Jason McBride - Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker

Eat Your Mind

The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker

Jason McBride

In my school called how can I live

in my theory of appearing

I lay out my costume.

LISA ROBERTSON, THE SEAM

PREFACE

K ATHY A CKER WAS THAT RARE and now almost inconceivable thing: a celebrity experimental writer. Patti Smith with a post-doc, perhaps; Anne Carson, if shed studied Greek during her breaks at a peep show; a Gertrude Stein in Gaultier.

When she died in 1997, at the age of fifty, shed published thirteen groundbreaking novels, and had written screenplays, poetry, libretti, essays, and criticism; two novellas were published posthumously. These categories are sometimes useful, sometimes not. Often considered a poster girl for postmodernisma word she was constantly ambivalent aboutAcker abhorred limitations of all kinds, and she exploded the borders between novel and poetry, philosophy and journalism, art and entertainment. Most compellingly, between reading and writing. Like Borges, I equate reading and writing, she wrote in the last year of her life. To read is to write; to write is to write the world; to elect to neither read nor write is to choose suicide.

She was highly educated, a voracious reader with catholic taste, and she almost always wrote with other writers books open in her lap or scattered across her desk or bed. Literature was both her life and her adversary, and it was impossible to judge her work by the standards we use to judge literary fiction. Very often, in fact, she deliberately wrote badly or incorrectly, in defiance of literary authority and propriety, as well as conventions of logic, grammar, and beauty. Identifying language with knowledge and power, she sought, always, to disrupt language. Two of her best-known novels are titled Great Expectations and Don Quixoteshe famously plagiarized scenes, phrases, characters, and ideas from texts both canonical and otherwise, collaging these with shards of her own diaries, sexual fantasies, gossip, political screeds, and blunt critiques of capitalism, liberalism, and patriarchy.

Collage suggests a degree of harmony, but Ackers fragmentary narratives are far more jagged and jangly than that. Her sentences are plain and direct, frequently aphoristic, punctuated by shifts into, and out of, the lyrical, the Gothic, the sentimental. Names, identities, issues, emotions, everything evident is fronted compulsively, poet Steve Benson said of her work. The relentlessly hybrid, helter-skelter nature of her prose is reinforced by its frequent swerves into playscript, hand-lettered poetry, foreign languages. Lewd drawings and elaborate dream maps made by the writer herself often provide illustration. Reading an Acker novel is hardly like reading at all; you enter it, endure it, allow it to act upon you, like an acid bath. You can skip paragraphs, even pages, or open a book halfway through, and the effect more or less remains. You leave an Acker novel feeling scoured, stunned, ravaged, as if youve just emerged from a car crash or emergency surgery.

Ackers plots, such as they are, hinge on rape, revolution, and doomed, treacherous romance. Her writing suggests that love and desire are determined by culture, by various social and political premises that require constant negotiation, re-evaluation, and reformulation. Compulsively and hyperbolically, therefore, she wrote about sex, gender, and power, concerns that also consumed her everyday life. For Acker, sex and writing were as inextricable as writing and reading, writing and politics. Later in life, she often wrote while she masturbated, in the hopes of arriving at different kinds of expression. In a sense, her novels were written to be performed, and when read aloud, especially by her, they become even more incandescent.

Acker likewise performed her life as if she had written it. To borrow Judith Thurmans description of Colette, Acker lived turbulently and worked tirelessly. Raised in a privileged but oppressive Upper East Side Jewish family, she turned her back on that world as soon as she could, seeking a life of romantic and intellectual adventure that led her to, and through, many of the most thrilling avant-garde and countercultural moments in America in the late twentieth century: the births of conceptual art and experimental music; the poetry wars of the sixties and seventies; the mainstreaming of hardcore porn; No Wave cinema and New Narrative writing; riot grrls, biker chicks, cyberpunks. In all these scenes, she was alternately student and shadow, avatar, vampire, paladin. As this book shows, time and time again, Acker was not just a singular writer, she was also a titanic cultural force who tied together disparate movements in literature, art, music, theater, and film.

In her early twenties, she worked in live sex shows in Times Square, made porn films, and stripped in sailor bars in San Diego. Her refusal of literary propriety extended to a similarly flagrant contempt for conventional feminine identity. Though married twice to men, she preferred to identify as queer. She never had children. For her, monogamy was moot, and she had countless lovers, both men and women. Sex fascinated her, as a source of personal, complicated pleasure, but also as a way to understand power, gender, the self. I threw myself onto every bed as a dead sailor flings himself into the sea, she writes in her novel My Mother: Demonology. Her legion of famous lovers included film scholars P. Adams Sitney and Peter Wollen; writers Rudy Wurlitzer, Hanif Kureishi, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Sylvre Lotringer; musicians Richard Hell, Adele Bertei, and Peter Gordon (her second husband); artists Robin Winters, Alan Sondheim, David Salle, and, allegedly, Sol LeWitt. She really was like a librarian, Winters said, and treated people like books. She wanted to read as many as possible. In turn, Acker often acted like she was a character in a book or myth. Another lover, the philosopher Johnny Golding, put it in related terms: Kathys fundamental sexual identity was writer. Her sexuality was writing. She was having a sexual relationship with that.

All Acker ever really wanted to do was write, but she also wanted to be, and often was, much more than a writer: artist, rock star, philosopher, performance artist, cultural force. She was heavily tattooed and pierced, kept her hair extremely short and often dyed, adored outr, cutting-edge fashion. All of this provided a kind of dazzle camouflage that distinguished her entirely from her literary peers. Over the years, her appearance shifted dramatically: she could look like a deranged kewpie doll, a pirate from the future, an alien courtesan. In a way, she was a clown, the writer Robert Glck said with admiration. She would wear a ton of makeup, so different from everybody else in the room. Dodie Bellamy, the novelist and essayist, had a similar take: She looked like a clown, but a totally confident, powerful clown. Author photos rarely appear on the front of books of fiction; in Ackers case, in the editions of her books that were published in the 1980s and 1990s, her well-known face and body were usually splashed across her covers, making them look as much like music albums as they did works of fiction.

The criminal and outlaw beguiled her, and in both life and work Acker assumed their defiance. She felt that artor at least the art she was interested incould itself be lawless, subversive, even antisocial; she signed the manuscript of a 1979 essay, Miss Criminal. She possessed a contradictory charisma: seductive, funny, fiercely intelligent, and capable of extraordinary intimacy, she could also be agonizingly vulnerable, narcissistic, demanding, obdurate, and competitive. The fearless, ferocious persona that she projected masked a more fragile neurotic, and sometimes vice versa. She craved stardom, but buckled beneath its demands. Her disguises and performances were profligate, unstable, confusing. Even as she was regarded by some as a dangerous person, a kind of literary terrorist or mistress of the obscene, as the