A few weeks after that, a smaller group attended a sea-scattering at Fort Funston, the location picked by Matias Viegener, the friend who had done most to look after the dying Acker and whom she had appointed her executor. Frank Molinaro, whom Acker had paid for astrological advice, passed out business cards in the car park, then grabbed hold of the vase with the cremains in it. Born in in New York City, Kathy Acker lived and worked as an adult in lots of places, most significantly downtown Manhattan, San Diego, London and San Francisco, with long spells of gigging and episodes of sudden geographical flight.
In her lifetime she published eight or 13 or more novels — it depends how you count them — since supplemented with a substantial Nachlass. She bought places to live in Barnes, Islington, Brighton, East 12th Street in Greenwich Village: at one point she was paying for three homes at the same time.
She died before the internet properly got going, when becoming famous or celebrated or iconic was a completely different matter from what it is now. Performance was also important. Acker explored the roots of her own subculture, and the roots of those roots too: Burroughs took her to Genet, who took her to the French and anti-French traditions, both homegrown and that of the anti-colonial resistance.
Rage, political and personal, took her yet further, to the assassins of 12th-century Persia, the nihilists of 19th-century Russia. I could go on. In , the South Bank Show broadcast a minute portrait of Acker, in which she reads from her novel Blood and Guts in High School over shots of herself stomping the slushy pavements of the then ungentrified Lower East Side. A bit later he addresses Acker directly. What do you mean by that, more precisely? For this appearance, Acker had her hair bleached and buzz-cut and further divided into roughly razored squares.
She smiles, meltingly, looking up something in Great Expectations , her version of the Dickens novel. And then she performs an extract from Great Expectations , sometimes eyeballing the camera, sometimes sweetly looking down:. The author of the work you are now reading is a scared little shit. A dog. She should put lots of porn in this book cunts dripping big as Empire State buildings in front of your nose and then cowboy violence: nothing makes any sense anyway.
