Kathy Acker Read online

  KATHY ACKER: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS

  Copyright © 2018 by Melville House Publishing

  Introduction copyright © 2018 by Amy Scholder and Douglas A. Martin

  First Melville House printing: December 2018

  “Kathy Acker: Mitali Restaurant, NYC” by Barry Alpert was reprinted with permission of Barry Alpert.

  “Informal Interview with Kathy Acker by R. J. Ellis and students” was reprinted with permission of R. J. Ellis.

  “Gramercy Park Hotel Bar, NYC, Conversation with Dean Kuipers” was reprinted with permission of Dean Kuipers.

  “Interview with Kathy by Sylvère Lotringer” was reprinted with permission of Sylvère Lotringer.

  “Kathy Acker Interview by Lisa Palac” was reprinted with permission of Lisa Palac.

  “Kathy Acker Angry Women Interview” reprinted with permission of Andrea Juno/Juno Books.

  “Body Bildung: Laurence A. Rickels talks with Kathy Acker,” by Laurence Rickels and Kathy Acker, © Artforum, February 1994, was reprinted with permission of Mira Dayal.

  “An Interview with Kathy Acker” by Beth Jackson, eyeline Autumn/Winter 1996, was reprinted with permission of Beth Jackson.

  “All Girls Together” Kathy Interviews the Spice Girls, was reprinted with permission of Kathy Acker/Guardian News & Media.

  “Candle in the Wind,” LOG Illustrated Summer 1998, the Physics Room, was reprinted with permission of Juan Rubén Reyes.

  “1997: ‘Interview with Kathy Acker’, Pretext 5 (May 2002)” was reprinted with permission of Kasia Boddy.

  Melville House Publishing

  46 John Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  Suite 2000

  16/18 Woodford Road

  London E7 0HA

  mhpbooks.com | @melvillehouse

  ISBN: 9781612197319

  Ebook ISBN 9781612197326

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Acker, Kathy, 1948-1997, interviewee. | Scholder, Amy, editor, writer of introduction. | Martin, Douglas A., editor, writer of introduction.

  Title: Kathy Acker : the last interview and other conversations / edited and with an introduction by Amy Scholder and Douglas A. Martin.

  Description: [Brooklyn, New York] : Melville House Publishing, [2018].

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018048548 (print) | LCCN 2018051278 (ebook) | ISBN 9781612197326 (reflowable) | ISBN 9781612197319 | ISBN 9781612197319 q(paperback) | ISBN 9781612197326 q(eBook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Acker, Kathy, 1948-1997--Interviews.

  Classification: LCC PS3551.C44 (ebook) | LCC PS3551.C44 Z46 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.54 [B] --dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048548

  v5.3.2

  a

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION BY AMY SCHOLDER AND DOUGLAS A. MARTIN

  KATHY ACKER: MITALI RESTAURANT, NYC

  Interview with Barry Alpert

  Only Paper Today

  March 30, 1976

  INFORMAL INTERVIEW

  by R. J. Ellis, Carolyn Bird, Dawn Curwen, Ian Mancor, Val Ogden, and Charles Patrick

  April 23, 1986

  KATHY ACKER: GRAMERCY PARK HOTEL BAR, NYC

  Conversation with Dean Kuipers

  July 2, 1988

  KATHY ACKER/ SYLVÈRE LOTRINGER (“DEVOURED BY MYTHS”)

  Unexpurgated Transcript

  1989–1990

  THE ON OUR BACKS INTERVIEW: KATHY ACKER

  by Lisa Palac

  May/June 1991

  KATHY ACKER

  by Andrea Juno and V. Vale

  Angry Women (RE/Search, 1991; June Books, 1999)

  BODY BILDUNG

  Laurence A. Rickels talks with Kathy Acker

  Artforum

  February 1994

  KATHY ACKER IN CONVERSATION WITH BETH JACKSON

  eyeline

  Autumn/Winter 1996

  ALL GIRLS TOGETHER

  KATHY INTERVIEWS THE SPICE GIRLS

  THE GUARDIAN

  1997

  THE LAST INTERVIEW

  by Kasia Boddy

  1997

  Biographies

  INTRODUCTION

  AMY SCHOLDER and DOUGLAS A. MARTIN

  Dear Douglas,

  I first met Kathy Acker in 1987, when I was working at the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and she was reading there as part of her book tour for Don Quixote. We then spent a magical evening getting to know each other over dinner at a restaurant south of Market Street, and tequila at Amelia’s, the lesbian bar in the Mission District. Despite the fact that the night ended abruptly (about which, more later) we began to write letters to each other when she got back home to London, a correspondence that lasted until she moved to San Francisco, two years later.

  I kept my letters from her, but not surprisingly I don’t have copies of the ones I sent to her. I wish I did. As I reread those letters now, and share them with you, I am trying to recall every detail. What presents did I send to her? What love affair was I beginning, when I seem suddenly effusive? Did I complain when she didn’t write me back right away—or did she apologize out of her own sense of procrastination?

  I like reading interviews in part because they feel epistolary. I miss letters (receiving more than writing them, I confess). And I thought it might be fitting for us to write an introduction to this collection of interviews as a conversation with each other, in the letter-writing mode we’ve established over twenty years of friendship.

  I’ve been thinking about community. When Kathy wrote to me when she was starting to think about moving back to the States, I asked her how she would decide which city to live in. She had friends all over. And she said, It’s about where I can find community. I didn’t really know what she meant. I was just beginning my life and career in book publishing. I was new to San Francisco. And it stuck with me—that I didn’t know what she meant by community. And I wanted to have that experience. She wrote:

  I can’t take the isolation anymore. I can’t fight a class system by myself. I need my community back because, learning my needs, I need support in bad times. I’m too fucking alone. And I hate the philistinism here, lying under a guise of upper-class education. I want to be able to explore the makings of a society, be it through taboo, through myth, without incurring fear for my own well-being. Writing, and I don’t give a damn about literature, but writing should be one arena for exploration, examination, and even criticism. Real criticism. Anyway.

  Thanks for your offer. If I could, I would run to your room right now…I will be on the coast in the spring and hopefully back home by Christmas. HOME, what a magic word, a lover, a geographical one, to have any arms, even that of a city, around me and holding me…I keep yelling these days, “I’m just a human being.”

  Well, I’m bitching, darling; please excuse me. Time, as they say, changes all…I love you. Acker.

  Kathy came to San Francisco to live shortly thereafter. The AIDS epidemic was beginning to engulf us. For those of us who survived—we wrote, published, made art, curated, resisted, supported. It was the first time in my life that I understood community. And how treacherous it can be to live and work without it. Especially when you are threatened, marginalized, rejected, sick, or alone.

  Wondering how you respond to these stories, and what’s been defining for you.

  Love you, Amy

  Dear Amy,

  Your friendship has always helped me understand community. San Francisco and City Lights was such a mecca in my little mind, as it was growing. There was an aura for me there, though I guess I was probably naive about many things. The group of artists, friends I fell
in among in the main by being the younger boyfriend, along for the ride for so many times, there was such reverence in the way they would speak of this as a pocket out there, a place unlike our own little outposts in the American South where we would gather, or even New York City others visited us from—there by the sea where the Beats had gone and set up as destination.

  I tried to move there, but it was too unrealistic to be someone like I was in my desperate twenties, no job to speak of, no career path or plan besides writing in my journal. A green army duffle, a Marguerite Duras book. I must have lasted all of forty-eight hours before I slipped out of the house where I was going to be granted this little pantry of sorts for a room. A mattress fit inside, and my friend Justin would sometimes let people stay. I left a so-apologetic note in the morning and sneaked away.

  I remember the first time I met you, in 1997. You were then living in Manhattan. We met at Fez on Lafayette Street, during a visit when I was trying to get some footing in the city. I knew Fez because I had been taken there before. Gone now.

  We were going to talk about the future of the writing I was doing. I learned that you were connected to Kathy, and also the artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, whose picture I had put on the wall next to my bed, much to my boyfriend’s worry, thinking I would somehow try to have this life and get lost then within it, get eaten alive by it, never be again someone who could continue to be connected with others like him in untroubled ways…I look back and think of how my primary shaping and vital relationships formed in the face of the fact of a fear. Like I’m not delusional. What kept this or that man connected to me in part was what had been presented as solution: one lover. So, I had one for a long time. Long for me at that age. Probably longer than I warranted. A sense of value got wound up in all this for me.

  You published and edited so many of the people who showed me how the world worked. Kathy attaches to one of the letters a piece, “Arthur Rimbaud Was Homosexual,” for a compilation of yours. I wanted to resemble Rimbaud in senses. What young boy like I was did not, of course. I got that in part through her. Community comes up there too:

  The poet, elsewhere, not in our western society today, was the speaker and guide of his or her community. Partly because of his homosexuality Rimbaud was one of the first poets in this western society who fully understood that he was alienated from his society.

  Above all Arthur Rimbaud hated hypocrisy, the deadness of the provincial bourgeois society into which he had been born. He wanted to go to a world that was pagan, a world in which politics sexuality language sensation and identity are interconnected.

  Rimbaud saw that this society separates. It separates politics and power from sexuality, politics from poetry and vision. It separates people from each other according to their sexual characters, colors, and classes. This society, which controls by separation, is a society of death.

  Sex was connected to poetry for me, also. Why did I want to be validated by men? One—I did not call him a mentor, I didn’t even really understand the word as such yet, though I would play around with the idea he was my “patron”—had a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations propped up in his kitchen. But he was dismissive of how Acker could be a poet too, a particular kind of poet, like the kind she talks about in interviews as either “coming out of” or being taught by, or the fact that she wanted to mark sexual pleasure as being how she differed from her contemporaries in the Language Poets; she takes it forward into the novel, how these worlds did and could intermingle. Why didn’t the men I wanted to respect my work see her as serious? It was her image that was not right for the kitchen. Poetry to her was about being radical. I guess at the time I did not really get Rimbaud beyond a legend, but I don’t think I was alone in that.

  Love, D.

  Dear Douglas,

  At the marathon reading of Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School at Performance Space NY on April 8, 2018, I was thinking about what bonds a community. And how those bonds endure (or don’t) over time. The gathering for this tribute to Kathy showed a fierce connection, I thought, around the values in Kathy’s work, and the work of Sarah Schulman, who organized the event. Blood and Guts, published in the Reagan era of the 1980s, is chillingly relevant in the current moment—after the beginnings of a tide change in social equity, a vicious backlash on a national level takes over the country.

  Are we becoming a nation of predators and victims? Are we doing enough in opposition? We are witnessing the consequences not only of white supremacy, but of white silence. Kathy’s despair in the 1980s gave way to a sometimes utopian fantasy, like one she created in Pussy, King of the Pirates. I want a fantasy world like the one she conjured, but I can’t find one. Everything feels too dire. I haven’t felt this way since the early 1990s, during the AIDS epidemic, when there was no end in sight. When going viral was not a good thing…

  Well, now I’m bitching. Time changes all…and then seems to change back!

  A.

  Dear Amy,

  In my mind, Pussy, King of the Pirates is the San Francisco book. She writes about that geographical promise in “Some American Cities,” for Marxism Today. Never seen it. Pieces of that utopia were also fomented in lights of queer theory. Butler as luminary publishes a portion of the novel, its opening, in a critical anthology. Excuse me. A colleague knocking at the door, one who has been housing me.

  I told my mother how I would not come visit in Georgia again until the terms of this presidency were over. Online, philosopher-critic Steven Shaviro reminds us, “I still think that Kathy Acker’s greatest works are her last two novels, My Mother: Demonology and Pussy, King of the Pirates” (tweet).

  Currently it has sixteen hearts, one reply by me. Did she also write My Mother: Demonology in San Francisco? I remain curious about much, even with all she offers here in these interviews. The one with R. J. Ellis we excerpt from was done along with students from a course he was running at the time, as he explained to me. “Informal” in that they went to a favorite Chinese restaurant of Kathy’s (“she was very good to my students,” Ellis) to eat, drink, talk. She invited him along to the gym to work out after. Like you invited me into this collection. She brought candid generosity in her letters to you and another companionship to the books. In the interviews, another velocity. In her letters to you, Acker was writing as being known. To be known. Here and there she is more or less known. I don’t want to just dismiss who women were to her in and out of bed, as you know. The lurks change when the public exposure does.

  I’m writing to you from downtown Middletown, where I passed yesterday on the street one of my students who wants to enter the world as we hypothesized it being potentially in our diary class, a world where that kind of work we were making there together could be recognized. How does one do that? He wanted to know. Then, dinner. “Did you know one of the first things she ever said to me about you [about a colleague] was that you were cruising students at the gym?” Obviously, she does not know my bag.

  Visiting you in Los Angeles, walking on the beach with you, introducing you to B. finally after all these years…(Last night, at another restaurant, debating that possessive there: like my husband, my wife. My human companion? Even that’s not right. Partner is bankrupt.) I was scared about my Acker book about to come out. What had been written of her in biography, would it be said to her face? How do stakes then change? Her strategies are still ahead of times we stay mired in. She cannot be easily consumed. Cat fights. Flash forward to the marathon, a day that started somber enough for me. The reading was in the main the New York contingent though some had traveled for it. I met her next biographer. We met years ago. I worry I have somehow disappointed Kevin and Bob. You know I was obsessed with not being listed in the event’s program. Matias knows. Masha. Ira was good to me and assured me I had no reason to be worried. Said these were my people. I was always afraid of being seen as too dumb. I am thinking interviews again, Acker’s timing and her aliveness in them, the closest thing I have to experiencing a conversati
on with her. It was a gift to get to read through all the interviews we started with working on compiling this collection, as much as a challenge with wanting to represent that whole spectrum of all those various public interactions over time adequately. One of the ones that gets away is a late-night version of her in the days of answering-machine tapes, a transcript pulled from one where she contextualizes punk as a response to the hippy movement, thanks to Juan Rubén Reyes, who exchanged contacts with her, a stranger, after a reading. I want to show that kind of generosity. The hope, in the end, is to give significant reads of key moments in her dynamic formulations, the foundations she was always shifting, and a number of culled highlights.

  We give each other an audience. Now reading your last response, I realize—see—I have done the motion with a pen like I tend to on student letters for my second job held down, the progressive education of Goddard College, when a line or phrase or turn of concern comes up I want to make sure to address, to be sure to in answering back, angle bracket (alligator mouth, as I was taught. A memory, of being chastised. Teach them something halfway professional, and disgust). You begin to realize the best thing that’s been written on the work is in papers coming in to you, once motivation becomes something beyond just more readers. This we are doing to try to get somewhere else by writing. Kathy’s work traded in the obscured. I’m off to go roller-skating.

  X D.

  Dear Douglas,

  This is why I asked you to co-edit this book with me: I had proposed this book of interviews for The Last Interview series not long after I left my last publishing job in New York in 2014.

  I was sad about leaving that job because I would miss the community I helped create there. But with management change it was no longer a collaborative environment—talk about a turd in a punchbowl (my friend Avram would say). I moved to California to think about the next chapter of my life and to do something different. But I still wanted to make books.

  I started to organize my professional files (book files from 1986 to the present) and found Kathy’s letters to me from the late 1980s.