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kathy acker, a conversation
ka: You said Haiti was a big break; the only time I’ve had a
big break—I can’t tell these things terribly well, but what I’m aware of, the only time that things have
radically changed for me as far as distribution and publicity is when I was first published in England.
It wasn’t the first time—but it was basically the first time. I thought it was another small press, art
press or whatever, and I didn’t know what Picadour was. Picadour was a very large press, and there was
a huge media thing that was going on. I came over there and I had lived in New York in the art world,
and I had no idea there was any content in my books. I mean, for me to make political jokes, who cared?
I was so immersed in the art world, it was just like a baby making stupid jokes. I never really thought
that I had any politics whatsoever, because the friends I grew up with in the university were very radical
and were part of the Weathermen or SDS or SIL or whatever, and I was al! ways on the periphery. So I always
thought I wasn’t very political at all, that there was no content in my books and I was just working structurally.
I never paid attention to anything else. Suddenly I got to England and I got off the plane and was immediately
taken to a radio show. Nobody said a word to me, it was LBC, Radio 3, which is the news program on the radio
in England. And before anyone said a word to me, they introduced me, “We now have Kathy Acker in the studio,
the most evil woman in the world.” I was like, what the hell? And finally I got this very proper looking
middle-aged woman to say why I was the most evil woman in the world, and it was because I wrote so much about poverty.
That was sort of an entrance into my realizing that I had to look at my content, that I had never looked at my content,
and why I wrote what I wrote.
acm: And up to then you had written
Blood and Guts in High School.
ka: Oh, I’d done
Blood and Guts, I’d done
Great Expectations,
I was in the middle of
Don Quixote when this happened. And it was the first time in my life I had to confront
that I was writing what I was writing. And it changed my writing quite a bit.
acm: That’s really astonishing. On one hand the question is how
it changed your writing, but on the other hand, as a reader, it’s almost unbelievable, you know. You’re obviously
a very smart person, and that you’re not aware at all…
ka: I didn’t want to be aware. Because it’s very dangerous to
be aware; what Eva Kurylik was saying tonight about the irresponsibility of the arts, etc. etc. In away one terribly
wants to be irresponsible because you don’t want to be bombastic, or write from the extrinsic point. You want to write
from the interior point. With writing students who were beginning to write, that’s what I do to free them. You give
them these silly rules and just give them games. It’s was the surrealists did.
acm: So the real deep stuff comes out when they’re not looking.
ka: The surrealists, obviously influenced by Freud, or André Breton, were
looking to get at what I guess we’d call [laughs] content, as opposed to deep structure. When they were looking to do
that they made up these silly games like “the exquisite corpse.” And the only point of the game is to divert what Burroughs
calls “that little bird mind back there,” to divert that extra little mind that Burroughs said is sitting at the hypothalamus.
To get you freed up, so you’re not noticing what you’re doing.
acm: I’ve been reading these things that you have said about your work, and I’ve
been really astonished that all you want to talk about is the system of this and thext and stuff like that. And I said to
myself, this is really surprising because I read the books, and I am moved by them. I care about them.
ka: Just don’t trust authors who play games so we can do what we have to do.
But it’s not just a game. [At first] I really didn’t understand, for instance, why I was slipping gender, why I was slipping
narrative. I had come out of Burroughs, but I wasn’t really writing like Burroughs. And my understanding of why I was writing
the way I was really came from reading, especially
Anti-Oedipus. Both
Anti-Oedipus and the works of Michel Foucault. So it was
reading theory that taught me—Well, it didn’t teach me how to write but it informed me why I was writing the way I was. So, it
gave me a way of going beyond what I was doing. Of proceeding. So, in one way it’s a way of diverting myself.
acm: They you have to find a way to make the work.
ka: And you do what you have to do. So, when someone asks you what you do, you
tell them what you do to make the work.
acm: Another thing that really has interested me is this matter of, what you call,
what I’ve seen you call plagiarism, and your use of other people’s work.
ka: [Laughs] Yeah. It’s not plagiarism—
acm: It’s never seemed to me that you plagiarize in any meaningful sense.
It’s a kind of joyful, loving, joining in to these other texts.
ka: I think I use the word “plagiarism” sort of—though I don’t write for shock value,
I often give interviews for shock value—
acm: [Laughs] We appreciate that.
ka: And I often say the word “plagiarism” to know that it’ll cause a little—it’s a way
of pricking people. What I do is I use other texts to spark my writing. It’s not plagiarism, because to plagiarize a text is to
represent somebody else’s text as your own. That’s the legal thing, which isn’t what I do. What I do is actually a gray area with the law. The law is never clear how you can use someone else’s text. What I do is play with texts, I change them, I use them. And the law isn’t clear about that. I guess the word is “appropriation.”
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