Kathy Acker
Page 17
BODDY: Is that something that distinguishes writing today from earlier avant-garde work—that it’s no longer possible to shock?
ACKER: My stuff still upsets people. I can’t get Pussy published in this country. Looking for junk down toilet bowls is okay, but girls having good sex isn’t!
BODDY: To get back to the idea of humor…
ACKER: I think I’ve got a quirky sense of humor. The beginning of Blood and Guts in High School, making it about a father and daughter, was just my idea of a joke. Basically, it was stuff to do with the breakup of my second marriage and I thought it was really boring—I do think of an audience!—so I thought I’ll make it about a father and daughter, that’s more interesting. That’s just my sense of “Why not?” I didn’t mean anything. Underlying it there was a great deal of myth about fathers and daughters, but it was just a bad joke.
BODDY: And no one got the joke!
ACKER: No. No one even thought it was funny. Everyone was asking me about deep meaning. In San Francisco a lot of the dykes came out of incestuous homes, and a number had told me “You were the first person to write about it!” I think my novels are bloody goofy. I don’t think In Memoriam is terribly funny, and My Mother: Demonology is kind of a serious book. But I think there are sections in Empire of the Senseless that are goofy—the last section. I get on a roll. I thought in Pussy, the girls are goofy, and all the rat stuff. And everyone got very shocked—“Oh, these girls are so dirty. They’re such violent, filthy girls.” I just thought it was fun. I had a good time writing that. After all, they’re pirates. It was just a boys’ book I turned into a girls’ book. I was ripping off Treasure Island, obviously, and I really thought Pussy was less violent. There is a scene in Treasure Island where there’s an actual killing, and I turned it into a girl throwing a stone at another girl. When it came to girls, it didn’t feel that right to be that violent, although God knows, I know enough cases of lesbian battery. People get offended awfully easily, I think. Even the bloody queen who writes the astrology column in the Bay Times went on a rant about how of course he didn’t believe in banning books, except in one case—me!
BODDY: What do you think of the way publishing has latched on to identity politics to market books?
ACKER: Identity politics took over the States. Very dangerous. I think it’s repulsive. Even though it comes out of postmodernism, it’s a backlash to postmodernism. I can see the point. I can see why ye olde black lesbian wants to assert black lesbianism—for all sorts of political reasons. But I think that you have to be really careful that when you’re asserting identity you’re only asserting in a certain time and place, and that you don’t make an absolute. And writing, novel writing, just isn’t about that. It can be for a moment. If you’re going to just write about yourself, you have to do what Emerson and Thoreau did, and go through the I to something else—something deeper. You have to end up somewhere that doesn’t just go “Today I went to the bathroom five times and ate an apple.” I think that my work is extremely difficult given this sign of the times because I don’t fit into any identity. I can’t be marketed as gay, I don’t even look good in the feminist sections, and yet I’m not ye olde straight novelist. There’s no way to categorize the writing.
BIOGRAPHIES
KATHY ACKER (1947–1997) was a novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright. Her novels include Pussy, King of the Pirates, and Blood and Guts in High School. Her work is closely associated with punk rock and experimental aesthetics. She died of cancer in 1997.
AMY SCHOLDER has been editing and publishing progressive and literary books for over two decades. Over the years, she has published the work of Sapphire, Karen Finley, June Jordan, Kate Bornstein, Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, Joni Mitchell, Kate Millett, Justin Vivian Bond, Ana Castillo, and many other award-winning authors. She serves as board president of Lambda Literary, and is producing the documentary feature Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen.
DOUGLAS A. MARTIN is a novelist, poet, and critic. Including early work, he is the author of nine books, most recently Acker. His first prose work, Outline of My Lover, was cited in the Times Literary Supplement as an “International Book of the Year” and adapted by The Forsythe Company into the multimedia performance and live film, Kammer/Kammer.
BARRY ALPERT is the author of The Poet in the Imaginary Museum. He edited the legendary literary-critical magazine Vort, which merited three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. His literary and art criticism have appeared in books published by Duke University Press, University of Maine Press/National Poetry Foundation, Four Seasons Foundation, O Books, Avenue B Press, and more. He lives precisely between Washington, DC, and Baltimore, MD.
R. J. ELLIS is currently a visiting professor of cultural history at the University of Chichester, UK. His books include editions of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig: or Sketches in the Life of a Free Black (with Henry Louis Gates); Charles Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream; Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and On the Streets of Athens (with Hugo Frey). He served as president of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers between 2012 and 2015.
DEAN KUIPERS is a writer on nature, politics, and culture. He is the author of the 2007 Michigan Notable Book, Burning Rainbow Farm, about the FBI shooting of two gay libertarian pot activists on a farm in Michigan, as well as I Am a Bullet with artist Doug Aitken. His forthcoming memoir The Persistence Hunter is about how a family hunting camp saved his relationship with his father. He was an editor at the Los Angeles Times and Spin. He lives in Los Angeles.
SYLVÈRE LOTRINGER, a cultural critic and the founder of Semiotext(e), is professor emeritus at Columbia University. He is widely credited for having introduced French Theory in America. He has written The Conspiracy of Art with Jean Baudrillard and Pure War with Paul Virilio. His latest book is Mad Like Artaud and his latest film is The Man Who Disappeared.
LISA PALAC is a psychotherapist specializing in sexuality and relationships. She lives in Los Angeles.
ANDREA JUNO is the founder and editor of Re/Search Publications and Juno Books.
BETH JACKSON is a curator and critical writer on contemporary art, based in Brisbane, Australia. Through her consultancy practice Artfully, she curates and manages public art commissions and develops policy and planning frameworks for private developments and local governments. Beth has curated numerous exhibitions for the gallery sector, reflecting her abiding interests in feminism and environmental concerns.
THE SPICE GIRLS are an English pop girl group formed in 1994. The group originally consisted of Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm, Emma Bunton, Geri Halliwell, and Victoria Beckham, née Adams.
LAURENCE A. RICKELS is the author of many books, including Aberrations of Mourning, The Case of California, Nazi Psychoanalysis, The Vampire Lectures, The Devil Notebooks, Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema, I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick, SPECTRE, Germany: A Science Fiction, and The Psycho Records. After thirty years teaching at the University of California, in 2011 Rickels accepted the professorship in art and theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe as successor to Klaus Theweleit, in Saas Fee, Switzerland. He holds the Sigmund Freud Chair at European Graduate School.
KASIA BODDY teaches American literature at Cambridge University. Her books include Boxing: A Cultural History, The American Short Story Since 1950, The New Penguin Book of American Short Stories, and Geranium.
THE LAST INTERVIEW SERIES
KURT VONNEGUT: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”
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LEARNING TO LIVE FINALLY: THE LAST INTERVIEW JACQUES DERRIDA
“I am at war with myself, it’s true, you couldn’t possibly know to what extent…I say co
ntradictory things that are, we might say, in real tension; they are what construct me, make me live, and will make me die.”
translated by PASCAL-ANNE BRAULT and MICHAEL NAAS
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978-1-61219-094-5
ebook: 978-1-61219-032-7
ROBERTO BOLAÑO: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“Posthumous: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that’s what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage.”
translated by SYBIL PEREZ and others
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978-1-61219-095-2
ebook: 978-1-61219-033-4
JORGE LUIS BORGES: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“Believe me: the benefits of blindness have been greatly exaggerated. If I could see, I would never leave the house, I’d stay indoors reading the many books that surround me.”
translated by KIT MAUDE
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978-1-61219-204-8
ebook: 978-1-61219-205-5
HANNAH ARENDT: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“There are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.”
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978-1-61219-311-3
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RAY BRADBURY: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“You don’t have to destroy books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
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978-1-61219-421-9
ebook: 978-1-61219-422-6
JAMES BALDWIN: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“You don’t realize that you’re intelligent until it gets you into trouble.”
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978-1-61219-400-4
ebook: 978-1-61219-401-1
GABRIEL GÁRCIA MÁRQUEZ: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“The only thing the Nobel Prize is good for is not having to wait in line.”
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978-1-61219-480-6
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LOU REED: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“Hubert Selby. William Burroughs. Allen Ginsberg. Delmore Schwartz…I thought if you could do what those writers did and put it to drums and guitar, you’d have the greatest thing on earth.”
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978-1-61219-478-3
ebook: 978-1-61219-479-0
ERNEST HEMINGWAY: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.”
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978-1-61219-522-3
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PHILIP K. DICK: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order?”
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978-1-61219-526-1
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NORA EPHRON: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“You better make them care about what you think. It had better be quirky or perverse or thoughtful enough so that you hit some chord in them. Otherwise, it doesn’t work.”
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978-1-61219-524-7
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JANE JACOBS: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“I would like it to be understood that all our human economic achievements have been done by ordinary people, not by exceptionally educated people, or by elites, or by supernatural forces.”
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978-1-61219-534-6
ebook: 978-1-61219-535-3
DAVID BOWIE: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“I have no time for glamour. It seems a ridiculous thing to strive for…A clean pair of shoes should serve quite well.”
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MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“Inustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
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978-1-61219-616-9
ebook: 978-1-61219-617-6
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“If someone says I’m doing this out of faith, I say, Why don’t you do it out of conviction?”
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978-1-61219-672-5
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HUNTER S. THOMPSON: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“I feel in the mood to write a long weird story—a tale so strange and terrible that it will change the brain of the normal reader forever.”
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978-1-61219-693-0
ebook: 978-1-61219-694-7
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS
“I’m a typical American. Half of me is dying to give myself away, and the other half is continually rebelling.”
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978-1-61219-741-8
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