by Olivia Laing
‘Here’s something you need to know: Caches of weapons were found throughout Rwanda after the genocide. This wasn’t about the CSA statue, but a test run for a militia takeover of a small city. I am sorry to bring you this tonight. There’s a bigger plan at work here. Please don’t doubt that. Take nothing for granted’: @kristinrawls, Twitter, 16 August 2017.
‘Perhaps we need a monument that lists the names of every enslaved person we can identify, in the tradition of the Vietnam War memorial’: @sarahschulman3, Twitter, 19 August 2017.
‘Three quarters of these bums’re black or Puerto Rican. The concrete stinks of piss much more than the surrounding streets smell.’: Kathy Acker, Bodies of Work (Serpent’s Tail, 1997), p. 107.
‘how did America begin. To defeat America she had to learn who America is’
‘a minor factor in nature, no longer existed’
‘what are the myths of the beginning of America’
‘the desire for religious intolerance made America or Freedom’: Kathy Acker, Don Quixote (Paladin, 1986), p. 117.
‘I stood next to the dummies that are supposed to represent black people in their deepest ignominy and noticed that there were no dummies that were supposed to represent the masters or the mistresses of the plantation’: Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, ‘A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof’, GQ, 21 August 2017.
‘the very 8½" x 11" multi-use acid-free paper on which the workplace discourse is pitilessly inscribed’: Lucy Ives, ‘Sodom, LLC: The Marquis de Sade and the Office Novel’, Lapham’s Quarterly, Vol. IX, No. 4, Fall 2016.
‘HISTORIC rainfall in Houston, and all over Texas. Floods are unprecedented, and more rain coming. Spirit of the people is incredible. Thanks! I will also be going to a wonderful state, Missouri, that I won by a lot in ’16. Dem C.M. is opposed to big tax cuts. Republican will win S!’: @realDonaldTrump, Twitter, 27 August 2017.
‘Knowing is tenuous as a swamp’
‘I’m in the middle of dirt’
‘The bodies are thrown in the water’
‘I’m with a girlfriend in a real building’
‘I want to do more than just see’
‘The more flights, the more forgotten’: Kathy Acker, Eurydice in the Underworld, p. 15.
‘A murky yellow liquid that mimics the effect of heroin. But addicts pay dearly for krokodil’s cheap high. Wherever on the body a user injects the drug, blood vessels burst and surrounding tissue dies, sometimes falling off the bone in chunks’: Simon Shuster, ‘The World’s Deadliest Drug: Inside a Krokodil Cookhouse’, Time, 5 December 2013.
‘they found I could read and they dragged me out to the barn and gouged my eyes before they beat me’: Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 282.
‘Its walls were painted with manure, I was the only human here’: Dodie Bellamy, Pink Steam (Suspect Thoughts Press, 2004), p. 137.
‘I never know how to say goodbye. We never do, do we? Just say “Goodbye.”’: Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School, p. 31.
‘I gave the old guy a dirty look’:
‘I’m not fucking you, I’m your enemy’: Kathy Acker, Florida, in Literal Madness, p. 401.
‘I know my grandmother hates my father’: Kathy Acker, Great Expectations, p. 14.
‘I love mommy. I know she’s on Dex’: Kathy Acker, Great Expectations, p. 15.
‘I didn’t feel frightened yet’: Kathy Acker, Florida, in Literal Madness, p. 400.
‘I myself never commit murder, I’m constantly drunk, I never despair’: Kathy Acker, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, in Portrait of an Eye, pp. 25–7.
‘I’m as normal as any moral person’: Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates (Grove Press, 1996), p. 84.
‘As soon as I was clean, again I started haunting clothes stores’: Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates, p. 88.
‘I grew up wild, I want to stay wild’: Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School, p. 97.
‘I felt very happy when my sister’s huge hat, while we were both in an auto, flew away’: Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless (Picador, 1988), p. 30.
‘I who would have and would be a pirate: I cannot. I who live in my mind which is my imagination as everything – wanderer adventurer fighter Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces – I am nothing in these times’: Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless, p. 26.
‘pain is the world’: Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School, p. 125.
Thank You
Rebecca Carter & PJ Mark, dream agents
Everyone at Picador, especially Paul Baggaley, Kish Widyaratna and Paul Martinovic
Everyone at Norton, especially Jill Bialosky, Drew Weitman and Erin Lovett
Early readers: Joseph Keckler, Kitty Laing, David Adjmi, Jean Hannah Edelstein, Sarah Wood, Ali Smith, Elizabeth Day, Jon Day, Chantal Joffe, Rich Dodwell, Charlie Porter, Lauren Kassell, David Dernie, Tom de Grunwald, Matt Wolf, Jenny Lord, Francesca Segal
Wolfgang Tillmans and Maureen Paley <3
Chris Kraus, for planting the seed; Kathy Acker, for making such radical possibilities; Matias Viegener, for your generosity
Denise Laing, always
& Ian Patterson, for everything
OLIVIA LAING is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She writes for the Guardian, New Statesman and Frieze among many other publications. Her first book, To the River, was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. The Trip to Echo Spring was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Gordon Burn Prize. The Lonely City was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and translated into fifteen languages. In 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize. She lives in London.
Also by Olivia Laing
To the River
The Trip to Echo Spring
The Lonely City
First published 2018 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2018 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-5098-9285-3
Copyright © Olivia Laing 2018
Cover Images © astro crusto, a. 2012 by Wolfgang Tillmans.
© Wolfgang Tillmans courtesy Maureen Paley, London.
Author Photo © Liz Seabrook
The right of Olivia Laing to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Pan Macmillan does not have any control over, or any responsibility for, any author or third-party websites referred to in or on this book.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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