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.