FEAR OF KATHY ACKER

On the origin of literary influencerism?

This review originally appeared as print exclusive in the second issue of The Whitney Review of New Writing, edited and published by Whitney Mallett. She’s just released the Review’s third edition (wherein I discussed The Satyricon). You’ll also be able to purchase it through Metalabel or at one of her brick-and-mortar stockists.

If Kathy Acker, who died in 1997, became an underground celebrity (or fetish object, as she complained) in her lifetime, today she’s on literary life support as a saint. The most recent resuscitation began in 2015 with Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark’s I’m Very into You, both from Semiotext(e). Wark also wrote Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker (Duke UP, 2021). Plus we’ve got Jason McBride’s hefty bio Eat Your Mind (Simon & Schuster, 2022), Douglas A. Martin’s Acker (Nightboat, 2017), Georgina Colby’s Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible (Edinburgh UP, 2016), and the 2019 exhibition I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker at the ICA London. Additional hagiography has certainly escaped my notice.

“I was interested in ‘fame’ as one end,” Acker wrote in 1973, thereupon listing three purposes: “(1) people whose work I want to find out about would talk to me, (2) I would somehow be able to pay for food rent etc. doing something connected, (3) artists I fall in love with would fuck me.” Her plan worked: ten years later the protagonist of Jack Skelley’s The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker spirals, “What will Kathy Acker think?”

Previously distributed in chapbooks, magazines, and readings throughout the 1980s, and now collected for the first time, The Complete Fear follows a narrator who alternates between a sort of non-specific Reagan-era protagonist (male, maybe monied or at least a “professional,” presumably white, straight) and someone who does the things and knows the people real-life Skelley does and knows. (A New Narrative–esque parabasic conflation, the author says in his intro.) This unfixed “I” zips free-associatively across Los Angeles and its surrounds, from Disneyland to Dodger Stadium, falling in and out of suicidal hangovers while Platonically (yes, capital P) fixating on chicks, including Kathy Acker—though in this instance, she’s the one doing the theoretical fucking.

I mostly think of Kathy Acker’s books as being concerned with literature (Cervantes, Dickens, Genet, Shakespeare, Erica Jong), whereas Fear is concerned with TV. Not in mimicking its forms—as in other quote-unquote transgressive novels, such as Darius James’s Negrophobia (1992)—but its affects, and context: “Hollywood is a pussy and I’m going to drive there.” Beavis and Butthead meets Story of the Eye. 

Okay, I mean, fitting—even the president had traded the silver screen for daily appearances on boob tube news. It’s not that Fear jettisons properly “literary” content: the protagonist encounters William Blake painting television lunch trays in his bandmate’s garage; visions of Allen Ginsberg chanting “MOLOCH!” through New York streets gurgle in his mind; and he can’t shake the earworm of Gertrude Stein and Madonna’s smash-hit duet. Rather, literature is sunk in the banal consumerist horror of The Media Personality: the narrator is preoccupied with stealing Olivia Newton Jones’s donuts; the narrator claims he is Billy Idol; the narrator complains about snubs from melancholics he curated into readings; the narrator breaks up (an already dead) Dennis Wilson and Christine McVie; the narrator explains that “[a]s society becomes increasingly depersonalized, and as there are less and less baseball players with nicknames, my chance diminishes for real personal rapport”; the narrator snorts speed with girls that used to be hot; the narrator laments his swollen Imagination’s failure to render “one girl clearly” instead of just “a collage of girls from TV, memories and dreams,” plus, also, fuck, shit, the signal’s screwed and the girl in the pay-per-view porno is looking all “mangled” and “Modern Simultaneous Cubist”; the narrator is perennially haunted by Endora, the mother from Bewitched (1964–72); the narrator’s friend asks, “How many times are you going to write ‘She scoops out one soft white tit and I suck’?”; the narrator keeps writing about tits; the narrator steals from Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, enjoining “PUSH YOUR TITTIES TOGETHER.”

Who’s afraid of Kathy Acker? Ask Barbara Casper, whose 2007 documentary took that title, perhaps half-influenced by Skelley’s. I, however, can’t secure a streaming link to tell you more. What I can tell you is that to sell books is to sell yourself, even or especially after death, given that the bestselling selves are those that are mostly made up. (“Autofiction is a fiction. It does not exist,” Skelley asserted last year in the Los Angeles Review of Books; “I write in the dizziness that seizes that which is fed up with language and attempts to escape through it: the abyss named fiction,” says the narrator of Acker’s My Mother: A Demonology; “But believe me, Kathy Acker, and everyone, I KNOW the difference between what a writer writes and what she actually does, but the line between fact and fiction these days is past the point of defining,” Skelley again, circa 1980s.) In The Complete Fear, Acker, who moved in and out of California from the 60s on, symbolizes a scene, a network, an unimpeachable cool, and, sorry, maybe an ur-influencer.