A sold-out affair at Bloomsbury’s prestigious London Review
bookshop, Kraus’ ode to the late, great Acker was welcomed to the shelf by
Juliet Jacques (author of Trans: a memoir)
and the novel’s author Chris Kraus (author also of I Love Dick, Aliens and Anorexia). The atmosphere was cosy, punters
nursing obligatory wine glasses in a sea of literary spectacles and polished
brogues. After Kathy Acker is what
Kraus champions as a “career biography” written posthumously from a limited
narrator as woman who moved in similar artistic circles during New York’s wild
70s/80s. Kraus marks Acker’s death as “radicalising” and speaks of her access
to Acker’s diaries shortly after her death and the question of when and whether
to write the biography. “If you wait 20 years it’s all very elegiac” she
asserts, striving for a “revisionist history of 80s New York”. Their stories
and circles are undoubtedly similar; sleeping with the same people (Sylvère Lotringer),
going to the same parties, breathing the same air. Whilst Kraus marks the scene
as “snobby” and “air-clad”, Acker’s work is also tinged with this sentiment of
claustrophobia and Kraus reads a short extract from her “Politics”; exploring
Acker’s relationship with writing, pornographic work, sexual politics and
familial estrangement. She speaks also of Acker’s “self-serving white lies”
which she employed throughout her career to “give her the legitimacy that she
deserved”. This invites a discussion of writing and the self (“a biography is a
hologram composed of fragments”) as well as Kraus admitting that contrary to
critical knowledge, she had not been personally acquainted with Acker. Kraus
speaks reverently of Great Expectations and
the short story’s artful meshing of grieving and the writing process though is
keen to mark the gendered assumptions of women who write about women that
“anything short of hating or liking will be seen as envy”. Further to this,
Jacques draws attention to Acker’s experiments with CD-ROMs as a result of
being ex-communicated from literary circles after falling out of critical
fashion in the mid-80s and the conversation touches on Acker’s foray into
theatre with plays such as Desire.
Both Kraus and Acker’s New York is filthy, sexually liberated and
self-masturbatory and the evening’s discussion siphons into the ouroboros-y of
the art scene and spoken word nights in which Acker (“the chamber writer of
Downtown New York”) would rattle off the names and shames of former flames to
an audience of friends; “feeding the scene back into itself”. Kraus’
immortalisation of Acker is humbly motivated and driven by the desire to write
the true Acker back into the subject space, rather than purely an object of
scandal and sex, untimely taken. I purchased myself a copy, quietly squirming
at the price, quietly asking Chris Kraus to sign it then promptly faded away,
rosy-cheeked, on the 171 in a cloud of free wine and biblio-bliss.
Words by Elinor Potts
Written for [smiths] magazine
Words by Elinor Potts
Written for [smiths] magazine
