Reading, Writing: Hell -- The Art of Kathy Acker

Reading, Writing: Hell

on Kathy Acker

by Alexander Laurence

Many years have passed since that day when I first attended Kathy Acker's writing class when she taught at Art Institute in San Francisco. The time was August 1991, the year punk broke. The class lasted fifteen weeks during fall semester. The class was entitled: "Reading, Writing: Hell" in the brochure. On the first day of class about forty or fifty students attended which was twice the amount that Kathy wanted. Classes beforehand had been very small I was told. Kathy had been teaching there for a year. The word had spread. Now there was a demand.

I remember very well that the first day Kathy was amicable. She had a Brooklyn Jewish accent and definitely held our attention with every word. She was very small, leather jacket, shaved head, tattoos. Not like any teacher I have ever had. I had never seen her before this. I didn't know what she looked like, although I had known that she lived close to where I lived, in the same neighborhood. She immediately described what the class was going to consist of: "There will be 1/3 reading, 1/3 writing, and 1/3 visiting writers or speakers."

I soon found out that the class was composed mainly of students who were studying painting or photography, plus a few who were studying performance art and film. There were no people who came from the perspective of a creative writing program. The people in the class were very mixed: mostly gay and lesbian, a few straight, and a few unsure. Jill St. Jacques was also in the class, but I had never met her before. I was not a student who was enrolled at the Art Institute expecting credit or grades, just a writer who was sitting in on the class for free.

Before the class began I had read a number of Kathy Acker's novels. I had read quite a bit of philosophy and French theory. I was very familiar with 19th and 20th century French literature and I was probably the best read person in the class besides Kathy. I had been out of school for a number of years where I had previously got a degree in English Literature.

Kathy had been reading Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov at the time. During this time she was also writing what became My Mother: Demonology. On the first day, some of the writers that Kathy mentioned were Rimbaud, Baudelaire, The Symbolists, The Brontes, Juan Goytisolo, Severo Sarduy, Artaud, Bataille, The Situationists, Faulkner, Borges and Thomas Bernhard. Many of these writers we would end up reading during the class. Kathy also told us to pick a book to do a book report on, to present to the class later on. I picked Under The Shadow by Gilbert Sorrentino. I had just received a galley of it and was interested in looking at it closely. Kathy OK'ed the book but she preferred that I chose a book by a dead author, nothing contemporary. It turned out that half the class picked Lolita. This had nothing to do with Kathy's strong influence I guessed. A few people picked Burroughs. There wasn't much diversity. Initially I gave Kathy a few stories as a sample of my work. Since I wasn't a student Kathy required that I show her something. After she read them, she told me that this was a class for beginning writers. I told her I still wanted to sit in on the class because I was hoping that there was something for me to learn. She then compared my writing to Paul Auster which I thought was a compliment, but later found out that it wasn't. I hadn't read that much Auster and didn't consider him an influence. The first week of class Kathy was trying to discourage anyone from taking the class. She had to reduce the class by twenty people, and I soon found out that this initial period was a trial period where Kathy was filtering out the maybes.

Part of this strenuous weeding out period included our first in-class writing assignment. Kathy told everyone to spend fifteen minutes and write about the most dysfunctional person in each of our families. So all forty people did this or contemplated doing this while chuckling to themselves. I wrote a short biography of my father. Part two of this assignment was that now each of us write about having sex with this person in our family. We did so. Though some refused to. Then Kathy asked each one of us to read these sex scenes out loud to the rest of the class. The class then heard about an hour of soft porn, a few sexless scenes, comedy, and poetry; all of it told in an uncomfortable way. About five or ten people didn't read at all.

Kathy sat there quietly and listened to us read and remarked that it was OK. She said that she didn't really care what we read about. She explained what she was trying to achieve by asking us to write about this stuff. She wanted to show that when we use the word "I" we use it in a different way when we are forced to be direct and autobiographical. I felt Kathy was also feeling out the class in terms of encouraging some and discouraging others once she got a sense of the personalities emerging in the class. Most of those who attempted these early writing assignments, which were equally difficult and embarrassing, stayed in the class while those who were offended or upset by the experience did not return to the meetings.

As the class dwindled down to about twenty-two people, Kathy let me stay in the class. Only one person and myself were able to stay in the class without being enrolled. The rest were students and had to be there. Kathy was known to let people sit in on the class.

As we were reading and writing our own stuff, Kathy was using Literature and Evil by Georges Bataille as a framework. She told us to read Wuthering Heights. I remember asking Kathy the question if she thought Story of The Eye was Bataille's version of Wuthering Heights? She said that she had to think about it, but I had made an interesting observation.

-- Much of this orderly recollection will focus on the sort of writing assignments that Kathy Acker gave us that were truly unique.

On the second week, she wanted us to analyze someone else's writing. All of us wrote down a brief description of a dream. I was handed this page that started off, "I am a servant . . . " and included stuff like, "Progress kills life" and "I wanted to be left alone" and "building barricaded by fat women" and "metal tearing flesh." Basically it was a rant with much unconnected dream imagery. We talked about what we thought about each other's writing anonymously. I remember this girl in the class named Penelope giving a critique about my piece about a recent dream I had about an ex-girlfriend that took place at a birthday party. I thought she gave a good explanation of it. She understood. I was made to look at the piece of writing objectively.

But still Kathy was disgusted about the overall reading and writing skills of the class. I think she went into a long speech about the art of reading, structuralism, and God knows what else. Many things that the class didn't understand. When she went into these sort of speeches, Jill told me that she fell asleep. I remember that initially Kathy was really disappointed in the progress of the class. She thought that the class wasn't living up to its potential. Kathy spent much of the next few meetings talking about Bataille, Emily Bronte and the art of writing. There was one quote from somewhere that intrigued Kathy: "Only art can reveal the process of breaking the law." She asked each of us to write a few sentences about what the law was. Then we exchanged what we wrote. I remember that I wrote a few sentences that were offensive, like a list of crimes that I wanted to do. The paper that I received said, "Law: to limit myself to what's comfortable and safe. To consider and obligate myself to other people's expectations." Kathy told us to write something based on this note which was somebody else's interpretation of the law. I wrote something banal. I think that most of us didn't read anything aloud in class. The assignment was sort of a dud.

She also had an assignment where we wrote a letter to someone where we delivered a difficult message. I wrote a letter or two about owing someone money. I think that Kathy had in mind Laure's letters to Bataille, but at the same time we were also talking about the relationship of Rimbaud to Verlaine, another one of Kathy's obsessions. My notes of this talk are as follows: "Writing opposes society and political conservatism" and "Rules: perpetuation of society--we're taught how to speak and act." I remember that this was also a time when Jesse Helms and the Anita Hill trial were on everybody's mind. I thought that the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill thing was totally uninteresting. Kathy disagreed with me. She was watching the hearings with great interest and would talk about them before the class.

Notes from September 9th, 1991: "Acker talked about taking a piece of writing and jamming with it, sampling it, altering it. A phrase, a word, a section. The way jazz is made . . .not interested in the assignment of meanings, of the formalizing academic way. Thinking of working with structures or getting to intuition are similar. . . "

I know that I was exploring many formal things in writing when I encountered Acker (being interested in Georges Perec and Oulipo). I was writing haikus, pangrams, always starting with a structural idea in mind, also being familiar with Queneau's Exercises in Style. Kathy was pushing me to be more intuitive, raw, exposing the unconscious. She emphasized Surrealist types of strategies. She wanted us to write every word and every sentence in an interesting way. She wanted us to explore dreams. Dreams were a big deal with Kathy. I see My Mother: Demonology as one long extended dream.

Kathy wanted us to break through with writing, to reach some key moment, some epiphany, or some crime, whatever. Jill St. Jacques explained this to me as exhausting oneself in thought, coming to a wall, then going beyond, and getting to another wall. At this point in the class, Jill was the most interesting reader to listen to, and developed as a important writer, more so than the class. I had written 30 stories and hundreds of poems and several essays and book reviews.

But I didn't know whom Jill was until after the class ended. We hardly said one word to one another till near the end. Kathy tried to encourage individualism as I recall. I didn't talk to my colleagues that much during the class because I understood Kathy as saying not to be too friendly, and not to form cliques. But then again, we spent an early meeting at Vesuvio's, a bar next to City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, so we could loosen up and get to know one another. At Vesuvio's I remember talking to a few people, then the discussion gradually moved towards if we were a "top" or a "bottom". Kathy told us that she was a "bottom". Bottoms supposedly had more power? I thought that this was not my sort of thing. I never thought about it. It was a San Francisco thing. Everybody talking about sex, and not important things. I was bored.

I had been reading some books by Michel Leiris and I had finally got to Guilty by Georges Bataille. Also after reading Illuminations by Rimbaud, I realized what a big influence he was on me, and most of the poetry that I had written between 1987-1992. Surrealism and Rimbaud. The story that I wrote in 1991, "The Seasons," was referring to Rimbaud; and slightly to Jasper Johns. I also wrote a few things in imitation of Leiris.

The next meeting Kathy talked about the writings of Blanchot and Borges. She talked about the "surface story" and what is it about. She made us think about how certain parts work together. Kathy told us to read parts of Rimbaud. I read many of Rimbaud's prose poems. Some of them are indecipherable. I wrote something in response to "After the Flood." It was like a mad lib, substituting words. Our take-home assignment was to take the poem, "Devotion" and to make a story out of it. I wrote something vague influenced by Leiris again. I forgot to do a few of the assignments so I decided to read whatever I had been writing. That would do instead.

Once Kathy was totally bored with our stories. She said that we were not trying to be good enough. We need to really think about what we are doing when we write. She looked at us: "Why are we writing? Why write at all? Writers do not make money. Some writers are beautiful technicians but do not have any soul." Kathy gave us Paul Auster as an example. She talked about Blanchot's "Madness of The Day." Kathy played tapes of music in between what people read. Like two people would read, then a tape of NWA, two more, a tape of Nine Inch Nails, etc.

I wrote a note to myself to be more aggressive with my writing. I had been too disappointed with my "arty-ness." Kathy asked us to read Justine by De Sade.

Kathy Acker's next few writing assignments:

"An ex-lover is dying. Describe what they say to you before they die."

"Write an paragraph on what is happening in American fiction in the 1990s."

"The only thing I want is all-out war."

Kathy Acker, My Death, My Life (p. 233)

Kathy made us read a section of The Unavowable Community and Madness of the Day by Maurice Blanchot. She talked all day about Blanchot, Bataille, and Klossowski.

Blanchot: "The narrative voice is a voice that has no place in the work."

Kathy talked about Acephele which was a group of writers that included Bataille and Laure. Much discussion about origins, identity, ouroboros, labyrinths, transcendence, eternal recurrence and the body.

Blanchot: "Writing is the absence of the work as it presents itself."

I remember this time of my life as being very difficult. Many problems. Depression. Beginning of many feuds with friends that were never mended. It was the last time that I suffered from depression.

Another KA writing assignment: she wanted us to write a film treatment. She also suggested that we take a part of Justine and turn them into a film treatment. Kathy also did a similar thing with her treatment of Dario Argento's "Suspiria" in My Mother: Demononlogy (1993). I later saw another Argento film with Kathy. She seemed to know his films well.

Next she wanted us to bring a foreign language dictionary of a language that we didn't have any particular proficiency in (I didn't take part in this assignment). She made us translate our original text into a foreign language. Then we translated it back into English without help of the dictionary. Kathy was always pushing us into creating nonsense. Does anything exist that is truly random and without meaning? It is a very hard process. Because words can be analyzed and interpreted. She liked the writing to veer off into babble. I think she was exploring the idea of a surface translation, like with some of the French stuff she did with Laure's letters to Bataille and earlier with the Persian poems.

After we had done the piece about the law, Kathy told us to write a moral essay. I think it was in response to something in Sade. I wrote the first part of what later became "Audrey Hepburn." My essay began "Jewish girls love to fuck . . ." Kathy thought that this was the best thing I had done so far. Actually it was a plagiarist text using a Gilbert Sorrentino text and having the desire to write something provocative about Audrey Hepburn who was still alive at the time. Not at all a homage of a dead person that it would now seem to be. I felt like this was a real breakthrough in my writing. I really let loose, and I felt that anything could happen in my writing. This was both a reaction to a difficult time in my life and overthrowing the boring formal styles that I had used before. I felt that my mind was opening up to the infinite possibilities of writing and freedom.

Kathy's next assignment was to write something in an active language. I do not know if I understood what she wanted us to do. I remember that she may have read to us Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I had never heard of him at this time.

Kathy talked about the structure of Justine. How it was "machine-like."

Kathy told us to write down a recent dream. Then we had to draw a picture of the dream. She made us put all of our dream pictures on the wall, and we stood around and examined them together. She told us to pick someone else's dream picture and write a story based on it. My picture that I drew was based on a dream I had about a Hans Bellmer mannequin. The picture that I based my story on was a cartoon that had two characters, one who was possibly a doctor. The text that I wrote became the first paragraph of "Undiscovered Country" later published in Nobodaddies #2.

I remember at this time Kathy wanted us to discuss what we had written: why we had done a certain thing, etc. Instead of just reading and going on to the next person. I don't know if I have said this before but Kathy would make us read one by one, sometime broken up by a musical interlude, then after everyone had finished reading their bit, Kathy would make a general comment about the group. She had little individual encouragement. This troubled a few students. We had a discussion about Kathy giving us more feedback. I didn't care. It wasn't like most creative writing classes I had experienced. There was none of this "turn in pages of a well crafted story and get a critique from the teacher." Marked up with "Good line here." You never knew where you stood with Kathy, but if you had confidence about your writing, that was good enough. Neither was there much response from other classmates except the usual laughter or reaction while you were reading your stuff out loud. Like most expensive art schools, things would fall into cliques, competitions would form, and it would become like a show of drag queens vying for the attention of the teacher.

I finally completed the film treatment of the Sade scene between St. Florent and Justine. Kathy continued talking about De Sade and "the sovereignty of evil." We ended up talking more about the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill trials. Kathy was really interested in power. She went on to relate it all to Pasolini. She handed out a text by him on freedom.

Kathy told us to write down our greatest pleasure. Then she told us to write down the reasons we should have this pleasure. I ended up writing more about Audrey Hepburn.

Kathy also talked about Surrealism: Breton, Leiris, Lacan, and Crevel. She read some of The Surrealist Manifesto (1925).

Kathy was personally reading the new Foucault biography written by Didier Erebon. I talked about the book with Kathy. She eventually didn't care for it.

At this moment Kathy went to the East Coast to do some readings and some lectures and panel discussions. We had three guest teachers the following two weeks: Dean Kuipers, Robert Glück, and Carla Harryman. I was out of town for one week, so I missed the first two writers, and when I cam back I got to meet Carla Harryman, the poet. She gave us several texts to read including, You The City by Fiona Templeton, and others by Balzac and Barrett Watten. We talked about these writings. Carla talked a little about her own writing. She would giggle a lot as she spoke. I think that the class was bored with her. I mentioned the Oulipo and Georges Perec. I described it to the class because it reminded me of what Carla was talking about with Language Poetry. Jill told me later that the classes with Kuipers and Gluck were more interesting.

Carla gave us a writing assignment. She wrote out a plan. First sentence: true statement. Second statement: false statement. Third statement: fragment (incomplete). Fourth statement: a question. Fifth statement: an utterance. This text which I wrote based on Carla's plan became the second paragraph of "Undiscovered Country."

Started reading Behind the Mask.

The next reading assignment was The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras. We all read it once though not too well according to Kathy. She got upset. She put on her glasses and went into a really boring in depth structuralist analysis of the Duras text. Kathy spoke of the "mechanism of desire" which she mapped out like this "Thought>Language>Desire." She pointed out that "when the other rejects consciousness begins." Kathy considered this Duras novel to be very important. Maybe someone could find a relationship between Lol Stein and Kathy Acker's books? Or how Duras influenced Kathy Acker? Reading her books, I couldn’t find where and if Kathy had been influenced or had appropriated any of Duras' texts. Kathy told us to write a story about someone who we desired. She then told us to write something based on this mechanism of desire.

Kathy brought in an essay by Charles Olson about poetics that she read and discussed. She spoke of the Beats and the New York School (Ashbery, O'Hara, etc.) and the Black Mountain School. Olson: "A paragraph equals a breath." Gertrude Stein: "Take away the distance between meaning and breath." Kathy then read aloud from a Robert Duncan essay (1954).

I wrote some of the epistolary sections "Audrey Hepburn" at this time. When I read these in classes I had been sitting right next to Kathy, which I never did. I always kept my distance. Usually across the room would do. We sat in a circle with desks and table in front of us. At the break Kathy asked me about my writing: "Why do you write the way you do, in different styles?" I replied, "I get bored easily. I'm trying different things." I later told her that I had read her Don Quixote and thought that it was unreadable. I don't think that Kathy cared much for that observation.

The next writing assignment was to take a book and copy some sentences out of it. Don't worry about making sense. Don't be original. Steal lines. Commit crimes. Plagiarize! Kathy got us all riled up. I had a few books with me: Ezra Pound, Juan Goytisolo, Bob Flanagan, and Amy Gerstler. I decided to open them all and copy down interesting words and sentences from book to book. When we read this to the class, the results were great. Quite the bevy of madness and collisions. I would always go over these types of texts and interject some more coherence into it. Much of this stuff became a prose poem "Body." I won an poetry award with this work a few months later.

I finished writing "Audrey Hepburn" and I read it at a reading called "Sturdy Trees." I finally wrote the first Acker inspired work that I felt was much different than my previous writings.

Together we read "The Garden of Forking Paths" by Borges. Kathy talked a lot about this story, and about Borges' work which was very interesting.

Kathy read a bit of Close to The Knives to us. Her next assignment for us was to describe our own deaths. Kathy told us that writing about death is like writing about dreams which are both impossible subjects. The mind cannot conceive of death. I wrote a few pages about dreams where I died a few times and came back and died again. After death I would be living on, like after being eaten alive, what I became was manure, consciousness intact. My body and mind wouldn't die. They would come back to life. Much of this became material for the end of "Undiscovered Country."

Kathy also introduced us to F/32 by Eurudice which had just come out. I read F/32 in December, 1991.

We planned to do a group reading together at an artspace called Anti-Matter, which ended up being a debacle. There is a videotape of it, and this is evident. The problem began when some kids started to heckle the first reader. Then when Bobi Morgan Wood got too drunk, she started to yell out answers to Eric Otter's performance that was based around Blade Runner. I read "My Birth" for the first time which I had written after writing all this death stuff. I wanted to be reborn. We had our last class to practice what we were going to read that night at Anti-Matter. After reading a rough draft of "My Birth" most of the class thought that it was weird, and I got many puzzled looks. Most of them thought I should read something from "Audrey Hepburn." But after Kathy said that she thought it was one of my strongest works, they changed their minds.

I think that what I learned from Kathy Acker was that it is a good thing to write a lot, to accumulate material, and edit the good stuff, to open up you're mind to all possible thoughts, to write about your dreams. To explore the unconscious and the conscious. That every line should be interesting. That to write about bizarre stuff was alright. I think that most people would agree that rewriting is essential, and writing that has been rewritten twenty times is much better, whatever the subject, rather than unschooled or automatic writing. And most of all I learned that it might be a good idea to have some general conceptual idea or game plan. I don't think of myself as a post-modernist or heavily influenced by Kathy Acker, but I felt that she was a catalyst and encourager of any experimental writing.

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