Eleanor Antin, for whom Acker used to babysit. It was an audacious move that established her as a conceptual artist and part of the mail art movement.

The book was later picked up by The Vanishing Rotating Triangle Press, which was run by Ted Castle (one of the main art critics in New York) and funded by the conceptual artist Sol Lewitt.

Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, Kathy Acker

Paperback: 91 pages

Publisher: Vipers Tongue Books, The Vanishing Rotating Triangle Press, New York (1975)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0931106206

ISBN-13: 978-0931106200

Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, Kathy Acker

Paperback: 152 pages

Publisher: Tvrt; Revised edition (1978),

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0931106206

ISBN-13: 978-0931106200

La vie enfantine de la tarentule noire, par la tarentule noire, Kathy Acker

Paperback

Publisher: Désordres - Laurence Viallet (5 Jan. 2006)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 226805702X

ISBN-13: 978-2268057026

[1] Devoured by myths, interview by Sylvere Lotringer, 1991 (Hannibal Lecter, My Father)

[2] Devoured by myths, interview by Sylvere Lotringer, 1991 (Hannibal Lecter, My Father)

Kathy Acker - The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, first edition

Kathy Acker - The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula

I dreamt I was a Nymphomaniac

I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining (1974)

The second of Kathy Acker’s novels of identity I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining explores the confrontation between the narrator’s desires and repressive systems.

As with The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula it also presents autobiographical elements (experiences from childhood and go-go dancing) mixed with appropriated texts from horror and pornography. Early in the novel, the narrator refers to herself as “Kathy Acker”. There is then a pornographic description of her having sex with two male artists.

This is then followed by the account of a dream that lasts for approximately two pages. This is then followed by the account of a dream that lasts for approximately two pages. This is then followed by the account of a dream that lasts for approximately two pages. This triple repetition of a piece of text disrupts the linear narrative.

Experimentation with the techniques of repetition is the central concern of I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining. In some senses Acker used a similar approach to the way serial music is composed.

After this, a second, longer narrative is repeated. This begins by outlining the narrator’s attempts to become a writer and concludes with her having an affair with Peter, a male transvestite that she met at a ball, while disguised as a man. This section concludes with a discussion of how time relates to identity and of the different narrative possibilities depending upon the configuration of the characters.

In this way in I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining Acker also plays with metafictional commentary and shifting narratives as she investigates the way repetition and memory affect meaning. She steps out of the text and analyses the effect of what has just happened in the text, asking the question: “If I repeated the same text, would it be the same text?” [1]

At the end of the novel she describes a fictitious rebellion taking place in California. The chapter catalogues the types of prisoners at Folsom Prison and tells some of their stories. Among the prisoners are fictional versions of people in Acker’s life, including her then partner – Peter Gordon, her friend and mentor David Antin and “the Black Tarantula,” who had become a Native American imprisoned in solitary confinement apparently without cause.

The way that she blends autobiographical and fake autobiographical material, both her own and those of people she knew became a trait of her writing and was one of her influences on the new narrative movement of the late 1970s. As Acker her self said: “I’ve used other texts, or I’ve used friends. I’ve used memories, but I’ve never created stories by making things up.”[2]

I Dreamt I was Nymphomaniac: Imagining was written directly after The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula. Acker suggests that it was written as a sort of a joke, because Eleanor Antin, who was a close friend at that time had just done a piece called ‘I Dreamt I was a Ballerina’.[3]

I Dreamt I was Nymphomaniac: Imagining was also published originally in serial form and mailed out using Eleanor Antin’s mailing list. It was republished as a paperback by Travelers Digest Editions (1980). It is currently available in in the 1992 collection Portrait of an Eye.

I dreamt I was a nymphomaniac imagining, Kathy Acker

Paperback

Publisher: Empty Elevator Shaft Poetry Press, San Francisco (1974)

Language: English

ASIN: B0007C1QDQ

Published as an edition of six volumes. 192 pp over the six volumes.

I dreamt I was a nymphomaniac imagining, Kathy Acker

Paperback

Publisher: Travelers Digest Editions (1 Jan. 1980)

ISBN-10: 0936578009

ISBN-13: 978-0936578002

[1] Devoured by myths, interview by Sylvere Lotringer, 1991 (Hannibal Lecter, My Father)

[2] Devoured by myths, interview by Sylvere Lotringer, 1991 (Hannibal Lecter, My Father)

[3] Interview and Reading at SUNY-Buffalo as part of the Wednesdays @ 4 Plus Series, April 12, 1995

Kathy Acker - I Dreamt I Was A Teenage Nymphomaniac: Imagining

Adult Life of Toulouse

Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec (1975)

The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec, was the third of Kathy Acker’s ‘identity’ novels that she wrote in the late sixties and early seventies, while living in California ‘apprenticed’ to David Antin.

The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec continues on from her work in The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula and I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining in the way that it blends biography, autobiography and fiction. It ‘experiments’ with language and memory.

In this novel Acker’s main concern is genre. As with her previous novels, The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec is broken into distinct sections (which were mailed out individually). Each section follows the conventions of a different genre: murder mystery, fables, porn and women’s “true confessions” magazines from the 1950s.

This shifting between styles disrupts continuity and deconstructs the form of the novel creating a polyphonic effect that is used to demystify the social and political formations of American society from gender to class and political manipulation to sexual repression.

Where her previous works explored the nature of the ‘I’ and Foucault’s question: ‘What is an author?’ – this seems to explore the question ‘What is a Book?’ As she says: “what makes the I are texts… So I became interested in just text. Other people’s texts.” [1] She transposes techniques from film – such as montage, saying “the harder the cut the better.”[2]

In The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, the famous French impressionist is re-imagined as a deformed woman who craves sex, but cannot get any because she is ugly. Her constant and frustrating state of desire distracts her from her art and this transformation of Toulouse-Lautrec into a woman is used to highlight how women artists are marginalised.

The initial story chaotically revolves around how Toulouse Lautrec and her friend Vincent van Gogh become involved in a murder at a Paris whorehouse (a metaphor for the reality of living in the US). This sets the scene for Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot to solve the murder.

The book then leaps into a section based on the generation defining film version of Robert Lindner’s novel – Rebel without a Cause. In this section, Van Gogh’s daughter, Marcia, is a nine-year-old Janis Joplin who is having an affair with James Dean, also known as Scott.

The affair is derailed by James Dean’s career, which requires that he not be a real person. Together they discuss the difficulties of being an artist, but James Dean is unable to recognize the difficulties Janis faces as an “intelligent,” independent woman.

As well as telling the story of a Hollywood affair, Acker cuts and folds in a political critique of Henry Kissinger’s war politics which, against the backdrop of global capitalism, are driving the US into dangerous financial instability.

The final chapter of The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec is ‘The Life of Johnny Rocco’ – a deconstruction of the gangster genre, which has undertones of Burroughs’s The Last Words of Dutch Schultz.

Johnny Rocco is a gangster who has flipped and is working for the CIA, when a woman, or more particularly a ‘dame’, tries to infiltrate his business, claiming that she is not a woman. Rather than being a victim she tries to play the man’s game, however, she finds that a simple inversion of gender roles is not enough. As a result she gets beaten up by Johnny and murdered by the CIA.

History seen from above and history seen from below are irreducibly different things and produce radically different perspectives on social hierarchies.

Another character explains that America gives men the privilege of being powerful, using and abusing others. In this novel this is both the way of America and the way and of patriarchy. This makes further connections between the individual characters and their socio-political environment and illustrates how the mechanisms of identity formation do not operate in a neutral semantic field.

When speaking about her series of three identity novels Kathy Acker explains what she discovered: “I came out with – whatever, the feeling, the discovery – that identity doesn’t exist in the way that we think it does. That identity isn’t centred.”[3] This led to the further conclusion that: “what you do when you write fiction is you... make. You don’t express, you’re not reporting when you write fiction, you’re actually making.”[4]

In the interview with Ellen G. Friedman, Kathy further says: “The major theme was identity, the theme I used from Tarantula through to The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec, the end of the trilogy. After that, I lost interest in the problem of identity. The problem had for me in a sense been solved by that trilogy. After that I became interested in plagiarism, working with other texts.”[5]

The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec, was the third of Kathy Acker’s ‘identity’ novels. It was the last of her novels to be self-published and distributed as mail art and it was also the last to be re-published by Sol Lewitt through Printed Matter and TVRT.

It is also available in: Portrait of an Eye, Kathy Acker, Dec 1997 or Young Lust, April 1989

The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, Kathy Acker

Paperback

Publisher: Black Tarantula (1975)

ASIN: B004MF324K

Published in six volumes. 260 pages over six volumes.

The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, Kathy Acker

Paperback: 201 pages

Publisher: TVRT Press (1978)

ISBN-10: 0931106214

ISBN-13: 978-0931106217

[1] Devoured by myths, interview by Sylvere Lotringer, 1991 (Hannibal Lecter, My Father)

[2] When She Does what She Does: Intertextual Desire and Influence in Kathy Acker's Narratives, Douglas A. Martin, 2007

[3] Kathy acker interviewed by Stan Nichols, Interzone, #27, Jan/Feb 1988

[4] Kathy acker interviewed by Stan Nichols, Interzone, #27, Jan/Feb 1988

[5] A Conversation with Kathy Acker By Ellen G. Friedman, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Volume 9.3, Fall 1989

Kathy Acker - The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec

Florida

Florida (1978)

Stylistically Florida follows on from the noirish ‘The Life of Johnny Rocco’ section of The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec.

Florida is a plagiarism of John Huston's film Key Largo (1948), but with the sexes of many of the characters reversed.

At 14 pages it is too short to be called a novel and has few of the characteristics of the novel form. It uses many kinds of cut up text combined into a text that sits between poem, collage or rant.

Florida does not have a linear story line. It pretty much has no logical or chronological structure. It is made up of cut up pieces of text that can be categorised as: direct speech, interior monologue or a combination of both, plus the ‘Stupid Popular Song’ (which is perhaps Acker’s first attempt at the Bakhtinian genre of ‘Billingsgate’ – the coarse and scatological forms of ‘low’ and ‘dirty’ folk humour).

Florida is also a slight divergence from Acker's trademark fiction – visceral prose, sensationalized autobiography, political tract, pornography, and appropriated texts populated by famous literary or historical figures. It is a cool, filmic text constructed around the interplay of thought and speech.

Florida is worth reading for the beautiful lines of fragmentary, cutting and brutal speech:

“Why don’t cha beat me up again? Hurting me takes the place of sex these days.”

Plus the marvellously surreal commentary on film making and desire:

''When I was two years old, I refused to drink milk. My parents . . . were scared I was going to die. My father started to take a camera apart. Only when he started to break the camera, would I drink the milk.''

Available in: Literal Madness, Dec 1987 or Young Lust, April 1989

kathy goes to haiti

Kathy Goes To Haiti (1978)

After publishing her three novels of identity: The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining and The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec Kathy Acker’s next full novel was Kathy Goes to Haiti.

She says of this: ‘I wanted to write an accessible book. To myself I wanted to prove I could do a conventional book.’[1]

Part of this was a reaction against criticism: ‘the conventional novel people were saying, “You write the way you do because you don’t know how to write a conventional novel. ”I thought, “OK, I’ll write a conventional novel – it’ll have unity of character and action, you know, time and blabitty blah, and it’ll be so dumb. All it will do is make a convention, and there will be nothing else in this novel.”’[2]

Kathy Goes to Haiti is perhaps the ‘straightest’ novel that Kathy Acker ever wrote. That being said it does contain pornography and deliberately bad writing, she appears as a character in her own work – and then there’s the unusual choice of location.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere and Kathy Acker used at least part of the Creative Artists' Public Services Program New York State Grant For Fiction that she received in 1975 to 1976[3], to travel there and research the book.

In some respects it seems an odd choice, but one of Acker’s early formative experiences was attending the New York film co-op as a teenager and seeing the films of Maya Deren – who was one of the first serious female artists that she had come across. Deren also went on to write an anthropological study of voodoo: Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti.

In an interview in 1991 Kathy spoke about this influence: ‘Maya Deren's films absolutely fascinated me. She made some wonderful films on voodoo dances – which is amazing because the Haitians at that time certainly didn't want a white woman recording their dances – and became a voodoo priestess, a mythic figure among those filmmakers. That fascinated me – that they were working with myth- the strangeness. It all had to do with a quality of life-a quality of really living in the imagination.’[4]

Kathy Goes to Haiti follows the strange journey by a woman named Kathy from Port-au-Prince to Cap Haitien and back – a road trip where she is constantly accosted by men who want to fuck her, mimicking hegemonic American views of Haiti.

Kathy Goes to Haiti is ‘a parody of a porn novel.’[5] Part of the reason for this was because she wanted to make some easy money. As she says: ‘At that time I wanted to write a porn book to earn money because at that point there were porn publishers who were giving eight hundred dollars, which was a lot of money in those days.’[6]

However Acker quickly, ‘got very bored writing a porn book, plus laws changed and they no longer had these little porn publishers. [7] She explains how she got around this problem saying: ‘I took the formula of a porn novel and I made a structure, a mathematical structure. In this chapter we have psychology, and here we have this happen… and then I wrote it according to this structure. It was the most boring thing in the world to write. I tried to make the characters as dumb as possible and I basically tried to make nothing happen…’[8]

Kathy Goes to Haiti is a parody of a Nancy Drew book. The prose is deceptively simple. It lulls the reader into an acceptance of the truth of it, conventional realism. You follow Kathy step by step throughout her journey in Haiti from her arrival at the airport to the Cap and back to the capital. Kathy sucks, fucks, wants, and does whatever she wants until she is ready to leave.

However, although the surface of the text seems simple (mostly third person with one psychotic break into the first) and it seems to follow a basic A to B plot, underneath this Acker draws on the verbal games of the European avant-garde and surrealist movements such as pataphysics and Oulipo.

Kathy Acker explains: ‘I made up all these rules… I was very intrigued at the time by Raymond Queneau, by Cortazar, and that group of writers where they make up all these little writing games. So I made up my own writing game – that every other chapter had to be a porn chapter, everything had to be so many pages, every chapter in the middle faced each other. I did a grid and everything was a mirror of each other. The center of the book has the only psychological thing in it, and everything had to be as dumb as possible; but the only thing that could be of interest was this mathematics. So the characters had to be dumb or their reactions had to be dumb, so that's why I meant it as a joke, right? And I wrote it, but I knew what I was going to write. So even though I made up all these dumb rules, it wasn't as amusing to write as I thought, because I knew what I was going to write.[9]

As she says elsewhere, ‘I took the formula of a porn novel and I made a structure, a mathematical structure. In this chapter we have psychology, and here we have this happen… and then I wrote it according to this structure. It was the most boring thing in the world to write. I tried to make the characters as dumb as possible and I basically tried to make nothing happen…’[10]

The last chapter was the only thing that wasn’t written according to the grid: ‘That was written while I was in Haiti, and it was journalism.’[11] Elsewhere she explains: ‘I had to opportunity to go to a Cuban voodoo ceremony early this fall. That took me six months of asking someone to get me to one. Boy was it great. The voodoo in Haiti is the most documentary part of the book.’[12]

The first edition of Kathy Goes to Haiti was produced with Bob Kushner. Kathy said of this: ‘It was beautiful, it was just all design. I think we only made a hundred copies. Bob gave them to some bookstore in New York and they sold out in a month. It was a beautiful book. Bob had done these erotic drawings, and it was just stunning. And that's how the book really should be. But Grove Press wouldn't publish it that way because they said the drawings would take away from my literary reputation. I said, I don't have a literary reputation [laughs]. But they wouldn't do it.’[13]

Kathy Goes to Haiti, Kathy Acker

Paperback: 170 pages

Publisher: Flamingo (26 July 1990)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0044407483

ISBN-13: 978-0044407485

Kathy Goes to Haiti, Kathy Acker

Paperback: 170 pages

Publisher: Flamingo (1993)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0006546110

ISBN-13: 978-0006546115

Also available in: Literal Madness, Dec 1987 or Young Lust, April 1989

[1] Interview with Kathy Acker in East Village Eye, Vol. 3 No. 22, June 1982

[2] Kathy Acker interviewed by Rebecca Deaton, Textual Practice: Volume 6, Issue 2, edited by Terence Hawkes (1988)

[3] Guide to the Kathy Acker Papers, 1972-1997 and undated - http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/acker/

[4] Kathy Acker Interview, Art, Performance, Media: 31 Interviews, edited by Nicholas Zurbrugg, (2004)

[5] Kathy Acker interviewed by Rebecca Deaton, Textual Practice: Volume 6, Issue 2, edited by Terence Hawkes (1988)

[6] A Conversation with Kathy Acker - ACM #30, 1994

[7] A Conversation with Kathy Acker - ACM #30, 1994

[8] Kathy Acker interviewed by Rebecca Deaton, Textual Practice: Volume 6, Issue 2, edited by Terence Hawkes (1988)

[9] A Conversation with Kathy Acker - ACM #30, 1994

[10] Kathy Acker interviewed by Rebecca Deaton, Textual Practice: Volume 6, Issue 2, edited by Terence Hawkes (1988)

[11] A Conversation with Kathy Acker - ACM #30, 1994

[12] Interview with Kathy Acker in East Village Eye, Vol. 3 No. 22, June 1982

[13] A Conversation with Kathy Acker - ACM #30, 1994

New York City in 1979

N.Y.C. in 1979 (1981)

Kathy Acker’s New York City in 1979 is perhaps the quintessential artefact of New York’s Downtown Literary Scene and perhaps her first big success.

During the seventies and eighties, while the punk revolution was giving us Patti Smith, the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads and Television an underground literary movement was also happening in New York’s Downtown.

The New York of the 1970s was a very different place to the New York of today. The city went bankrupt. The police weren’t paid. The rubbish wasn’t collected. Basic repairs to the built environment were not made. Murder and robbery rates went through the roof (and in New York rooves are very high). Landlords found it more economic to burn properties and collect insurance than to collect the rent.

This was the environment that spawned the Downtown scene. Somewhere below 14th Street home grown presses sprang into action and spawned a generation of zines, magazines and pamphlets, from X to Bomb and Between C and D. Downtown literature was characterized by a do-it-yourself attitude; and a distaste for commercialism.

This new generation of writers explored new narrative techniques, avant-garde experimentalism, fluid sexual identities and a derangement of the senses. Their numbers included Kathy Acker, Spalding Gray, Mary Gaitskill, Tama Janowitz, Dennis Cooper and David Wojnarowicz to name but a few.

It was a time when Constance DeJong was creating multimedia works with Philip Glass. Patti Smith was performing at the St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project and Lou Reed could be seen at CBGBs.

In Kathy Acker’s New York City in 1979, New York City is portrayed as ‘a pit-hole: Since the United States government, having decided that New York City is no longer part of the United States of America, is dumping ... all the people they don’t want (artists, poor minorities and the media in general) on the city and refusing the city federal funds… Meanwhile the temperature is getting hotter and hotter so no one can think clearly. No one perceives. No one cares. Insane madness come out like life is a terrific party.’

New York City in 1979 is a bleak vision inspired by Kathy Acker’s time working in the sex trade on 42nd Street. She uses pornography and bad writing to disrupt polite literature. She describes the punk rock scene and places like the Mudd Club. She merged her own identity with her fiction and appeared as a character in her own work, presenting the autobiography of others as her own and creating metafictional complexes that biographers will struggle to unpick for centuries to come.

At the time it was extraordinary and ground breaking stuff. New York City in 1979 won Kathy Acker the Pushcart Prize for literature. Founded in 1976 by literary luminaries including: Anaïs Nin, Buckminster Fuller, Ishmael Reed, Paul Bowles and Ralph Ellison, the annual Pushcart Prize honours works published by small presses over the previous year.

New York City in 1979 was first published in Crawl Out Your Window #7, July 1980 (ed. Mel Freilicher and Eleanor Bluestein) and was reprinted in the Pushcart Press #6 in 1981. It was then picked up buy Top Stories and reprinted in June 1981 and again in 1986.

N. Y. C. in Nineteen Seventy-Nine, Kathy Acker

Paperback, 24 pages

Publisher: Top Stories (Jun. 1981)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0917061098

ISBN-13: 978-091706109

Implosion (1983)

Implosion is a short text, written in the form of a play about war, the French Revolution (or Robspierre and his gang) and the problems of long distance relationships. The individual scenes are set in various locations: England… Europe… the Artforum offices, on Mulberry Street, Now York.

In the latter two Italian Situationists discuss Baudrillard’s theory of simulation in relation to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner which is described as ‘a real American film… which is a film and not a real event…’ proving that ‘simulation can take the place of reality’.

Implosion is also one of the first texts where Kathy Acker begins to espouse her view of society from the bottom. This begins with: ‘If this society in which you’re living shits, you shit’ – a Burroughs style statement that implies everyone collaborates, everyone is complicit.

She then goes on to explain that: ‘A whore needs a pimp. A whore doesn’t need a pimp because she’s weak. A whore needs a pimp because a pimp controls the territory.’ Every artist, writer or musician is a whore. Record companies, publishers and galleries are pimps.

Robspierre outlines the full Sadean political vision when he says: ‘I’m taking over this world because I’m strong and you are weak.’

And all that Acker’s grandmother has to offer is: ‘right now, fiction’s the method of revolution… To dream’s more violent than to act.’

Implosion was first published in 1983. In the initial Wedge paperback it was 28 pages and a 16 page version is available in Essential Acker. Wedge published Implosion as a separate paperback/chapbook in a folder of fourteen different booklets of experimental writing.

Implosion, Kathy Acker

Paperback: 28 pages

Publisher: Wedge Press (1983)

ISBN-10: 0913519014

ISBN-13: 978-091351901

Also in Wedge: Partial Texts: Essays and Fictions, No. 3/4/5 (1983)
A special issue of 14 separate booklets contained within a thick printed paper sleeve (assortment of experimental writings, photographs, poems and other artistic statements by the following participants: Kathy Acker, Silvia Kolbowski, Nan Becker, Reese Williams, Matthew Geller, Richard Milazzo, Roberta Allen, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Harry Kondoleon, John Fekner, Candace Hill, Gary Indiana, Sarah Charlesworth and Phil Mariani).

Implosion

great expectations

Great Expectations (1983)

After the three early novels of identity (The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining, and The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec) Kathy Acker’s next important work to be published was the novel Great Expectations.

On the dust jacket she describes her own book: “Great Expectations is both the story of a young boy’s introduction to the world and a profound examination of moral values. Written at a time when Acker’s relationship with society is in question, texts given by the society, Dickens, Proust, Flaubert, Reage, Victoria Holt, Keats, appear both as they were written and in a new interrogative light. The whole culture is brought into question. Out of the agony of the author’s disenchantment of plagiarism, appears beauty; given text is laid on given text language is no longer used to control but to be; the reader touches the language rather than is controlled by it; meaning changes to tapestry. This book is sensuous.”

Great Expectations begins with a section called ‘Plagiarism,’ which indicates her shift of emphasis from identity. As she says: “What I was interested in was what happens when you just copy something, without any reason… it was the simple fact of copying that fascinated me… I came to plagiarism from another point of view, from exploring schizophrenia and identity, and I wanted to see what pure plagiarism would look like, mainly because I didn’t understand my fascination with it.”[1]

Although Acker’s Great Expectations might have been based on r Dickens’, as you might expect, she turns it into something else entirely: porn, whores, gender-shifting narrators. Great Expectations perfectly captured the spirit of New Wave New York in the late 70s-early 80s.

Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations starts with the introductory sentences from Dickens’ Great Expectations: ‘My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.’

The plagiarism, however, is not exact. When Acker steals something and re-writes it, she also changes it: ‘My father’s name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Peter. So I called myself Peter, and came to be called Peter.’

‘Pip’ becomes ‘Peter,’ (the name of her former husband – the use of his real name became a contentious issue for Peter while Kathy was testing out Great Expectations in performances[2]). As well as this, a little further on, the name of Pip’s mother is conspicuously missing, setting her up as an absent presence.

Kathy Acker’s mother had suicided on Christmas Eve of 1978 and in some ways Great Expectations is Kathy Acker’s most autobiographical novel. In an interview she says: “I had a real thing with my mother. For me it was a real love-hate relationship. Now the whole issue is dead for me psychologically. I went through some kind of transformation. Great Expectations is all about my mother, she committed suicide about two years ago. Great Expectations was like saying goodbye to her. I'm real happy that I don't have to keep writing about my family, it's like I'm free of that finally.”[3]

Kathy’s parents were the generative source of her private mythology, constantly appearing in her works. During the period she was writing Great Expectations her father died, around a year later her mother suicided and then a few months after that her grandmother died. In Great Expectations they become the parents who died, abandoning her, leaving her an orphan.

‘Great Expectations is all about the orphan whose great expectations are destroyed, who is forced to run away, to get as far from home as possible, to become a sailor or, better still, a pirate.’[4]

It is structured as a bildungsroman, but before this can get under way, Acker presents a female character’s story, by abruptly cutting off the familiar story of a young man’s journey to establish his identity in the world.

Acker questions patriarchy and the concept of ownership that identity permits. The unnamed female character is having a tarot reading after her mother’s suicide the previous year. Her future seems predetermined because she is trapped by her mother’s influence. Her only escape appears to be working through her mother’s legacy.

This narrative is then interrupted by sex-scenes on a battlefield. Acker implicitly compares war and sex. As these narratives interchange with one another, the narrator slips in commentary on her aesthetic choices: “that’s why one text must subvert (the meaning) of another text.” These statements examine of the power of language, the power of memories— whether of mothers or fathers—and the desire to write oneself into existence.

This hope is the essence of the female narrator’s ‘great expectations,’ which she cites at the end of the first chapter.

The novel’s second section, ‘The Beginnings of Romance,’ follows Peter and the unnamed female, who is now either Rosa or Sarah. Rosa/Sarah is obsessed with her mother while Peter fixates on his father. Rosa/Sarah attempts to solve the mystery of her mother’s death, who she thinks was murdered, and to find her real father.

Throughout these parallel narratives, Acker cuts in sections of plagiarism from The Story of O. Acker tells how, as a child, O was raped by her father and critiques the Seattle Art Society, comparing the art world to corporate big business and French court life.

The final section of Great Expectations is ‘The End’ is written as a play about the Latin poet Propertius, who Acker studied at school. Propertius is having an affair with a hysterical woman named Cynthia and regrets the fact that women have emotions. Cynthia’s mother has died and she recalls a Rabbi asking her: ‘Do you know anything good I can say over your mother’s mutilating body.’ [5] Eventually, Propertius rejects Cynthia, showing how unequal the relations are between men and women.

Throughout Great Expectations there is a self-reflexive commentary on writing and language: ‘every part changes (the meaning of) every other part so there’s no absolute.’[6]

When she started writing Great Expectations Kathy was still living with Peter Gordon, who was studying under Robert Ashley. She says: ‘I was thinking of a novel that didn't have a centralized plot or centralized characters, but was more like a Robert Ashley piece of music-decentralized environmental.[7]

In Great Expectations Acker defines sexuality as ‘that which can’t be satisfied’[8] and is, therefore, comparable to her own writing, which defies conventional expectations.

The final paragraph of the novel reads: ‘My mother committed suicide and I ran away. My mother committed suicide in a hotel room because she was lonely and there was no one else in the world but her, wants go so deep there is no way of getting them out of her body, no surgery other than death, the body will hut… I ran away from the pain. What is, is. No fantasy. Pain. Just details…. I know the only anguish comes from running away. Dear mother,’ [9]

Ending with the words ‘Dear mother,’ the start of an unwritten letter.

To publish Great Expectations Kathy collaborated with Re/Search magazine, who she was working for at the time.[10]

Even though she was financing the printing of the book herself, she did not want it to seem as if it were a vanity project. There were problems as Vale pre-paid the printer without a contract. The printer only produced 300 copies and refused to give back the boards. [11]

Then the book started to get great reviews, including one by Alain Robbe-Grille, who called it: ‘the most completely unified work of art Acker has yet produced. One that by its formal concentration and its unified shape at every depth of reading fulfils the sort of demands that Sterne or Canetti makes of the novelist.’ [12]

Later Grove picked up Great Expectations and republished it.

It remains one of her strongest works.

Great Expectations, Kathy Acker

Paperback: 128 pages

Publisher: Barrytown Limited (Dec. 1982)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0940170043

ISBN-13: 978-0940170049

Great Expectations, Kathy Acker

Paperback: 128 pages

Publisher: Open Book Publications / Station Hill Press, 1982

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0940170043

ISBN-13: 978-0940170049

Great Expectations, Kathy Acker

Paperback

Publisher: Grove Press, 1994

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0802131557

ISBN-13: 978-0802131553

Also available in Blood and Guts in High School Plus Two

Große Erwartungen. Ein Punk-Roman (Great Expectations), Kathy Acker

Publisher: Heyne Verlag (December 1990)

Language: German

ISBN-10: 3453008146

ISBN-13: 978-3453008144

Grandes espérances, Kathy Acker

Paperback

Publisher: Désordres - Laurence Viallet (21 Aug. 2006)

Language: French

ISBN-10: 2268059065

ISBN-13: 978-2268059068

[1] A Conversation with Kathy Acker By Ellen G. Friedman, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Volume 9.3, Fall 1989

[2] Letter from Kathy Acker, Spread Wide, Kathy Acker and Paul Buck, 2004

[3] Interview with Kathy Acker in East Village Eye, Vol. 3 No. 22, June 1982

[4] Death (and Life) of the Author - Peter Wollen on Kathy Acker, London Review of Books, Vol. 20, No. 3, 5 February 1998

[5] Great Expectations- Kathy Acker (1982)

[6] Great Expectations- Kathy Acker (1982)

[7] Art, Performance, Media: 31 Interviews, Nicholas Zurbrugg, (2004)

[8] Great Expectations- Kathy Acker (1982)

[9] Great Expectations- Kathy Acker (1982)

[10] Art, Performance, Media: 31 Interviews, Nicholas Zurbrugg, (2004)

[11] Letter from Kathy Acker, Spread Wide, Kathy Acker and Paul Buck, 2004

[12] Letter from Kathy Acker, Spread Wide, Kathy Acker and Paul Buck, 2004

leatherdale

New York 1983 (1983)

New York 1983, photography by Marcus Leatherdale, text by Kathy Acker

Paperback

Publisher: Molotov, Vienna (1983)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 9110895604

ISBN-13: 9789110895607

New York 1983, photography by Marcus Leatherdale, text by Kathy Acker

Algeria: A Series of Invocations Because Nothing Else Works (1984)

Algeria: A Series of Invocations Because Nothing Else Works, Kathy Acker

Paperback: 32 pages

Publisher: Aloes Books (February 1984)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0856520594

ISBN-13: 978-0856520594

Algeria: Aljazayer (Persian), Kathy Acker

Paperback: 70 pages

Publisher: H&S Media (7 Dec. 2012)

Language: Persian

ISBN-10: 1780832087

ISBN-13: 978-1780832081

Algéria Cartonné, Acker Kathy

Hardback:

Publisher: DTV (1988)

Language: French

ISBN-10:

ISBN-13:

Blood and Guts in High School (1984)

Blood and Guts in High School Plus Two, Kathy Acker

Paperback: 416 pages

Publisher: Macmillan/Picador (10 Feb. 1984)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0330281860

ISBN-13: 978-0330281867

Blood and Guts in High School Plus Two, Kathy Acker

Paperback: 165 pages

Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press; 1st Evergreen Ed edition (11 Jan. 1994)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 080213193X

ISBN-13: 978-0802131935

Blood and Guts in High School Plus Two, Kathy Acker

Paperback

Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press (1 Jan. 1999)

ISBN-10: 0802130755

ISBN-13: 978-0802130754

Harte Mädchen weinen nicht. Ein New Wave-Roman (Blood and Guts in High School), Kathy Acker
Paperback

Publisher: Heyne Scene 1985

Language: German

ISBN-10: 3453046080

ISBN-13: 978-3453046085

Sang et stupre au lycée (Blood and Guts in High School), Kathy Acker

Paperback

Publisher: Editions du Rocher (13 Jan. 2005)

Language: French

ISBN-10: 2268053369

ISBN-13: 978-2268053363

Lisede Kan ve Cesaret (Blood and Guts in High School), Kathy Acker

Publisher: Sel (2012)

Language: Turkish

ISBN-10: 9755705899

ISBN-13: 978-9755705897

My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1984)

Available in: Blood and Guts in High School Plus Two or Literal Madness

Mein Tod, mein Leben. Die Geschichte des Pier Paolo Pasolini (Blood and Guts in High School plus two. My Death, My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini), Kathy Acker
Paperback

Publisher: Heyne Scene 1987

Language: German

ISBN-10: 3453001036

ISBN-13: 978-3453001039

Hello, I'm Erica Jong (1984)

Hello, I'm Erica Jong, Kathy Acker, Michael McClard (Illustrator)

Paperback

Publisher: Contact II Pubns (1984)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0936556072

ISBN-13: 978-0936556079

Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (1986)

Don Quixote, Kathy Acker

Paperback: 208 pages

Publisher: Paladin (24 April 1986)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0586085548

ISBN-13: 978-0586085547

Don Quixote, Kathy Acker

Paperback

Publisher: Grove Press (1986)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0394550188

ISBN-13: 9780394550183

Die Geschichte der Don Quixote. Ein Traum (Don Quixote), Kathy Acker

Paperback: 263 Seiten

Publisher: P. Selinka Vlg., Rav. (Juni 1991)

Language: German

ISBN-10: 3926532076

ISBN-13: 978-3926532077

Die Geschichte der Don Quixote. Ein Traum (Don Quixote), Kathy Acker
Paperback, 283 pages

Publisher: Heyne Verlag (November 1992)

Language: German

ISBN-10: 3453042069

ISBN-13: 978-3453042063

Don Quichotte: Ce qui était un rêve, Kathy Acker

Paperback

Publisher: Laurence Viallet (18 Mar. 2010)

Language: French

ISBN-10: 2918034002

ISBN-13: 978-2918034001

Don Chisciotte (Don Quixote), Kathy Acker

Paperback

Publisher: ShaKe (1 Jan. 1999)

Language: Italian

ISBN-10: 8886926553

ISBN-13: 978-8886926553

Literal Madness: Three Novels (Reprinted 1987)

Literal Madness: Three Novels:
Kathy Goes to Haiti; My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini; Florida, Kathy Acker

Paperback: 410 pages

Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press; Reprint edition (13 Jan. 1994)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0802131565

ISBN-13: 978-0802131560

Literal Madness: Three Novels:
Kathy Goes to Haiti; My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini; Florida, Kathy Acker

Hardcover

Publisher: Grove Pr; 1 edition (Dec. 1987)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0802100015

ISBN-13: 978-0802100016

The Birth of the Poet(1987)

Wordplays Five: An Anthology of New American Drama: v.5, J.Strahs, J. Sondheim, D. McAnuff, J. Jesurun, K. Acker

Paperback: 336 pages

Publisher: PAJ Publications (1 Jun. 1986)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1555540074

ISBN-13: 978-1555540074

Empire of the Senseless (1988)

Empire of the Senseless, Kathy Acker

Hardback: 227 pages

Publisher: Picador; 1st edition (6 May 1988)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0330301926

ISBN-13: 978-0330301923

Empire of the Senseless, Kathy Acker

Paperback: 227 pages

Publisher: Grove Press (Sept 1988)

Language: English

ISBN 10: 0802110797

ISBN 13: 978-0802110794

Empire of the Senseless, Kathy Acker

Paperback: 224 pages

Publisher: Picador; New edition edition (11 Aug. 1989)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0330305786

ISBN-13: 978-0330305785

Empire of the Senseless, Kathy Acker

Paperback: 227 pages

Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press; Reprint edition (13 Jan. 1994)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0802131794

ISBN-13: 978-0802131799

Im Reich ohne Sinne (Empire of the Senseless), Kathy Acker 1988)

Paperback,

Publisher: Ravensburg: P.S. (Peter Selinka), 1989, (1989)

Language: German

ISBN-10: 3926532211

ISBN-13: 978-3926532213

El Imperio de Los Sinsentidos (Empire of the Senseless), by Kathy Acker

Paperback: 320 pages

Publisher: Editorial Escalera (Mar. 2012)

Language: Spanish

ISBN-10: 8493948926

ISBN-13: 978-8493948924

Young Lust (1989)

Young Lust, Kathy Acker

Paperback: 256 pages

Publisher: Pandora Press; 1st edition (April 1989)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0044403496

ISBN-13: 978-0044403494