kathy acker

Kathy and I were friendly acquaintances. I had a very positive experience of Kathy. I was not her equal, I was much younger and respected her, I did not compete with her. She was very very generous to me. Our first contact came from her, she reviewed my novel AFTER DELORES in the Village Voice in 1988. There was nothing in it for her, believe me. I had no currency, no connections, I couldn't help her in any way. She just liked my book and she said so. After that, sometimes she would call when she was in NY and I would go over to the Gramercy. I went to her readings. When I came to San Francisco, she came to two of my readings and asked engaged questions during the post-reading discussion. I went to her house and looked at her massive library. She would read every book by an author. She had much more curiosity than most people. We talked about Norman Mailer. She took me to a lunch with Aline Mayer and Carolee Schneeman and Karen Finley. We went together to see a concert by Diamanda Galas. And we spoke on the phone a few days before she died. I said "what are you thinking?" and she said "get better, get better, get better."

Kathy and I talked quite a bit about The Diary of Anne Frank. Having been born in New York as a German Jew in 1948, Kathy grew up- as many of us did- with this paradigmatic document of the Jewish Woman Writer as moral visionary and martyr. It created the possibility that Jewish girls could be writers and also could be moral leaders. As long as the were murdered.

To be a German Jew is to feel entitled and endangered. She was born Kathy Alexander, the kind of German Jew that is known by real New Yorkers as "Our Crowd" - her family, the Alexanders, along with the Lehmans, Loebs, Ochs etc. were the best educated, wealthiest, and most sophisticated Jews in the world. It was at Brandeis, the Jewish university, that she studied Latin and Greek, found her Jewish husband, Bob Acker, dated John Landau (another wealthy German Jew who eventually produced the film Titanic), and her roommate was Tamar Deisendruck, another German Jew who became a respected composer. She came from a small ethnic group, German Jews, who were responsible for originating the most influential theories of the 20th century: Marxism, Psychoanalysis, The theory of relativity, holocaust theory, and post modernism.

What she had in common with the tradition of Benjamin, Ahrendt etc, was what Carla Harryman calls comprehensive knowledge. Kathy was a profound intellectual, able to produce work that incorporated so many different dimensions of thought, simultaneously, that it eclipsed the capacities of many people. She was able to fully comprehend the cultural product of the dominant culture and of the many margins. And herein lay her problem.

Emotionally Kathy was average. She had no family. She was an abandoned, traumatized person and did not have a noble emotionality. Artistically and intellectually, however, she was exceptional. Inherent in her supremacy was a certain kind of expectation. A complex one. On one hand, she knew realistically the great value and achievement of her work. She was clear and confident of the merit of her work. Her work was grappling with things that matter, both formally and in terms of content and perspective. There was a discovery in the writing, she was highly inventive, not derivative. She was very generous in that her work was emotionally honest and explicit. Because she understood the real value of what she was offering the reader, she expected a broad recognition and gratitude.

The problem is that most people are average - or, as Ahrendt would say – "banal". This included people who run universities, the publishing industry, and the rewards system in the arts. Most people look at something that is not familiar and think it is wrong. Very few people are able to look at an authentic discovery and be grateful. So, she was in the historically consistent but unbearable Jewish position of being an object of mockery or neglect because of her singularity. Because of her simultaneous outsider/insider perspective. This made her wrong and not good enough for the kind of social praise and support that her work merited. And of course she had to watch horribly mediocre people be repeatedly insanely rewarded for their useless and meaningless product. She took this personally.

Now on the other hand, like many many people in the avant garde and in the arts and publishing, she had inherited wealth. Not surprisingly the organic and primary impact of wealth on cultural production is never discussed. Just for the record, having someone else pay for your education, your home, your equipment, clothing, gym, whatever, separates one from the experiences of most people and creates a false and distorted sense of superiority. Regardless of knowledge, emotionally, people who are not the source of their own financial life, are both infantilized and tyrannical. They always seem to believe, on some level, that they deserve their advantage. That is a distortion. And in Kathy's case, her background and financial cushion gave her a sense of entitlement that was unreasonable.

So she ended up being very disappointed by the lack of public appreciation and the lack of establishment appreciation, this disappointment was partially legitimate and partially illegitimate. But I think that this first expectation, of having her work be seen for its true value, was THE PROBLEM of her work.

Let me read here from DON QUIXOTE - note the precision, explicitness, and clarity of feeling and idea. Notice the systematic Judaic way that she builds her argument.

DON QUIXOTE (excerpt)
When she was finally crazy because she was about to have an abortion, she conceived of the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to love. By loving someone other than herself. She would love another person. By loving another person, she would right every manner of political, social and individual wrong: she would put herself in those situations so perilous the glory of her name would resound. The abortion was about to take place "Why can’t I just love?" Because every verb to be realized needs it object.

Otherwise, having nothing to see, it can’t see itself or be. Since love is sympathy or communication, I need an object which is both subject and object: to love, I must love a soul. Can a soul exist without a body? Is physical separate from mental? Just as love's object is the appearance of love; so the physical realm is the appearance of the godly: the mind is the body. This, she thought is why I’ve got a body. This's why I'm having an abortion. So I can love. This’s how Don Quixote decided to save the world....

I think Prince should be president of the United States....It has been said that Prince presents nothing: he's dead, an image. But who do you think you are? Are you real? Such reality is false. You can only be who you’re taught and shown to be. Those who have and are showing you, most of the controllers, are shits. Despite that, how can you hate you or the image? How can you be who you're not and how can you not be? Prince accepts his falsity. We must be conscious in order to fight outside control. Make Prince, who may be conscious, the next president of the United States.

It is true that women are never men. Even a woman who has the soul of a pirate. Even freaks need homes, countries, language, communication. The only characteristic freaks share is our knowledge that we don’t fit in. Anywhere. It is for you, freaks my loves, I am writing and it is about you. Since humans enjoy moralizing over and over again they attack us. Language presupposes community. Therefore without you, nothing I say has any meaning.

Kathy believed, falsely, that there was this huge group of people out there, called readers or freaks, who would understand. And so that she was writing for them. But they aren't there. She elevated the reader - who is average - to her level, which was exceptional. What do people do who are average, when you pretend they are exceptional? They get very angry and feel inadequate. And when they have institutional power, they respond with neglect or derision. Avital Ronell talked about Kathy's contempt for universities. Well, most academics practice the evolution of one long slow idea. They're trained that way. Kathy thought multi-dimensionally. These were two antithetical systems. Her ideas cannot be proven, nor summed up. The publishing industry rewards breezy journalistic sentences about young white heterosexuals in love. Those stories they love have nothing to do with truth, but that's why they love them. They don't like people who say "Who do you think you are?" "Are you real?" They don't want to think about it, because they will feel inadequate. They want to be entertained.

I don't think that Kathy ever understood that. Deeply. I think it always hurt her that she didn't have as many equals as she needed. And that her superior mind and heart excluded her from relationships with people who lacked her capacity but had forgiving generous emotionality. For the most part. She had few friends, but they were mostly exceptionally gifted and kind. She simply couldn't get along with anyone who wasn't both. Less traumatized than she, but smart enough to understand. It was her superiority that kept her, ultimately, alone.