Mel Freilicher talks about his friend Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker died in 1997, abruptly silencing...
In her work she was never an invisible narrator, an absent presence, instead she created her own form of presence; she spoke through a series of characters that she wore like masks and inserted elements from her own life directly into her fiction.
In his recent book The Encyclopedia of Rebels Mel Freilicher wrote a short, but beautiful eulogy to Kathy Acker, who had been a close friend for 30 years. Thus her life was also inserted into his work …briefly giving her voice again.
Mel first met Kathy, when they were both freshmen at Brandeis University in 1964, where Kathy was studying classics and he was studying psychology.
“No one noticed me, despite my beauty and intelligence. I tried to teach myself politics and philosophical theory,”[1] said the Black Tarantula.
Mel: “I would actually be quite surprised if Kathy felt unnoticed at Brandeis. Kathy was quite influential with the women in our class.[2]”
Mel was a political activist and in his first year, during Selma, Alabama, was involved in a sit in at the Federal building in Boston. Political activism established itself as a long-standing component of his life, as did involvement with grassroots networks and artists’ organisations.
In 1966 Kathy moved to the University of California San Diego (UCSD) transferring to an undergraduate degree in literature. She went with her then husband, Robert Acker, who followed Herbert Marcuse when he moved from Brandeis to UCSD. In 1968 Mel and a group of friends moved to California and ended up billeting on the Ackers’ floor for a while.[3]
During that time in San Diego Kathy and Mel became close friends and both became writers. Both Mel and Kathy attended classes by the poet David Antin at UCSD, although not formally as part of a course.
Kathy: “I apprenticed myself to David Antin. That is, I sat on his doorstep and babysat for his kid, Blaise, the kid and I got along great. Our favorite game was ‘criminals’, a sample question: “Would you rather hold up a small bank in Kentucky or poison a rich creep who is already dying?” [4] I was his favorite babysitter.”
Mel: “We both babysat for Blaise (at different times).”
Mel and Kathy became friends with David and his wife Eleanor Antin, a visual (conceptual) artist, who also became a strong influence during the period that Kathy was writing The Burning Bombing of America, Rip Off Red: Girl Detective and the material she wrote as The Black Tarantula.
Kathy: “I always wanted to write prose. So I was looking for models of fiction that were poetic and fiction writers don’t work that way…They don’t write by process.”[5]
Mel went on to teach at UCSD and spent fifteen years writing and editing the San Diego literary magazine Crawl Out Your Window and has also published the book: The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives.
When asked about his work Mel said: “I’ve written several books in the past, sections of which, along with many self-contained pieces, have been published in a variety of literary and art magazines. These were basically exercises, playing around with different styles, approaches, conceptions; learning technique. Teaching part-time at two universities simultaneously for decades, I often didn’t have time to do sustained writing. During various periods, I’d write book, zine, and some movie, reviews, to keep my hand in: for the San Diego Union-Tribune, American Book Review, Fiction International, and other venues.”
Although Mel’s work, such as The Encyclopedia of Rebels, is very different from Kathy’s it shares a range of common elements – such as the use of material (and characters) borrowed from other sources, which is skilfully re-written into another narrative and then interwoven with elements of personal biographical detail.
Mel explains how they both came to share this method of writing: “We did have common interests and experiences. We both started out, briefly, writing poetry. David Antin was very clear about his disdain for the vanities of narrative, confessional and, generally, emotive poetry. Eleanor Antin worked in many different media in fascinating ways, but basically saw herself as a conceptual artist. The composers we knew in Berkeley, and in New York (largely through her partner, Peter Gordon) were also conceptually oriented. In New York, Kathy was championed by Sol Lewitt, Lawrence Weiner and other conceptual artists.
Kathy: “I just wanted to take what was given to me: texts – because words were more real to me than anything else.”[6]
Mel: “Both of us were caught up in a confluence of individuals, networks, and movements, such as mail art (especially Ray Johnson’s Buddha University gallery shows) since we were both mailing out instalments of our works: mine were the American Revolutionary Political Pamphlet series. And to more or less the same people: we both had Eleanor Antin’s mailing list (at the time she was mailing out her great “100 Boots” postcard series); I also had John Perreault’s list which I shared with Kathy, and she gave me other names.
“We both knew some of the language poets (a few intimately), and admired their project of reconceiving poetry as less of an expressive, and more of an intellectual, tool: to examine the nature of syntax, and of language itself. But I often felt that their experiments were too formal or programmatic to be really engaging. At the same time, ‘identity politics’ was clearly significant, but often seemed very limited, and essentialist.”
Kathy: “Having abandoned the ‘I’ as a subject, as a way of organising reality, I needed a new concept. I decided to try the principles of serialism and outlined the concept that would be behind my new work.”[7]
In interviews Kathy often spoke about the difficulty of finding ‘the authentic voice’ that was idealized by the Black Mountain poets. A core part of her early writings was to deconstruct identity so that she could find a position from which she could write, as Mel explains:
“I think the Black Tarantula was the beginning of both of our lifelong attempts to find a voice in order to lose it: that is, to subsume our own experiences, however urgent and imperative, within textual and contextual voices: situating the exigencies of our lives, and of our generation, within the various constructs which shaped, and/or facilitated escape from them, and from an overarching sense of historical determinism of the most pernicious kind – the absolute greed and tyranny of the rich.”
Kathy: “Writing became a series of guerrilla tactics in which I destroyed meaning and rigid definitions.[8]”
Much as Kathy’s work drew on an anti-tradition of literature, writers such as De Sade, Rimbaud and Burroughs, Mel’s most recent work, The Encyclopedia of Rebels, draws on an anti-tradition of politics and retells the stories of activists such as: Sacco and Vanzetti, John Brown, Upton Sinclair, Mother Jones and the wonderfully irascible Hyppolite Havel.
He explains: “My historical interests partly came from many years of teaching bright students who knew nothing about the past, and didn’t understand how much that intellectually incapacitated them. I don’t have any illusions that my writing – or any kind of experimental writing (if any writing at all) – will have much of an effect on anyone. I do think when I eventually burned out doing activist politics, this kind of writing was useful for me, to feel some connection with my own past.”
Kathy: “I write it to get it out of me. I don't write it to remember it[9]... I’m trying to figure out what reality is.[10]
In works like Great Expectations Kathy Acker wrote first person accounts by characters, such as Pip, that she not so much plagiarised as piratically plundered from the literary cannon.
Kathy: “When I copy, I don’t ‘appropriate’. I just do what gives me the most pleasure: I write. As the Gnostics put it – when two people fuck, the whole world fucks.”[11]
Although similarly working with ‘ready-made’ material Mel’s approach is different:
“Style became very important to both of us, of course, as for any writer. I think our concerns tended to be about juxtaposition of materials – how much disjunction, coherence, repetitions, resonance could be utilized, and to what ends. (As time went on, I became interested in achieving a kind of oddball, comic seamlessness.) In that sense, style wasn’t really about demonstrating our exquisite sensibilities (which I’m afraid is often the way people think about it, and discuss it in writing workshops).
Kathy: “Nothing stops my writing…[12] For me writing is freedom. Therein lies my identity.”[13]
Mel: “I have an almost completed MS right now, which is similar to the last two books I published: combinations of fictional characters and actual historical figures and situations. I try to do this so the historical profiles are both attributed to biographers and historians where I found them, and are also clearly distinguishable from the fanciful parts.
“In some cases, those pieces feel like book reviews. For instance, when I was writing about Bayard Rustin, my narrator pointed out how telling it was that although the historic occasion of Rustin being dragged out of the closet – he was arrested for having sex with two white guys in a car in L.A. – was always discussed, his lovers within the left in later years, as well as his long-time partner were almost never mentioned.”
However, where Kathy quite deliberately used transgressive material to attack the politicians of her time and reveal what she saw as the unspoken power relations of society, Mel’s approach is perhaps less shocking, but no less subversive.
He says: “I never liked Doctorow’s Ragtime, and my intermixing of historical figures is much more absurd, and hopefully funny. Nancy Drew often appears: in one story she goes to the trial of the Chicago 7, because the insane judge Hoffman was a classmate of her father’s at law school. Much of this piece comes from the transcript of that Kafkaesque trial. Nancy becomes quite disillusioned with the system, but she does almost fall in love with Mitzi Gaynor at the Ski Dump!”
This spirit of subversive humour continues in Mel’s current work: “In what I’m working on now, Laura Ingalls Puce (she briefly married a carnival barker) and Floppsy Bobbsey (one of the ‘set’ of Bobbsey twins; the rest are all Republicans who’ve stayed in the east) hang out with actual and fictitious IWW workers and leaders in Chicago and Seattle, right before US entry into WW1. It’s very much about the decimation of the left at that time, with a focus on the life of Helen Gurley Flynn, icon of our two heroines.”
“I’ve been somewhat obsessed with the pre WW1 period now for quite some time, as well as the 1850’s when the Civil war seemed imminent. Initially, I think my interest arose from pure disgust with our degraded contemporary political conditions, and the wish to understand whether there ever have been more hopeful eras in this country; if there were ever more credible reasons to hope than exist now.”
Kathy: “Method has become supremely politically important. For example, the novelist who writes about the poor Cambridge vicar who can’t deal with his homosexuality is giving us no tools for survival, whereas William Burroughs’s writing methods, his uses of psychic research, are weapons in the fight for our own happiness.”[14]
Both Mel’s and Kathy’s work tackle the big questions of their age. They delve into politics and identity. When asked about what he considered the importance of Kathy Acker’s work to be he answers:
“Kathy’s early book, Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula, which she mailed in serial installments, was incredibly important and liberating for me, both in its concept and in the writing itself. Each chapter utilized a variety of cited texts combined with autobiographical materials to reveal Kathy’s personal contradictions: to contextualize, interrogate, illuminate, and obscure them.
“Each chapter started by stating its intention. The very first one: Intention: I become a murderess by repeating in words the lives of other murderesses. Another: I explore my miserable childhood, I become William Butler Yeats.
“Kathy inserted personal anecdotes, experiences, fantasies, desires, half-memories, dreams within each text: juxtapositions might happen parenthetically, sometimes as insertions within a paragraph, maybe in repetitive, obsessive loops. As time went on, she became increasingly involved with following postmodern theory – using her texts to play with, even anticipate, it in many ways, especially with its emphasis on the social construction of desire.”
Kathy: “Writing isn’t just writing, it’s a meeting of writing and living, the way existence is a meeting of mental and material language of idea and sign.”[15]
When asked about which is his favourite work by Kathy Acker he says simply: “I personally feel that Blood and Guts in High School is Kathy’s strongest, and most accessible work.”
Kathy: “I want to go through death. How can I go through death?: (Shouts.) Hey death! (Death doesn’t answer.)”[16]
[1] The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula – Kathy Acker, 1973
[2] One or two things I know about Kathy Acker, The Encyclopedia of Rebels, Mel Freilicher (2013)
[3] One or two things I know about Kathy Acker, The Encyclopedia of Rebels, Mel Freilicher (2013)
[4] A few notes on two of my books (1989), Bodies of Work – Kathy Acker (1997)
[5] Devoured by myths, interview by Sylvere Lotringer, 1991 (Hannibal Lecter, My Father)
[6] Kathy Acker documentary by Alan Benson, 1984
[7] I Dreamt I was a Nymphomaniac Imagining – Kathy Acker, 1974
[8] Kathy Acker documentary by Alan Benson, 1984
[9] Kathy Acker: Where does she get off? - Interview by R.U. Sirius, 1994 (io Magazine)
[10] The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula – Kathy Acker, 1973
[11] A few notes on two of my books (1989), Bodies of Work – Kathy Acker (1997)
[12] The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula – Kathy Acker, 1973
[13] Preface (1997), Bodies of Work – Kathy Acker (1997)
[14] A few notes on two of my books (1989), Bodies of Work – Kathy Acker (1997)
[15] My Death, My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini – Kathy Acker (1983)
[16] Blood and Guts in High School – Kathy Acker (1982)