Kathy Acker (Pt 1)

I've never read anything by Kathy Acker before today. I've seen her name all over the place, name-checked by everyone from Kathleen Hannah to Richard Hell to Kate Zambreno. But every time I venture into a book store, new or used, I fail to find any primary texts from the writer herself. While I'm sure I could have read (and probably have read short texts of) her work online, I've never immersed myself in a novel or collection of essays. I finally found a copy of work with her name on the cover, Hannibal Lecter, My Father, a collection of interviews, prose, dramatic work, essays, and more.

The first piece of the collection, and my introduction to her greater themes, was a couple of interviews from 1989-90 with French literary critic Sylvère Lotringer. The two discuss memory, identity, community, plagiarism, censorship, tattoos, and mythology. The part I really liked was about plagiarism and how we use other people's work. Acker recognizes it's impossible to create without experience in reality, and for her, words and text are just as much a staple of reality as material and experiences. She explains: "What I'm doing is simply taking text to be the same as the world, to be equal to non-text, in fact to be more real than non-text, and start representing text." Of course, I'm yet to read any examples of her doing this, but I hope to change that soon.

The pair's discussion about government espionage is prophetic to what is happening today. "People know that the CIA has done a lot of chemical warfare testing, they know how things work now; they just don't give a damn. The society's totally disintegrated. We're wallowing in our own fucking nihilism...we're wandering around and we don't know what to do, living in a sort of hell with AIDS and crack and everything else*. It always is a guerrilla warfare, so you do have to look at context, the culture, what's happened, to see what makes sense at the moment." It doesn't seem too far off from the general feeling in society today, save for the fact we are all more culpable in our disintegrated privacy, due to our dependence on technology and willingness to share every single fact about ourselves and the thoughts in our minds with corporations (he typed into his Google powered web platform). But surely that leaves the door open to question how one can define their identity now: by community? by conformism? by the collective memory as prepared for the Internet and social media where we only share the good things that happen in our lives? by what shames us?

*everything else = drones, terrorism, ISIS, police violence, transphobia, climate change...