Kathy Acker: Doing

“So if that little thing can do so much, who knows what else we can experience?”

Kathy Acker

Kathy Acker: Where does she get off?
Context: A friend told me that there are these clean and sober dykes that have piercings every couple months just to get high. It's about learning about my body. I didn't know my body could do this. It's not exactly pleasure. It's more like vision. I didn't know the body is such a visionary factory.
Basically we grew up not wanting to know that we had bodies. And it's not as if these piercings are in that deep — it's just on the surface. So if that little thing can do so much, who knows what else we can experience?

“The German Romantics had to destroy the same bastions we do.”

Kathy Acker

Empire of the Senseless (1988), Elegy for the World of the Fathers, Part I, Rape by the Father, p. 12
Context: The German Romantics had to destroy the same bastions we do. Logocentrism and idealism, theology, all supports of the repressive society. Property's pillars. Reason which always homogenizes and reduces, represses and unifies phenomena or actuality into what can be perceived and so controlled. The subjects, us, are now stable and socializable. Reason is always in the service of the political and economic masters. It is here that literature strikes, at this base, where the concepts and actings of order impose themselves. Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.

“Writing is what I did when I was alone with no one watching me or telling me what to do. I could do whatever I wanted. So writing was really associated with body pleasure — it was the same thing. It was like the only thing I had.”

Kathy Acker

Kathy Acker: Where does she get off?
Context: I think writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off of it. And the riffs are about timing. And about sex.
Writing for me is about my freedom. When I was a kid, my parents were like monsters to me, and the world extended from them. They were horrible. And I was this good little girl — I didn't have the guts to oppose them. They told me what to do and how to be. So the only time I could have any freedom or joy was when I was alone in my room. Writing is what I did when I was alone with no one watching me or telling me what to do. I could do whatever I wanted. So writing was really associated with body pleasure — it was the same thing. It was like the only thing I had.

Pleasure

“I'm looking for what might be called a body language. One thing I do is stick a vibrator up my cunt and start writing -- writing from the point of orgasm and losing control of the language and seeing what that's like.”

Kathy Acker

“All the people around Hester hate her and despise her and think she's a total freak. The kid's beyond human law and human consideration. How do you feel about yourself when every human being you hear and see and smell every day of your being thinks you're worse than garbage? Your conception of who you are has always, at least partially, depended on how the people around you behaved towards you… You don't know. How can you know anything? How can you know anything? You begin to go crazy.”

Kathy Acker book Blood and Guts in High School

Blood and Guts in High School (1978)

Hate , People , Law , Feeling

“"Why are they ashamed and miserable?"
"They're repenting they're white. Any thinking human does it. Don't you read your own history books? So if you attack those miserable moderns or modernist, knight, you'll be making a miserable historical mistake. You will be preventing whites from hating their own whiteness."
Don Quixote finally refused the dogs' attack on her attack: "Liberalism has never stopped me from doing anything", said the knight.”

Kathy Acker

Don Quixote (1986)

Hate , Books , Dogs , History