From A Conversation with Kathy Acker:
KATHY ACKER: You can't get to a place, to a society, that isn't constructed according to the phallus. You're stuck with a lot of loneliness, so how do you deal with that isolation and loneliness? The third part concerns that issue. Also I'm looking for a myth. I'm looking for it where no one else is looking. That's why I'm so interested in Pasolini.ELLEN G. FRIEDMAN: The myth never surfaces?
KA: The myth to me is pirates.
EGF: Pirates is the myth?
KA: Yes. It's like the tattoo. The most positive thing in the book is the tattoo. It concerns taking over, doing your own sign-making. In England (I don't know if it's so much true here), the tattoo is very much a sign of a certain class and certain people, a part of society that sees itself as outcast, and shows it. For me tattooing is very profound. The meeting of body and, well, the spirit--it's a real kind of art, it's on the skin. It's both material and not material and it's also a sign of the outcast. So that's what I'm saying about looking for the myth with people like that--tattoo artists, sailors, pirates.
EGF: They represent the outcasts?
KA: Not just outcasts--outcasts could be bums--but people who are beginning to take their own sign-making into their own hands. They're conscious of their own sign-making, signifying values really.
You have to love her.
Well, the memory of her.
Don't remember when I first read this account of her death, but the quote from Kathy has stuck with me since then:
The trip to Mexico was surreal. We rented a big van and hired an RN (this after I had my lessons in injecting K with morphine & oxygen equipment etc - very relieved not to have to do that...); she was very cool, 6'1" Minnesotan lady who lives in Berkeley, a Buddhist who spent years working in Cambodia with landmine victims etc. The first time Kathy wanted to pee Judith suggested that she pee outside, on the ground - since she's been in a hospital room for so long. K loved this (of course). After she peed she wanted to sit in the sun, where she was squatting with just her shirt pulled up over her waist. Then dream-like she said, "the sun feels so good on my cunt!" And the nurse, still rather midwestern & proper, smiled and said "oooo girl!"
Which probably tells you way too much about her and me, but there ya go.
And I hit post too soon, so this is an update:
She's one of those authors -- Samuel Delany is another -- where I think my life would have been better, or at least more interesting, if I'd been exposed to their work when I was younger.
I like to think lots of things, though.
Not sure her comments about the tattoo serving as a sign still hold true today in the US. They seem pretty common across lines of class and identity. You can usually tell the people using them as a (fairly) disposable fashion statement from the ones actually saying something with them.
This is a very half-formed notion, so please don't ask me to explain it. I can spew empty pseudo-intellectual bullshit with the best of 'em, but try to avoid doing it here.
Why are you laughing?
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