nothing and no one's straight
rebel. nymphomania. artista. dirty talker. rigorous thinker (Galas). performer. storyteller. mesmerizing intellect and toxic humour. wild imagination. openly celebrating plagiarism. copy and paste. drag and drop. decomposition and re-invention of language. (smart playful babytalk childwoman)
... so called long passé absolutistic expressions such as sadist/masochist, sense/nonsense, life/death, sex/love or male/female, dreams/reality, fiction/fact, trash/literature, mind/body are taken ad absurdum, ad nauseum, turned inside-upside down and spit out again after being chewed upon in all possible ways...
"I make nothing new, create nothing: I am a sort of mad journalist, a journalist without paid assignment. Twain was obsessed with racism, me with sexism."
(Kathy Acker, Bodies of Work, A Few Notes on Two of my Books, page 13)
"... crucified from within by all that's intolerable in this world and proud of it - that's my kind of writing"
(Kathy Acker, Pussy King of the Pirates, Sections from the Chronicles of the Pirates, page 238)
'Kathy Acker's writing is virtuoso, maddening, crazy, so sexy, so painful, and beaten out of a wild heart that nothing can tame.'
(Jeanette Winterson on Acker's novel Eurydice in the Underworld)
when I was a child the only thing I wanted was to become a pirate. ... pirates lived in the living world because pirates had fun. since pirates lived in my books, I ran into the world of books, the only living world I, a girl, could find. I never left that world."
(Kathy Acker, Bodies of Work, Seeing Gender, page 158/159, Serpent's Tail 1997)
"Adult:
I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. because I want to live forever in wonder."
(Ibid, page 159)
"Looking for a body:
when I was a child, I knew that the seperation between me and piracy had something to do with being a girl. with gender. with being in a dead world. so gender had something to do with death. and not with sight, for to see was to be other than dead. to see was to be an eye, not an I."
(Ibid, p. 160)
"Searching for the body:
[...] has anybody seen gender?"
(Ibid, page 166)
"the camera transforms each wound into a new, never-before-seen genitalia. after a car crash, anything can be penetrated, anyone, everything and everyone is, anyone can penetrate and does. this new realm is no longer one of duality, of men who penetrate with cocks and women who get penetrated via cunts. each car crash allows sexual organs to proliferate everywhere: the world is sexualized as it was when it began and in its constant beginnings."
(Ibid, the Future, page 174)
"emerging at last from violent insight
"sing out in jubilation and in praise,"
to the angels who terrified away the night.
let no one string
of my forever child-child's heart and cunt fail to sing.
open up this body half in the realm of life, half in death
and give breath.
(Kathy Acker, Eurydice in the Underworld, Requiem, page 188, Arcadia Books 1997)
tons of links to online reading bits, tributes, books, reviews, interviews. some links don't work though
http://acker.thehub.com.au/ackerbib.html
books available
http://www.uidaho.edu/LS/Eng/Fugue/acker.html
speech for the artist in society conference, Chicago, October 1994
http://www.gherkin.com/palimpsest/empire.htm
Empire of the Sensless, related links
http://www.other-rooms.com/html/entry_3.html
