Kathy Acker by Robert Mapplethorpe (1983)
How many books about Kathy Acker do we really need?
No one needed Roadrunner.
Back in February of 2022, I wrote about Anthony Bourdain and cultural credibility. Today I would like to return to this general idea and look at author Kathy Acker through this lens and the lens of celebrity victim narratives, which I wrote about for #22.
After all, Acker and Bourdain’s cultural impacts, packaging, and profitable post-death legacies are not dissimilar; both rely on a thick coating of edgy whatever to distract from their ritzy roots.
Don’t get me wrong: I like Kathy Acker’s writing. Her influence on me becomes especially obvious when one reads my older work. I was on Tumblr in 2014, just like everyone else. I bought several of her books from Thriftbooks.com. I read all of them.
She is, again, much like Bourdain, good at what she does, at least superficially. They successfully convince the audience that they’re being taken away from the beaten path.
This is often enough.
Neither this piece nor #2 are attacks. Rather they're a call to think critically, especially when it comes to branding American “rebels” and how we end up mythologizing the bourgeois over and over again, provided he can create for himself a story of sympathetic struggle.
Much like every other punk you know, Kathy Acker is from money. Old money. The kind of money you unsuccessfully try to shake off or play down. I’ve written about the painful self-awareness of the bourgeois, his desire to break free and away from the guilt and shame, to enter into working-class spheres and blend in.
This is that story.
Again.
Both Bourdain and Acker were driven by the classic American quest for “authenticity.” Bourdain went for the kitchen, while Acker worked as a secretary, stripper, and porn performer. We can see this in today’s cultural landscape, too — trust funders rushing to jobs that will provide them with clout, cultural credibility, what they need, what money cannot buy, and what will unlock doors to life outside the suffocating bubble.
Something To Write About.
It is difficult, at least for me and at least now, not to see Acker as a classic fuck-you-mom-and-dad petulant brat. A kid in a costume. A stinky jet setter. The post-death celebration of her work, which has turned out to be quite profitable for various presses over the years, consistently dodges her roots in favor of maintaining the mystique built around her — some raw genius savant, an alien punk.
The truth is there will always be Ackers and Bourdains, children of the rich and very rich, who manage to rebirth themselves into new roles, who manage to convince us of adversity lived when in reality it’s privileges made somehow irrelevant; an easy sell to a class-blind society.
It’s how we choose to remember them and how much we want to contribute to their mythologies and legacies that could shift, should shift, leaving no room for greedy publishers or filmmakers.
Another great American tradition: never letting anything rest in peace.
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