A Conversation with Kathy Acker

Ellen G. Friedman

Gramercy P ark Hotel, New York

1 February 1988

ELLEN G. FRIEDMAN: I'd like to begin with your novel Dox Quixote.
epigraph to Part II of Don Quixote reads, "Being dead, Don Quixote
no longer speak. Being born into and part of a male world, she had no
of her own. All she could do was read male texts which weren't her
your parodies and plagiaristic writing, are you that Don Quixote
male texts?
KATHY ACKER: There's a certain amount of ironic distance between
and Don Quixote, a distance that varies, but at that point in the text, r d
yeah, I am.
EGF: In "reading" Don Quixote-you're a woman reading
Quixote. Is it a way of appropriating the language for women?
KA: Not really. I had the actual copy of Don Quixote, and as a ki
joke, simply made the change from male to female to see what
happen. I don't think there was much more behind it than this direc
simple move. Whenever I use "I," I am and I am not that "I." It's a lit
like the theater: I'm an actress and that's the role I'm taking on.
EGF: There's a great deal of overt feminism in your work. You do
priate a lot of male texts and that's an issue in your work. I'd like )
comment on that aspect of your work.
KA: When I did Don Quixote, what I really wanted to do was a
Levine painting. I'm fascinated by Sherrie's work.
EGF: What fascinated you about Sherrie's work?
KA: What I was interested in was what happens when you just
something, without any reason-not that there's no theoreticaljustific
for what Sherrie does-but it was the simple fact of copying that fasci
me. I wanted to see whether I could do something similar with prose. I
to plagiarism from another point of view, from exploring schizophrenia
identity, and I wanted to see what pure plagiarism would look like,
because I didn't understand my fascination with it. I picked Don
a subject really by chance. I think it was a bit incidental, perhaps "V"
I ' ''. • ",.
incidental, that it was a male text. When I grew up I went to an all­
school. By the time I first heard of feminism, I was in college. I never
 Ellen G. Friedman 13

thought about feminism uatil I got older and realized that the society was
deeply sexist. I don't consciously write as a feminist, although there are a
tew places in Don Quixote where I was dealing with Andrea Dworkin.
There is an attack on Andrea Dworkin in Don Quixote, not her personally
in fact I saw her on a TV show and quite admired how she stood up for
°eminism), but on her dualistic argument that men are responsible for all the
evil in the world. Her views go beyond sexism. She blames the act of
penetration in sexual intercourse. I find that not only mad but dangerous.
With all the problems in the world, such a view doesn't do feminism any
_ood. But as a rule I haven't thought, "I am a woman, a feminist, and I'm
going to appropriate a male text." What happens is that I frame my work
ay after I write it. The epigraph you quoted at the beginning comes out of
my asking, "Why did I write all of these texts?" In fact, I wrote the second
part of Don Quixote first by rewriting texts, out of a Sherrie Levine-type
Impulse. Then I wrote the first and third parts later. The Lulu segment had
een commissioned by Pete Brooks as a play. And I think I did the Leopardi
part early on as well. Then I actually had an abortion. While I was waiting
to have the abortion, I was reading Don Quixote. Because I couldn't think, I
. ust started copying Don Quixote. Then I had all these pieces and I thought
about how they fit together. I realized that Don Quixote, more than any of
my other books, is about appropriating male texts and that the middle part
)f Don Quixote is very much about trying to find your voice as a woman. So
whatever feminism is there is almost an afterthought, which does not inval­
Idate the feminism in any way. I don't say, "I'm a feminist," therefore I'm
�oing to do such and such. A complaint people have had about my work is
that I'm not working from a moralistic or ideological tradition. I take
materials and only at the end do I find out what's going on in my writing. For
Instance, while writing it, I never considered that Blood and Guts in High
School is especially antimale, but people have been very upset about it on
that ground. When I wrote it I think it was in my mind to do a traditional
narrative. I thought it was kind of sweet at the time, but of course it's not.
EGF: Sweet is not an adjective I would use to describe' it.
KA: It's about kids and kids are sweet. I was really in kidtime when I
wrote that. So that's a very roundabout way of answering your question.
EGF: What about the schizophrenia and plagiarism. You said that was
your original way into plagiarism.
KA: When I first started writing, I was influenced by poetry, mainly the
Black Mountain school of poetry, so there's a bit of poetry in that book. I
was searching for my own medium. The middle section of the book inter­
ested me more than the other sections because I was working in a sex show,
and this middle section was based on sex shows, diaries of sex shows. I was
very influenced by Burroughs, so I was really writing out of a kind of "third
mind" -through Burroughs and the sex show diaries. It was during the
hippie days when sex was fun, when everybody slept with everyone else. I
14 Ellen G. Friedman

had another-point of view, having seen it from the 42nd Street angle. I
became politicized.
EGF: You say Burroughs was an influence on you.
KA: Oh, he was my first major influence.
EGF: Can you say what in Burroughs you admire or took?
KA: I came out of a poetry world. My education was Black Mountai
school-Charles Olson, Jerry Rothenberg, and David Antin were m.
teachers. But I didn't want to write poetry. I wanted to write prose and there.:
weren't many prose writers around who were using the ways of working \
poets I was influenced by. Their concerns certainly weren't narrative in an.
way. Any prose writer, even if he doesn't use narrative the way narrative
traditionally used, is concerned with narrative. I mean the reader has to g
from A to Z and it's going to take a long time and that's narrative. There's
way to get around it; that's the form.
EGF: So Burroughs seemed a natural?
KA: There were Burroughs and Kerouac really. I love to read Keroua
but Burroughs is the more intellectual. He was considering how language
used and abused within a political context. That's what interested me. T
stuff about his relation to women and all that was really secondary for me
the main work, books like The Third Mind. I was also looking for a wa)
integrate both sides of my life. I was connected to the St. Marks poet.
people at the time. On the one hand, there were the poetry people, who wer
basically upper-middle-class, and on the other, there was the 42nd Stre
crowd. I wanted to join the two parts of my life, though they seemed ve .
unjoinable. As if I were split. Of course, the links were political.
EGF: There were political links between the two?
KA: A political context was the only way to talk about the link betwee.:
them. Politics was the cause of the divergence. It was a question of class a
also of sexism. The poetry world at that time denied any of this. Sexi
wasn't an issue, class, forget it. Money-we're all starving hippies-ha. h
That I worked in a sex show for money was not acceptable at all, despite t
free love rhetoric. Warhol was interested in this convergence as well. I kne.:
Warhol people who worked on 42nd Street, and his was the only group th
did any crossover. He was interested in sex hype, transsexuals, strippe
and so forth.
EGF: What attracted you to 42nd Street? Was it the political aspe
you've been talking about?
KA: Oh, no. I just needed money. I had gotten out of university and I h
nowhere to go.
EGF: Where did you study?
KA: At Brandeis, at UCSD, and a little bit at CCNY and NYU.
EGF: We were talking about your early work.
KA: The first work I really showed anyone is The Childlike Life of:
Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula.
 Ellen G. Friedman 15

EGF: What aboJlt the schizophrenia?

KA: The thing about schizophrenia: I used a lot of autobiographical
material in Black Tarantula. I put autobiographical material next to
material that couldn't be autobiographical. The major theme was identity,
the theme I used from Tarantula through Toulouse [The Adult Life of
Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec], the end of the trilogy. After
that, I lost interest in the problem of identity. The problem had for me in a
sense been solved by that trilogy. After that I became interested in plagia­
rism, working with other texts.
EGF: What comprises the trilogy?
KA: The Childlike Life ofthe Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula,
I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac, and Toulouse Lautrec.
EGF: And this trilogy was about identity? In Tarantula there's a
constant metamorphosing "I." It's a very unstable "I."
KA: Well, it's a very simple experiment in Tarantula. When one first
encounters the "I" in Tarantula, it's the autobiographical "I." Then the
··1" takes on other, non-autobiographical qualities and gradually the
invisible parentheses around the "I" dissolve and the experiment in identity
proceeds from that. In Nymphomaniac, I suddenly realized that I wasn't
even thinking about how language works. So I began to explore language-
ow language works within the parameters of a particular problem. I began
·0 work with memory and with repetition. How does the reader remember,
'r what does the reader remember when you repeat something over and
>ver again? How do language and memory work even in the most well­
�onstructed, logical texts?
EGF: Do you know that Books in Print lists your books twice? It lists
Black Tarantula by an author called Black Tarantula and then has a listing
'r Black Tarantula by Kathy Acker. The same with Toulouse.
KA: In those days, we did a lot with performance. We performed for each
her. This was in the same vein. I put Black Tarantula in the phone book.
luch of women's art had to do with performance and identity. At art
arties at the time, there was a lot of crossdressing, playing with gender and
Ith identity.
EGF: Let's get back to Don Quixote. You know, of course, that Borges
o has his Don Quixote story. Were you playing with both Cervantes and
rges?
KA: Not really. I reread Borges's story somewhat toward the end of
-iting my Don Quixote.
EGF: Here's a quote from Don Quixote having to do with semiotics:
'lhat it really did was give me a language with which I could speak about
. work. Before that I had no way of discussing what I did, of course I did it,
d my friends who were doing similar work we had no way of talking to
�h other" (54). Was there an element of truth in that statement?
, A: I felt very isolated as part of the art world; I could never talk about
16 Ellen G. Friedman

my work until the punk -movement came along and then I don't know for
what reason or what magic thing happened, but suddenly everyone started
working together along the same lines. But we had no way of explaining
what we were doing to each other. We were fascinated with Pasolini's and
Bataille's work, but there was no way of saying why or how. So Sylvere
Lotringer came to New York. His main teachers were Felix Guattari and
Gilles Deleuze and somewhat Foucault. That's why I didn't want to use the
word " semiotics" because it's slightly inaccurate. He was looking in New
York for the equivalent of that scene, which wasn't quite Derrida's scene.
What he picked on was the art world, especially our group, which was a kind
of punk offshoot.
EGF: Who was in your group?
KA: Well, there were my friends Betsy Sussler who now does Bomb.
Michael McClark, Robin Winters, Seth Tillett. People who started the
Mud Club. Bands were forming, such as X, Mars, and the Erasers. Band
with ties to Richard Held, Lydia Lunch. Very much the Contortions. It wa
that amalgam of people he found. Sy Ivere started hanging out at our partie
I knew nothing about Foucault and Baudrillard. He's the one that introduced
me to them, introduced everyone to them. But it wasn't from an academi
point of view, and it certainly wasn't from a Lacanian point of view or eye
from Derrida. It was much more political. When he did the Italian versi
of Semiotext(e). there were very close ties with the Autonomia, and it \\

very political. When I went over to F rance, friends of mine were working
the Change. There were connections with Bifo and Radio Alice. For t
first time we had a way of talking about what we were doing. It was main
-for me-about decentralization, and in Don Quixote I worked \\ I

theories of decentralization.
EGF: Empire ofthe Senseless seems to indicate a new direction for)l
For instance, the plagiarism is not so apparent.
KA: Empire is a new direction, but I did use a number of other texts
write it, though the plagiarism is much more covered, hidden. Almost all t
book is taken from other texts.
EGF: What other texts?
KA: I've used tons of other texts-sometimes it's just a phrase. Y
know I've gotten very good at it. There's a lot of Genet for instance.
beginning is based on Neuromancer, a book by William Gibson. But
page to page, I've adapted a lot of other texts. I couldn't even say exa�
The "first part is based on the oedipal complex and of course, there's a 1
Freud in it. At first, I was going to name everyone after Freud's patients.
I didn't do that for all the characters. The first chapter is, on the whole.
Sade because I thought if anyone has to find the oedipal society, it's de
He was quite a brilliant man in that as he personified evil, he was at the
time reflecting what was going on in society. The first chapter of Pan I I
about the Haitian revolution and about voodoo, and then there's A ThoLl
 Ellen G. Friedman 17

and One Nights and there's some Genet. The reason for these particular
texts is that I try to fmd writers who describe the particular place I want to
get to. The third part of Empire is Huckleberry Finn. That's one of the
primary American texts about freedom and about how you live free in a
-ociety that isn't.
EGF: What is the new direction you've taken with Empire?
KA: The search for a myth to live by. The purpose is constructive rather
than deconstructive as in Don Quixote. What I particularly like about
Empire of the Senseless is the characters are alive. For instance, in Blood
and Guts, Janey Smith was a more cardboard figure. But I could sit down
and have a meal with Abhor. However, it was the structure that really
interested me-the three-part structure. The first part is an elegy for the
world of patriarchy. I wanted to take the patriarchy and kill the father on
every level. And I did that partially by finding out what was taboo and
rendering it in words. The second part of the book concerns what society
would look like if it weren't defined by oedipal considerations and the
taboos were no longer taboo. I went through every taboo, or tried to, to see
what society would be like without these taboos. Unfortunately, the CIA
intervenes; I couldn't get there. I wanted to get there but I couldn't. The last
ection, " Pirate Night," is about wanting to get to a society that is taboo, but
realizing that it's impossible. The CIA is symbolic.
EGF: The CIA is symbolic of what?
KA: That you can't isolate yourself from the world. Two examples: Say,
the hippie movement in which the goal was that you make things better by
isolating yourself from society and going your own way. The same sort of
thing with the separatist feminists. You form your own group. In the end you
pull things that way a little, but it can't work successfully. Neither one is in
any way a viable model of true separation. It's impossible. In the same way
you try to imagine or construct a society that wasn't constructed according
to the myth of the central phallus. It's just not possible when you live in this
world. That's what I wanted to do in the second section of Empire, but the
CIA kept coming in. That's what I mean by the CIA being symbolic. It
could have been anybody. So I ended up with "Pirate Night." You can't get
to a place, to a society, that isn't constructed according to the phallus.
You're stuck with a lot of loneliness, so how do you deal with that isolation
and loneliness? The third part concerns that issue. Also I'm looking for a
myth. I'm looking for it where no one else is looking. That's why I'm so
interested in Pasolini.
EGF: The myth never surfaces?
KA: The myth to me is pirates.
EGF: Pirates is the myth?
KA: Yes. It's like the tattoo. The most positive thing in the book is the
tattoo. It concerns taking over, doing your own sign-making. In England (I
don't know if it's so much true here), the tattoo is very much a sign of a
18 Ellen G. Friedman

certain class. and certain pt<ople, a part of society that sees itself as outcast,
and shows it. For me tattooing is very profound. The meeting of body and,
well, the spirit-it's a real kind of art, it's on the skin. It's both material and
not material and it's also a sign of the outcast. So that's what I'm saying
about looking for the myth with people like that-tattoo artists, sailors,
pirates.
EGF: They represent the outcasts?
KA: Not just outcasts-outcasts could be bums-but people who are
beginning to take their own sign-making into their own hands. They're
conscious of their own sign-making, signifying values really.
EGF: The wordplay in the book is quite wonderful, the relation between
"tattoo" and "taboo," for instance. That's one of the things I was going to
ask you about-tattooing. Is the tattooist an image of the writer?
KA: No, the tattooist is an image of the tattooist. I'm much more simple.
The tattooist is the tattooist. The tattooist is my tattooist. I'm heavily
tattooed.
EGF: But you were just talking about the tattooist as a sign-maker.
KA: Oh, the writer could do the same thing. I'm fascinated with the rela­
tionship between language and body. That's something not many people
have started working with. I'm interested in the material aspect of the tattoo.
I admire Pierre Guyotat because he's very much concerned with the body
as text. This business of "When I write I masturbate. " Erotic texts at their
best-I don't mean pornographic, which is something else-are very close
to the body; they're following desire. That's not always true of the writer,
whereas it's always true that the tattooist has to follow the body. That's the
medium of the tattoo. If you're looking for values, it's where the ground
would be for real value. Whereas the ground for the values we have now,
such as religion, there's no reality to it, especially the evangelical move­
ments, other than politics. It's now something very sick. I have that feeling
about the whole spectrum of what's going on in America, from malls to
religion, it's very sick. It's not real.
EGF: Why did you leave the United States?
KA: Not enough money.
EGF: You do better in London?
KA: It's better for a writer over there, for me. There I'm an accepted
writer. Here it was very difficult; I was sort of an adjunct to the art world. I
really wanted to get out of New York. I'm forty now. I was thirty-seven
when I got out of New York. I was feeling that my life was never going to
change. To survive in New York is to be a little like those hamsters on a
wheel, the wheel turns faster and faster. I felt that either I had to get very
famous, just as a calling card for survival-I had to write movie scripts, I
had to do whatever writers do here, write for popular magazines-or else
become like a lot of poets I know who are very bitter about their poverty.
And I don't want either alternative. What I like is the middle ground. And I
 Ellen G. Friedman 19

didn't see it pos�ible to maintain that middle ground.

EGF: And it is possible in London?
KA: Yes, very much: It's a very literary society and you don't want for
money, so you can work.
EGF: Do you have a community of writers whose style of writing is
closer to yours than here in America?
KA: No, I'm probably closer to people here. I have very good friends in
London, but the people I'm closest to are people here.
EGF: Are there any contemporary writers whose work you're following?
KA: Oh, I have friends who are wonderful writers, Lynne Tillman and
Catherine Texier-very much I'm following their careers. I was just sent a
novel by Sara Schulman called After Dolores, which isjust lovely. But what
vould be the feminist writers in England don't interest me that much.
EGF: Too ideological?
KA: No, it's not too ideological; I don't mind that. It's just social realists.
It"s too much, "I used to be in a bad nuclear marriage and now I'm a happy
esbian." It's diary stuff and the diary doesn't go anywhere, and there's not
nough work with language.
EGF: I understand.
KA: I'm more interested in the European novel now. Pierre Guyotat.
Duras's work interests me. Some of Violet Leduc, early Monique Wittig.
orne of de Beauvoir's writing, Nathalie Sarraute. There is Elsa Morante's
riting. Luisa Valenzuela, I like her work. Laure, an amazing woman, a
French woman from the upper classes who lived with Georges Bataille.
Wonderful writer.
EGF: In Pasolini there are letters from Emily to Charlotte. Why the
Brontes?
KA: Because they were Catholic.
EGF: Because they were Catholic?
KA: Well, anything Catholic was the point. You see, I was setting up the
ext so that all the connections were based on nominalism. So about
Pasolini's childhoood, the son/sun pun became important, anything that
ad to do with the son, the son is Catholic, Pasolini was Catholic.
EGF: That's fascinating. Can you talk a little more about that?
KA: The book's structured that way. I think it's probably unreadable, but
fascinated me to write it.
EGF: No, not at all. It's one of my favorites.
KA: The idea fascinated me. I'll never do it again. It's as far into structure
I'll ever go. I wanted to fashion a book out of different ways of ordering
at weren't causal. Again, I was fighting against oedipal structuring. The
rst part of the book is about the death and the second about the life of
Pasolini. So there were two sections to death and life: In "Death" I was
°ascinated by his murder and also by the media around his murder. In the
edia, the idea advanced was "pornmaker, homosexual" murdered in
20 Ellen G. Friedman

gory, homosexual murder. Everything was covered over at the trial. I

fascinated with why the media sensationalized it, what they were getting
of it. I always wanted to write a crummy crime book. It started out that"
I was going to write an Agatha Christie version of Pasolini's murder.
EGF: An Agatha Christie version?
KA: It just slarted out that way.
EGF: It's far from Agatha Christie, though.
KA: The first books I ever read came from my mother's collection.
mother had porn books and Agatha Christie, so when I was six years old.
hide the porn books between the covers of Agatha Christie. They are
favorite models, the books I read as a kid. That's why I originally beca
writer-to write Agatha Christie-type books, but my mind is fucked u

was going to write the Agatha Christie version of Pasolini's death. B

didn't turn out as planned. I picked three ways of solving the murde
wanted a non-political way of solving it. So I picked three categorie :
language, and violence. They had to be three appropriate categories.
way of solving it was by way of nominalism. Once I had the
anything went. Once I had the category sex, anything went that was
sex. Language was any language experiment, so I played with
school theory. In the end I wasn't so much interested in solving his dea
I was interested in his life. As I got into solving his murder, I didn't
how he died, so much was covered over. What I did learn was how
leveled he was. He was a man whose life was his work. He would al
.
make the material of the body his subject. He never allowed people to
the body. He didn't exploit the body as many thought. As I became
and more involved in his work, the "My life" section of my novel be
more important. The influence of Pasolini's theories on my work is pa
larly important. He refused to separate genres-film, poetry, criticism
refused to separate body and mind. When he was an old man he dem
that a series of pornographic pictures be taken of him.
EGF: Who's your ideal reader? Do you like academic readers?
KA: I don't imagine an ideal reader. I write for myself and maybe
friends. Although as I give readings more and more, I try and see wh
the audience is bored. So in that way I'm aware of an audience. There ha
be that element of entertainment, really, or there's limited accessibility.
do care about my readers in that way. Academics-I feel a confusion
academia.
EGF: You've come out of the academy?
KA: I absolutely hate it. I've seen too many English departments de
people's delight in reading. Once something becomes academic it's
on this level-take the case of semiotics and postmodernism. When I
first introduced to the work of F oucault and Deleuze, it was very politi
was about what was happening to the economy and about changing
political system. By the time it was taken up by the American
 Ellen G. Friedman 21

the politics had gone to hell. It became an exercise for some professors to
make their careers. You know, it's just more of the same: the culture is there
o uphold the postcapitalist society, and the idea that art has nothing to do
with politics is a wonderful construction in order to mask the deep political
ignificance that art has-to uphold the empire in terms of its representation
as well as its actual structure.
EGF: What do you mean "in terms of its representation"?
KA: In England, for instance, they don't have an empire anymore though
they refuse to recognize that fact. What they have is Milton and Shakespeare.
Their attitude toward Milton and Shakespeare is something absolutely
incredible. A person's speech denotes his class. Those who can speak
. lilton and Shakespeare are in the top class. It goes much deeper than this,
bviously. The literary world should be a populist world, it should be the
world in which any class can discuss itself. But in England, the literary
world is so tightly bound to the Oxford-Cambridge system. Nobody but
nobody gets into that world who hasn't come from Oxbridge. It assures that
I representation of itself always comes from its upper class. And those
lasses which are not Oxbridge have no representation of themselves
except in fashion and rock and roll. So you really have two Englands: one
represented by fashion and rock and roll, and one is the literary repre­
ntation.
EGF: That's very true for England, but not so much for the U.S.
KA: No, but I still think there's an element of it here.
EGF: Fostered by the academy?
KA: Yes.
EGF: So when you get a book that's experimental or postmodernist . . .
KA: I think that sometimes the word "experimental" has been used to
ide the political radicalness of some writers. Oh, they're "experimental,"
that means they're not really important.
EGF: They're marginal?
KA: What this society does is marginalize artists. "Oh, artists, they have
nothing to do with politics." So the experimental-it's a way of saying
things. I hate this way of saying things. I want to say "fuck, shit, prick."
That's my way of talking, that's my way of saying "I hate you." But what
they're doing is marginalizing the experimental and that's why I hate the
v.ord "experimental." It's another form of sticking people into the corner.
EGF: You grew up in New York?
KA: Yes.
EGF: Manhattan?
KA: Yes, 57th Street and First Avenue.
EGF: Ever married?
KA: Married twice. The second marriage ended ten years ago.
EGF: What hasn't been noticed about your work?
KA: Well, I'll use the word "experimentalism," my work with language
22 Ellen G. Friedman

and postmodemism-tha.t's been noticed about my work-it's been noticed

quite a bit now. Feminists hate me. Well, that's not true anymore. Ten year
ago, I was damned by them. But even in England, they are finding some·
thing to like in my work.
EGF: Here in America you've certainly been praised by feminists.
KA: In England the complaint is that I'm a "bad" writer. The sex is OK
but they mind my coming out against the literary culture.
EGF: Are you a bad writer purposefully?
KA: Yes, sure-"piss, fuck, shit" scrawled over a page-sure, of cour
This appalls the literary establishment. When I appeared on a rad
program, the announcer said, "We now have Kathy Acker, the author
Blood and Guts. She's the most evil person in the world."
EGF: That really happened?
KA: Sure, that happened, though it's hard to believe. Another time, I
interviewed on radio by an upper-middle-class woman who said, "Wh.
..
you talk about poverty all the time?" and I said, "I've been very poor.
disparity between the classes is really pronounced in England, so
parade me as a freak, that's the role I play for them. Here, it's not a
EGF: What are you working on now?
KA: The book I'm working on now, a third of which is finished, is a It
·
Rimbaud. I chose Rimbaud because I wanted to remember who 11 1llJU,,,,,,"
me, to explore the history of the imagination, and of dreaming and
how art can matter politically in the society. For me, one lineage tha
come out of is that of Rimbaud. So to investigate Rimbaud is to go
the beginning for me. He saw myth as a way out of the mess I wa
about to you before.