I'm very into you
EXCERPT FROM FOREWORD
by John Kinsella
Hi, K
I have abandoned my somewhat academic introduction to the letters volume, and have decided an email (Acker: ‘this isn’t a very academic email’) that can be used as an intro or an afterword (if you wish) will serve better, and be more honest to the presentation or maybe even manifestation of the e-pistolary exchange between you and Kathy Acker. Below, you will find many convention-breakers, including a wild use of parenthesis, and the address (to you?) will be unstable (how else can it be…so?) but how does Acker put it? ‘My parentheses have gone to hell.’…remember, that was from riding her motorbike for hundreds of miles, and mine are because I’ve been wandering around in the bush under the wheatbelt sun!
Rereading I came across this from Acker: ‘I’m sorry, Ken; do be my friend.’ I understand this. I am pretty sure I know what she means outside of the platitudinous. That is, she really does want a friend. Not friends, she has them, but a particular friend. Maybe she has many particular friends, but not this particular one. Is this the key to unlock your exchange? Your almost-love letters of cultural slippage and affirmation? A deep desire to connect: aerially, rhizomically, physically, textually.
I know you reasonably well (or did) in some ways, and in other ways, not at all. I recall, when I first met you, saying, ‘I’m not much of a blokey bloke’, and you understood. Do you recall? Then later we interviewed each other about space, wastage, masculinity, travel, and non-belonging. I never met Kathy Acker in the flesh, but felt I knew her (as you’ll see in what’s to come I feel there’s a knowing through text: dangerous as that is!), but was really (really) into her work during the ’80s. People used to introduce themselves with, Hey, I heard you are into Acker, so am I. Then it faded from view for me, until I re-engaged with it via Pussy, King of the Pirates and In Memoriam to Identity. And that has faded a little, though my first encounters never truly will: Blood and Guts and Kathy Goes to Haiti: I wrote a poem about that and wanted to send it to her but had no idea how. I was young then, very young. Now, as you remind me, we’ve done the watershed fifty-thing (me only just, you a couple of years ago) and Acker is long dead. After she died, you wrote a piece for me at my request (for a journal I was editing). I quote it here:
‘Escape from the functionaries of language—that is how she understood the
literature of the avant garde. One day she will be recognised as a marvellous addition
to the escape routes it pioneered. Her writing didn’t owe much to Woolf or Stein, but
like them, she wrote as a woman, inventing what that might be as she went along.
Being Kathy Acker was, I suspect, not an easy thing. Like Burroughs, she discovered
that when you set writing free, you become even more aware of every little subtle
fascism at work in the world. Like Burroughs, she was a visionary writer. Her early
books describe the nightmare to come. But they also chart the routes out of the
nightmare.’
(‘The Sailor Turned into the Sea’ by McKenzie Wark)
I'm very into you
EXCERPT FROM INTRODUCTION
by Matias Viegener
Portisheadspace by Matias Viegener
Here before you is the surviving correspondence between Kathy Acker and MacKenzie Wark. These emails were hastily written, casual and often indirect; they crossed “in the mail” and both the sequence and references may confuse the reader. The authors barely knew each other, the correspondence lasts a little over two weeks, and their relationship lasted only a few weeks beyond the last of the letters. You might ask why publish them at all, and so did I, but only after a novelist Ken Wark and I (and Kathy Acker) held in great esteem turned down our request for a preface. Initially very enthusiastic, on closer reading the novelist found the letters too personal. In declining, the novelist said it felt too much like rooting around in someone’s underwear drawer.
Is this a terrible mistake? I pulled back to reconsider. I reread everything. The letters are personal, but they tell us only a little about the author’s lives. Many of the things they reveal you can easily find in these writers’ published works. They gossip a little about their friends, some famous and some not, but all of them interesting. Most of the content rests on what they are thinking about rather than how they feel, on their questions for each other, and on what they are reading, rather than what other people have said or done. In part the letters read like bibliographies or indexes, chock full of cultural referents that map the corresondants within their literary, critical and pop cultural eras. They talk a lot about sex, about gender roles, about drag unveiled and re-ironized for familiar purpose: to flirt.
These letters mark the passage of two people in a brief moment in time. If you wanted to know how brainy nerds of a certain period fall into courtship, this is your book. Ken Wark and Kathy Acker met in Sydney in July of 1995 and this is the email exchange that followed. To call them love letters would exaggerate their tenor and consequence, but there is an irresistible tug of seduction in them. Not love letters, but certainly letters of intention: the narrative advances indirectly, thrusts and parries, messages get confused and reach an impasse. This is only broken when Acker finally confesses she’s “very into” Ken Wark. If paper letters were best suited for love, perhaps email does best with crushes. What you have before you is not the artifact of an affair, but of a seduction. Of what happens after the letters end, perhaps Ken Wark will speak if he chooses. Suffice it to say here that they saw each other a few more times but that other things intervened, and that two long years later Kathy Acker was dead from cancer.
Lest you think this is a record of Kathy Acker’s last stab at love, it isn’t. That happens a year later, though it left fewer remnants. Sexual desire, seduction and romantic obsessions are at the core of many of Acker’s texts, just as they formed a through-line in her life. She filtered her daily life throughout her manuscripts. This wasn’t ancillary to her work; it was at its core.
I call up D in Los Angeles do you want to sleep with me with me when and where there why don’t you spend a few days with me I’ll call you tomorrow. No call three days later I’m maniacal I have to see D I don’t know him hello I’ve got a ride to Los Angeles lie I’m not sure I know where we can stay should I not come up come up. We don’t touch talk about anything personal until we get to motel never talk about anything personal spend night together I have to be at Irvine in the morning I’m busy call me Friday. Do you want me to call you yes. I call Friday call Saturday Sunday this is Kathy O uh do you want to spend a night with me again are you too busy uh goodbye have a good time in New York uh goodbye. [The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, in Portrait of an Eye, New York, Pantheon, 1992, p.4.]
Two paragraphs past the opening of Black Tarantula, Acker bursts through the appropriated narrative of the murderess Charlotte Wood by appropriating her own found material, and of course, her lover’s. It’s an early instance linking the power of plagiarism and the force of transgression in her work. This mining of autobiographical information persisted throughout her life, and led many readers to irrepressible ideas about who she was or what she wanted. Early in her career, Acker not only didn’t discourage this, but actively deployed both her life and her body in a sort of performative persona. This persona succeeded rather well in attracting readers, but also generated a set of problems in strangers who confused the persona with Kathy herself. This often annoyed her, because it became most acute when she was interested in a lover.
I'm very into you
EXCERPT
Correspondence between
Kathy Acker & McKenzie Wark