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Death (and Life) of the Author: Kathy Acker

Peter Wollen's 1998 essay about KA is arguably the finest piece written about her and her work to date.

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Discuss Rules Beforehand

From the Believer magazine.

FEROCITY AND VULNERABILITY IN A POSTHUMOUSLY PUBLISHED COLLECTION OF EMAILS FROM WRITER/ARTIST/FEMINIST ICON KATHY ACKER

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Kathy Acker Interviews the Spice Girls for Vogue in 1997

All Girls Together by Kathy Acker

The Spice Girls are the biggest, brashest girlie group ever to have hit the British mainstream. Kathy Acker is an avant-garde American writer and academic. They met up in New York to swap notes - on boys, girls, politics. And what they really, really want.

Fifty-second street. West Side, New York City. Hell’s Kitchen - one of those areas into which no one would once have walked unless loaded. Guns or drugs or both. But now it has been gentrified: the beautiful people have won. A man in middle-aged-rocker uniform, tight black jeans and nondescript T-shirt, lets Nigel, the photographer, and me through the studio doorway; then a chipmunk-sort-of-guy in shorts, with a Buddha tattooed on one of his arms, greets us warmly. This is Muff, the band’s publicity officer. We’re about to meet the Girls …

They are here to rehearse for an appearance on Saturday Night Live. Not only is this their first live TV performance, it’s also the first time they’ll be playing with what Mel C calls a ‘real band’. If the Girls are to have any longevity in the music industry, they will have to break into the American market; and for this they will need the American media. Both the Girls and their record company believe that their appearance here tonight might do the trick. There is a refusal among America’s music critics to take the Spice Girls seriously. The Rolling Stone review of Spice, their first album, refers to them as ‘attractive young things … brought together by a manager with a marketing concept’. The main complaint, or explanation for disregard, is that they are a ‘manufactured band’. What can this mean in a society of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and En Vogue? However, an e-mail from a Spice fan mentions that, even though he loves the girls, he detects a ‘couple of stereotypes surrounding women in the band’s general image. The brunette is the woman every man wants to date. Perfect for an adventure on a midnight train, or to hire as your mistress-secretary. The blonde is the woman you take home to mother, whereas the redhead is the wild woman, the woman-with-lots-of -evil-powers.’ So who are these Girls? And how political is their notorious ‘Girl Power’? 

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In 2006, the poet and essayist Dodie Bellamy curated “Kathy Forest,” a show of KA’s clothing at the New Langton Arts Center in San Francisco. Derek McCormack wrote about the show for Fanzine.

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One night, around ten, we're on West Broadway, around the corner from Magoo's, rumored to have once been a brothel, now a bar and hamburger joint. Kathy and I are sitting outside some stairs, talking about our writing. By now I've finished Weird Fucks and "Diary of a Masochist," so it must be 1979 or 1980. I'm almost certain that the very ironic Kathy Goes to Haiti has come out. Kathy says something like, You have to know a lot of things to write a novel, it's hard work. She's been reading toward a new book. I'm working on the script for Committed. In my mind's eye (always a curious expression), I walk away, then turn and wave good-bye again. She's waiting for someone and might be going to Tier 3, a rock club down the block, or maybe I am.

Lynne Tillman, "Selective Memory," The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall, 1989

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“My life was very, very dark and has gotten relatively lighter as years have gone on...I changed myself by using literature.” KA on Bookworm, 1992.

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Kathy Acker (1947-1997) was a force who died too soon. The literary canon was her playground; in it she turned the mastertexts into her own Revolutions. Great Expectations, Blood and Guts in High School, Kathy Goes to Haiti, and Pussy and the Pirates are among the titles that simply ripped the lid off any expectations you might have had about reading, writing, or, why not say it, existing. Discovering Acker as a kid-writer in the '80s was an amazement that gave some of us our own reveling girl bodies like brazen potlatch gifts. Here was acutely daring permission to think against every repression towards a life fully in the thinking, desiring flesh, where words are flesh too.

Lisa Robertson and Matthew Stadler, Revolution: A Reader

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When I hear the expression, larger than life, I think of Kathy, who could actually seem big through sheer presence. Well, presence is never actually sheer, it’s opaque, a complex mechanism with a hundred different factors and parts. Mostly she was in control, and it wasn’t always pretty. We were rehearsing Carla Harryman’s theater piece Memory Play, in which we were all charged with playing animals of one sort or another, and Kathy had it all down from Day One. Rehearsals lasted so long—ten months or so—that eventually Kathy dropped out, but her spirit continued to animate the production. I learned a lot about stage presence from aping her.

Kevin Killian, Ghost Parade

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Three chapbooks

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What she had in common with the tradition of Benjamin, Arendt, et cetera was what Carla Harryman called 'comprehensive knowledge.' Kathy was a profound intellectual, able to produce work that incorporated so many different dimensions of thought simultaneously that it eclipsed the capacities of many people. She was able to fully comprehend the cultural product of the dominant culture and of the many margins, and therein lay her problem. For, emotionally, Kathy was average. She had no family. She was an abandoned, traumatized person and did not have a noble emotionality. Artistically and intellectually, however, she was exceptional. Inherent in her supremacy was a certain kind of expectation. A complex one. On the one hand, she knew realistically the great value and achievement of her work. She was clear and confident of its merit. Her work was grappling with things that matter, both formally and in terms of content and perspective. There was a discovery in the writing. Her books were objects that young women would take off the shelves and put into each other's hands. Life giving. She was highly inventive, not derivative. She was very generous in that her work was emotionally honest and explicit. But because she understood the true value of what she was offering the reader, she expected a broad recognition and gratitude.

Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind

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Toronto, October, 1988

The first time I saw KA read, at Toronto's Harbourfront Authors Festival. (Photo: Toronto Star)

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Matias Viegener

"I do believe in genius. I've met at least one: Kathy Acker." — Matias Viegener, 2500 Random Things About Me Too

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The Face, January, 1984

From the collection of Derek McCormack.

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Kevin Killian

My first interview, on May 4, 2013, was with the brilliant poet, novelist and Jack Spicer biographer Kevin Killian. He gave me these two books, both from Kathy Acker's personal library, as talismans. The first is Gigo Poems, by Zahrad; the second, Philip Lamantia's Destroyed Works (with cover collage by Bruce Conner).