Very Into You: Chris Kraus Preps Believers for Kathy Acker's Emails with MacKenzie Wark at the Dawn of the Internet Era

Holy Moley, there's a new book on the horizon edited by Matias Viegener that includes the tre romantique emails of new media theorist MacKenzie Wark and Kathy Acker. Chris Kraus maps it out for us, at The Believer:

Throughout her career, Acker spoke often about her discovery of appropriation through her studies with the poet David Antin (husband of Eleanor) at UC San Diego, and the early influence of Charles Olson and other Black Mountain poets. She described this as a crisis of voice. As she’d tell Larry McCaffery, “The problem was, I couldn’t find my own voice. I didn’t have a voice, as far as I could tell… what I was trying to do in Tarantula was to see if, rather than trying to integrate the ‘I’, if you could dis- integrate it and find a more comfortable way of being.”

As Gary Indiana describes her work: “Her first writings—quirky, stream-of-consciousness, deceptively confessional—are whimsically strewn with pornography, violence, black humour and incongruous cultural references…. She routinely dropped into her writing records of the things she’d done or talked about or overheard during the day, mixing them up with send-ups of classical texts and mythological references to create droll, disorienting collages. Reading this early work was like being stoned in a taxi speeding through an unfamiliar city.” Like the Oulipian novelist Georges Perec, Acker is never merely a formalist. Both writers devised intricate textual structures to contain an excess of feeling. Acker’s compositional strategies enact a more intimate space between writer and reader than most conventional narratives do, because they’re so consciously, willfully performed for an audience. [...]

“We’re all the same, don’t you think?” the artist Martha Rosler remarked. We were talking about Acker, whom she’d known well in San Diego during the early 1970s. “Of course we’re competitive. But that also means we can identify with her. I could’ve been Kathy; Kathy could’ve been me. I don’t know. I could’ve been you; you could’ve been me. We all could’ve been Eleanor Antin. It’s all the same. And by that I don’t mean we’re not who we are. But you know what I mean.”

Read Chris Kraus's assessment in its entirety at The Believer.