Kathy Acker (Pt 2)

I'd put this book down for awhile and finally finished it the other week (part one here). Acker is...well, you probably already know about her reputation. Difficult is one word. Some call her problematic. The last piece in this book, Hannibal Lecter, My Father, is the testimony of The Federal Inspection Office for Publications Harmful to Minors in Germany and their reasons for banning the book Tough Girls Don't Cry. In addition to the hypersexual content and coarse language throughout, they cite the book as being difficult to follow, adopting too many styles, and for plagiarism.

I can't argue that this book should be read my minors. I've thought about this in the past when I first read Naked Lunch. Or first heard the Velvet Underground. I wonder if I have kids what kind of media I would expose them to, or what of mine they would find on their own. I'm all for the possibility of expansion of ideas especially in children and teenagers. But how does one determine when one can begin to handle such dark and surreal or evocative and cerebral texts? Making works taboo only makes them more attractive.

The disjointedness of Acker makes me think I won't read anything of hers again, or at least any non-non-fiction work (essays, interviews, etc). I like her thoughts but can't get into the prose. I think I could have appreciated this experimental writing style actually if I were still in high school or college. She eschews conventional tactics entirely. Of course, this is also a work of her earliest material, and maybe I need to find the Acker that's best for me.

I've thought a lot lately too about conventional texts and sounds. Music becomes more monotonous to me over time. Musicians have decided that one note must be followed by another of only two or three notes, or can be played simultaneously with a handful of notes. It's boring. Granted, I've heard much more music than I have read literature. But will we get to the point where writing too becomes so predictable? That any given word can only be followed by a handful of words? Are we already there?

Anyway, here's a now defunct website that put Kathy Acker lines into the comic Cathy.

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.