Acker wrote to fill the void of feminine subjectivity in writing as ‘I’—she also wrote for freedom. To save herself from constrictions of The Self. Kathy Acker mimed and mined literature, ravishing book after book that throughout history has silenced and foreclosed women and feminine writing. She broke them open, subverted the phallic ‘eye’, and re-told these stories, trying to find her ‘I’— an act of piracy. (There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.) A lone pirate, aboard a phantom ship, Kathy Acker sought to uncover the stories lost at sea, buried alive under the sand, marooned on piece of driftwood—forever lost. She swam in an ocean of books (the places for transformations), dived down into the depths. She transformed: grew gills, breathed in the water, letting the words fill her. She stole the language of the deep (into which all drown), one that she could only come upon as she disappeared. She learned the language of ghosts—appearing as mirages on the bow. (Ghosts equals pirates.) She pried open an oyster shell, put it to her ear and listened intently to the language of her body: its inner rhythms, embodied knowings, a relational energetic labyrinth of becoming woman. She swallowed the pearl (treasure!).

As a woman, (Born dead), Kathy Acker spent her life climbing out of holes—leather-clad, leopard print bandana, never taking off her rings. Each novel, essay or poem written was Acker climbing up out of various gendered, tabooed, literary, systemic holes. And if she wasn’t climbing out of them she was filling them in—with words, with fingers. 

—Mollie Elizabeth Pyne, from “After After Kathy Acker” (3:AM Magazine, August 2018)

I hate to say it but the chris kraus kathy acker bio is kind of a flop... a lot of the raw materials are ofc interesting but man if I had that many artworld acquaintences I could do a better job....

Hi, I sent you an ask a few years back and you answered! I think it was about A Study in Emerald. That was really cool thing that happened.

I'm sending you this ask because I saw your tweets about Salman Rushdie, and I was. Um. Sort of there? Like not in the audience but I work for the Chautauqua institution, about a three-minute walk away from where it all went down. I'm not sure how useful these things are to say. It's horrible that this has happened. Every half-an-hour or so I remember that it's real, like it actually really happened HERE, that something I knew about possibly before most of the people on the planet is now on international news. How in god's name did something relevant to my job end up on the front page of CNN? How did we get here?

uh. Anyway I loved Sandman. Great work with Sandman. Peace out.

I feel the same. I keep thinking, this isn't an abstract idea. This is my friend Salman, who I had dinner with after Lou Reed's memorial in 2013, who told the best anecdotes, who also knew Kathy Acker, who did The Moth with me in 2007, who sent me advanced copies of his books sometimes. A real person. Funny and brilliant and caring and dry.

Thanks to @blind-the-winds for the tag!

This is from my novel-in-progress. I'll try not to over-explain, but: it's loosely based on events from my own life (with a lot of straight-up fiction thrown in), and stylistically I'm aiming for something like "if Kathy Acker wrote Jack Kerouac's On the Road." There are the main narrative sections (which hew more closely to the structure of OtR), but then there are all these interludes and meta-fictional weirdnesses and... Anyway, this is one of the main narrative sections.

I buzzed her in, and she said: “And I brought a joint. I thought maybe you’d wanna get high.” Hell yeah, I wanted to get high. “Let’s go out,” I said, grabbing my jacket. I knew we couldn’t talk or smoke like we wanted in front of my boyfriend, who sat noodling around on his guitar in the next room. He’d take one look at Rat Hole and decide she was a bad influence, and he hated weed, too. We headed east on Irving Park Road, towards the Brown Line Stop. Rat Hole cupped her hand around the flame of her green lighter and lit the joint, took a puff, passed it to me. We walked in silence for a bit, passing the joint back and forth, keeping an eye out for cops. Soon everything was a stoned symphony of sound and color, the headlights of passing cars bending and refracting in our blurry vision, their tires wsssshhhing over the wet, salty streets. We got so high we forgot it was still cold; our blood was warm and everything felt like spring. We took the el to Belmont Ave. and it was Rat Hole’s first time on Belmont, and ever after that place became a symbol of our friendship. I thought of my ode to Belmont; the night was like a living version of it. They were all there: punks with six-inch tall Day-Glo mohicans, Jesus People proselytizing, drag queens in their feathers and spangles, goths in their big black boots, suburban spare changers, pickpockets and prostitutes in the Punkin’ Donuts parking lot, and all the sounds, bass booming behind doors of dance clubs, car horns and stereos and hey fuck you, buddy! And all the smells—donut grease, car exhaust, smoke (sewer, cigar, incense), hot dog water, deep dish pizza, grime—an Eau d’ Belmont.

I'll tag @belialjones @endreal @kurnutus86 @hthrrloooo @chucklingpecan @big-low-t @dee-the-red-witch — and any other writer pal who'd like to participate. (But don't feel obligated! And P.S. feel free to use any recent work, be it poetry or prose, fiction or non. I've put poetry in these things before.)

First, my students read Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia.” The father of psychoanalysis creates a binary of healthy and pathological grieving. If the bereaved is not wholly aware of their loss, and therefore cannot directly process it, this leads to a state Freud calls melancholia, resulting in “profoundly painful dejection, loss of the ability to love,” and other miserable and enduring consequences. In contrast, there is healthy mourning: the bereaved consciously knows their loss, and shuts out the world to grieve it, eventually returning to a state of normalcy, which Freud describes as a kind of equilibrium.

This conscious mourning can take the form of ritual. After Ed’s death, Bob and Ed’s partner Daniel disrobe and wash his body before it is taken away to be cremated. Glück writes, “Daniel and I unfold him and try to lift out one arm but it won’t be guided. It’s so like Ed, I have to laugh. Trying to steer him was always a challenge, like pushing a shopping cart with one bad wheel.” After the two have successfully removed Ed’s blue and white kimono, Bob focuses on a single leg, which “splays outward, then his knee falls inward, loose-jointed as a broken umbrella.” It’s an incredibly tender scene—more intimate than the sex scenes that populate the book with piss, come, an asshole “bubblegum pink, so clean it twinkled.” The scene of the washing is a kind of inventory, and the final body part recorded is Ed’s cock, from the tip of which a single drop of blood emerges. “The drop of blood is the only indication of the pandemonium that occurred within this body,” Glück writes, “Here to present itself for a bow, Ed’s murderous blood.”

The uncanniness of Ed’s being dead, even if it’s long expected, repeatedly has an air of the theatrical to Bob: “It’s a weird kind of play, someone’s death, that pressures the actors.” Everyone has their part. Still, these stilted roles, these practices, are meant to help the bereaved, to give shape to their mourning.

After Ed’s death, Bob thinks through mourning again and again. “Mourning is the fear of losing Ed combined with the fact of losing Ed,” he offers in one of several definitions. He even names Freud explicitly, and “Mourning and Melancholia” more referentially, using the words in close proximity. In a passage about the grief of time carrying us onward, he asks: “What is mourning? The will bends back, nailing me to the awareness of time. I spend days staring at a bright spot on the wall that moves with the sun, so I become a sundial, the melancholy motto is the self.”

. . .

Glück honors Ed’s life without insisting on the context, or perhaps retrieves Ed’s memory from its context, asking, in one of the few moments he names Ed’s death as one among many: “Was Ed’s death a trauma that replaced his life? Was he thrown into the mass grave of HIV? In mass death, recovery occurs in the collective mind over time. It may take a generation to reacquaint ourselves with the dead, for their rich complexity to be apparent once more.”

Robert Glück cofounded the New Narrative school in the Small Press Traffic Bookstore in San Francisco, through writing classes open to the public. The school of writers included transgressive icons like Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker. New Narrative writing is identifiable by its careful observance of dailiness, including chat, sex, and sensory descriptions—rich complexity. One motivation, Glück writes in his essay “Long Note on New Narrative,” was to see if the writers “could come up with a better representation—not in order to satisfy movement pieties or to be political, but in order to be.” Queer people were among those not afforded unpolitical lives. Crimp paraphrases Michael Moon in arguing that the “normalcy” Freud expects a healthy griever to return to does not exist for gay men in a homophobic culture. Cultural production reflected this; the daily lives of queer people were hugely underrepresented in mainstream art in the 1970s. Yes, the personal is political, but perhaps there could be personal lives captured without the burden of political messaging. Glück asks, in his same essay on New Narrative, “What kind of representation least deforms its subject?” Perhaps one that refuses to instruct.

New Narrative began in the 1970s, predating the AIDS crisis, predating Ed’s death. I have spent years studying ACT UP, which began in New York in 1987 and was active in San Francisco in the final years of Ed’s life. I know well the context in which Ed is dying, at least as well as someone of my generation can. Ed died in 1994, near the end of the worst of the crisis: in 1995 the FDA approved the first protease inhibitors, and the following year saw effective combination therapy become the standard of care. Had Ed gotten sick just a bit later, maybe he’d still be alive today. Perhaps I am ruining Glück’s project, in a way, by stitching the story back into the political context. Near the end of his essay [“Mourning and Militancy”], Crimp suggests that militancy busies the hands of the bereaved, and this work, while vital, distracts from adequate mourning. “Militancy, of course, then, but mourning too: mourning and militancy.” I should let Ed rest, I think, and allow Glück to mourn.

Who is afforded a non-politicized death? Who is afforded a non-politicized life?

The murder of my acquaintance is nearly immediately instrumentalized by the right wing. He’d been a dedicated harm reduction activist—we’d helped to lead a Narcan training two weeks before his death—and the worst of the internet emerges to callously pronounce that the leftist got what was coming, given what he’d advocated for: dangerous streets. (He was killed by a stranger at a bus stop.) I find myself, perhaps naively, astounded by the cruelty—the online posts have the gleeful tone of cartoon villains, when the loss is unspeakable, impossible, devastating. Those who loved the man interrupt their mourning to insist publicly that the circumstances of his death would not have changed his political and moral convictions.

As sick as this makes me, I find myself strategizing elsewhere, sourcing material in the stories of others: a friend and I exchange articles, asking which newly published think piece or war diary will be the most likely to politically move people in our lives. The relatable Jewish Brooklynite, reflecting on their morphing relationship to the Jewish State, through statistic- and history-heavy analysis? Or will the first person account from Gaza, tragedy stylized in prose, persuade a reader that Palestinians deserve to live in safety and dignity? It feels dirty to plot like this, to utilize the real and present grief of others. But in this moment of urgency, it seems we are not above it. Maybe in a generation, I think, these dead will be able to rest.

– hannah gold, "voices of mourning"

According to Klein [in “Mourning and its Relation to Manic Depressive States”], when a later grief is experienced it is not only a fresh loss in the external world that must be contended with, but a disturbance in the subject’s internal world that was originally constructed in response to the grief associated with their early loss:

The pain experienced in the slow process of testing reality in the work of mourning thus seems partly due to the necessity, not only to renew the links to the external world and thus continuously to re-experience the loss, but at the same time and by means of this to rebuild with anguish the inner world, which is felt to be in danger of deteriorating and collapsing.

Klein declines to dispense with Freud’s term “normal mourning,” but she nonetheless modifies and stretches his definition: she identifies more intermediary stages in the process and claims that it involves reckoning not only with immediate grief but with more distant past experiences. She therefore seems to imply that mourning has both a tenacity and a longevity that Freud refuses to grant it.

Yet despite supplementing and revising Freud’s definition of mourning, the strangeness Rose observes in “Mourning and Melancholia” is not completely absent from Klein’s paper. Although her main focus is on manic depressive states and thus on obstructed mourning processes, ultimately, like Freud, Klein insists that “normal mourning” is a process with an end, even if she locates its beginnings in infancy and hence argues that its middle is longer and more fraught than in Freud’s definition. Only people who did not successfully overcome the “infantile depressive position” will fail to overcome a loss experienced later in life, whereas others will eventually reinstate their internal “good” objects.

Her essay ends by describing this end point. She declares that the mourner “overcomes his grief, regains security, and achieves true harmony and peace.”

. . .

[T]he weird abbreviated ending of Phenomenology of Spirit and “the extreme narrative compression of [Hegel’s] account of absolute knowing” seemed helpful for thinking through Klein’s similarly abrupt and surprisingly resolved conclusion to “Mourning and its Relation to Manic Depressive States.”

In an essay in The Dash, Comay analyses the ending of the Phenomenology in more detail. Although she observes that the book “suddenly sprints forward to the finish line,” she continues that, “it’s not just the traumatic abruptness of the last dash [by which she means both rush and the punctuation mark with which the book ends] but also a curious indeterminacy of the endpoint that intrigues me.” Everything that had been dilated over the course of many chapters is suddenly compressed, regurgitated so abruptly as to become almost illegible. Comay asks whether Hegel is a mourner or a melancholic, does he relinquish the lost object (mourner) or maintain it in “hallucinatory persistence” (melancholic)? The unanswerable answer seems to be that he is both: the dialectic continues even at the moment of its supposed cessation. Or perhaps mourning always retains a melancholic aspect; the terminable and interminable cannot be separated.

Comay argues that despite the appearance of closure and finality the Phenomenology “engages the repetitive, restless energy of the dialectic, its obsessive, circular doing and undoing: every inscription supplies its own erasure, every erasure its own reinscription, and this intransitive, tautological transition from negation to negation is relentless.” Proclaiming all scars healed enacts a violent erasure of its own. The form of the text remains scarred even if Hegel declares it conceptually healed. Comay claims that “the Phenomenology is the perfect case study of interminable analysis”; “antidote is… indistinguishable from injury, health from illness, and poison from cure.” It is this repressed or unresolved tension that Rose sees in Freud’s definition of mourning and that I want to argue can also be discerned in Klein’s essay. The wound remains hidden beneath a rhetorical sticking plaster that masquerades as healed flesh, but which threatens to fall off at any moment. Scars remain; wounds are not left behind. Maybe mourning never really ends, but that’s not the same as saying that nothing changes.

– hannah proctor, "mourning interminable"

I move alone without daddy forwards BACKWARDS through the hotel. The hotel is now, is really large transparent squares. I glide to the final back room. The back wall of this room is really windows. Windows are opaque. Windows through which I’m seeing a black phosphorescent ocean. None of the men in daddy’s band want to be with me and daddy’s with Sally. I want to go swimming I have to go swimming. The ocean is bright green, even though it’s night. The ocean is glowing. Now the window is totally transparent. Through it I see a man’s body as if dead turning in the sparkling green water. I wanted a fur coat. Little halls surround one long black major hall. Thin white walls, almost non-existent, separate these halls. I bought a red sweater in the Junior Department on the third floor so anyone who was watching would know that I wasn’t a thief. Then I rode the escalator upstairs to the Fur Department. Tossing my brown woolen coat across a rack, I tried on fur after fur. Stealing is luxury. Ten or fifteen minutes later the salesgirl had to run across the hall to get change. Of course, daddy and Sally and the boys in his band are given their rooms first. My room is the room no one else in the world wants. My bedroom is the huge white hexagon in the front left corner of the hotel. It has no clear outside or inside or any architectural regularity. Long white pipes form part of its ceiling. Two of its sides, which two is always changing, are open. My bedroom's function is also unclear. Its only furniture is two barber's chairs and a toilet. It's a gathering place for men. Hotel men dressed in white and black come in and want to hurt me. They cut away parts of me. I call for the hotel head. He explains that my bedroom used to be the men's toilet. I understand. My cunt used to be a men's toilet. I walk out in a leopard coat.

— Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

list of texts that have changed me forever:

• i love dick – chris kraus

• blood and guts in high school – kathy acker

• angels in america – tony kushner

• endgame – samuel beckett

• the piano teacher – elfriede jelinek

• after delores – sarah schulman

• the lonely city – olivia laing

• girls against god – jenny hval

• rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead – tom stoppard

• close to the knives – david wojnarowicz

• keeping things whole – mark strand

• self portrait against red wallpaper – richard siken

‘This’ is the world.” ... ‘This’ is the realm of complete freedom: I can put down anything.

Acker wrote incessantly, filling notebook after notebook throughout 1970 and beyond, later typing up extracts that she called poems. She wrote so much that a tenant on the floor below complained about the incessant clatter of her typewriter. Writing was pleasure, possibility, perversion; she was devoted to it, obsessed with it, addicted to it—“this writing is getting to be like junk I’m going crazy doing it want more.” When she wanted to show Freilicher just how much writing meant to her, she drew a circle and said, “This is the area of freedom—writing.” Then she’d point outside the circle and say, “This is the world.” ... Imagining: “This is the realm of complete freedom: I can put down anything.”) But in the pages of these notebooks, “writing” and “the world” form something more like a Venn diagram—the two overlap, creating something altogether new. Writing, for her, was alchemical, the freedom to rearrange and reimagine the world. Even decades later, in a letter to the film theorist Peter Wollen, another writer and friend, she still held on to her belief in the transformative liberation of writing: “… it’s only one fucking life one life to do everything to do everything to the hilt. I am stupidly romantic, and writing is one way, no possibility left of hiding lying keeping shut. I don’t like being in pain, but I’ll take pain any day over prison. Every day what writing for me is my fight against the prison…”

— Jason McBride, “Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker“ (Simon & Schuster, November 29, 2022) 

Jason McBride, from Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker (Simon & Schuster, 2022)

It also helped that most of her students were big fans of hers when they arrived, and even bigger fans by the time they left. Her classes, usually three hours long and between fifteen and twenty students, were always oversubscribed. After her first year there, students were required to submit three writing samples to be considered for admission. She understandably gravitated toward students whose writing felt fresh and unusual, who had an interest in postmodernism or experimentation, as well as those who’d had tough lives, who seemed damaged. “Half of them come out of serious child abuse, sexual and other,” she told a friend. She doted on the students with tattooed skulls, the trans men, the ones who’d worked in porn. But you didn’t even have to be enrolled at SFAI necessarily; if she found you compelling enough, you could be a high-school dropout and still take her classes. Over the years, several of her students would go on to successful writing and art careers: Lynn Breedlove, Anna Joy Springer, Alicia McCarthy, Geoffrey Farmer, Xylor Jane, Erin Courtney.

The class was, for all intents and purposes, a writing workshop, but with an unmistakable Ackerian flavor. “Only one thing’s forbidden here,” she would announce at the start of the term. “You’re not allowed to bore me. Never bore me. Just be honest. Dishonesty is boring. Honesty is always interesting.” The first writing exercise she’d give students was to write a sex scene involving them and a family member. Then she’d have them pass their assignment to the person sitting next to them, who would then read it out loud. “Write from your father’s point of view,” went another assignment, “but in the voice of a schizophrenic.” She would tell her students to try, as she did, to write while masturbating. “I was like, ‘Wha...?’,” remembered Lynn Breedlove. “I can barely do one at a time.” This was something that Acker famously did, for a brief while keeping what she called the Masturbation Journals. “I start,” she writes in one example. “Do I want porn? If I’ve got porn can I write this journal? (Do this do that: get all those thots [sic] out of mind, back to dreams where all the animals live) ... I will float forever ...”

...

At the beginning of class, she also told her students that she wasn’t there to solve their problems; she was going to be neither mother nor shrink. That disclaimer, students soon found, was a bit of misdirection—she could, in fact, be extremely nurturing. When one student, for example, arrived to class on her motorcycle, her bare hands freezing, Acker promptly gave the woman an old pair of hers. She could be especially supportive when it came to students’ writing. She told many of them to never give up on their writing. “She almost violently grabbed me by my braids,” said Anna Joy Springer, “and said, ‘You’re so good, Anna Joy, don’t you dare stop writing. I think you’re the reincarnation of Jean Genet.’ I had no idea who that even was.”

...

Springer was dating Lynn Breedlove, the founding member of Tribe8, a queercore band that often spoofed the antics of straight hair bands like Bon Jovi. Breedlove wasn’t technically a student at SFAI, but Springer brought him to the Edinburgh Castle and he was immediately intrigued. “There was this little, short, butch-femme, leather-clad, Harley-riding New Yorker babe,” Breedlove remembered, “talking about this French porno philosophy shit. And I was like, ‘Whoa.’ She had my attention.” Breedlove had a degree in English from Cal State and liked to condense literary and philosophical ideas into three-chord rock songs, bestowing this knowledge, he said, on kids who couldn’t afford college. Acker, he felt, was engaged in a similar project, making ideas and information accessible in her own way too. In Acker’s class, he wrote about years lost to drugs and alcohol and about his past life as a bike messenger. That writing would eventually become Godspeed, Breedlove’s first novel. “She made herself so accessible to all of us,” he said. “And validated us. She said, ‘Okay, you guys are young, you’re queer, you’re fucking way out on the edges of society, and the world needs to hear about your lives’.” Acker hired Tribe8 to make music for her spoken-word album Redoing Childhood, taking producer Hal Willner to a concert the night before the recording session, where the band proceeded to cut up several large green and blue dildos on stage. Acker called Tribe8 the “hottest band in San Francisco” and Breedlove “one of the dreams I had had when I was a girl.”

...

“She was learning a lot,” Springer said. “How to have sexual intimacy with women, about diverse gender roles, about power plays that didn’t have exact representational parallels in real life. I think she was learning about queerness, feminist queerness.” That said, and as much as Acker loved the idea of queerness, as much as she thought of herself as queer, sex with women was still only rarely appealing to her.

...

Springer saw this too, though in somewhat different terms. Acker was in her forties, had never had kids, and was watching a generation of young queer women come of age, third-wave feminists who could have been her children, who she had, in a way, given permission to be. “She never thought that what was happening in feminist, dyke, punk, S and M, anti-moralistic culture could happen with women,” Springer said. “She was, like, ‘Oh my god, you kids are doing amazing things. The future might be possible’.”

After this im reading Kathy Acker (vibe shift)

hi how was that kathy acker biography you were reading?

i'm honestly pretty conflicted about it! Writing a straightforward biography of a woman whose life project was in large part self-mythologizing is honestly offensive to me on an emotional level that I can't totally justify. But I just read this Vulture piece and I feel like it does a good job summing up both the problems of the book and the appeal of it. I'm working through After Kathy Acker rn and definitely prefer that.

I sit on my brand new bed and dream about ways to kill myself something I know I’ll never do or at least in this moment in time I know I won’t . Right now I have a body that works which I am so lucky for but being grateful is for optimists and I am nothing of the sort . I have this endless need to be needed

I sit in  my school full of spoiled kids from Brooklyn who haven’t experienced a thing in their life ( at least I think so ) they are mostly incredibly boring and far too optimistic for my liking. I love to hate, it brings me joy unimaginable to piss someone off for reasons that truly don’t matter. It is a joy that cannot be replicated and to watch their reaction of squirming and delusions is like a reality show where you only get the best parts.  My brain is turning into rot . I say these things to anyone and feel like I should be locked up in a cave I’m crazy I think or at least that’s what these kids tell me I become it for them something like an art piece too real that I can’t detect it. I’m only like that around people I feel no need to impress because they’ve already made up their mind about me .

People have always hated me but never for anything real always for something such as becoming this cartoon character that I feel I must become . I hate silence there’s something about dead air full of teenagers who think they’re better than you that makes me want to give them something they don’t want : a problem . I’m crazy , I admit to it most of the time but I don’t think anyone understands the scope. I got sent away for it and the scary thing is I think it made me worse . I had normal depression but I was so dumb . In mental hospital is where I learned the fastest way to kill yourself is to cut yourself. Hot dog style not hamburger. I saw kids getting taken away and kids beaten the shit out of them by full grown adults .

I’m a problem my existence is something I  want to understand but never I will. I sat in my bed last night watching alien workshop skate videos listening to drumless rappers who are able to put their pain to art . Sometimes I feel I only put my pain into pain. I feel stupid I so desperately need human connection to feel the warmth that I think everyone feels. I fall in love with people seconds and years after meeting them and fantasize but often give up knowing that love is something that feels impossible at the moment. They say life will get better and I think that’s true for a lot of my people but not for me the circuits in my brain don’t work unless my 100 dollars of medication are on I vision a gun shooting me  directly in mouth and I swallow the bullet and scream for help but there’s nothing I can do I love life I hate it . PLEASE  KILL  ME . xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

kathy acker used to write and masturbate I often think about the inclinations of masturbation like the men these days are doing we are all always rotting so is are brain . Jack skelly follows me on instagram and lives on my bookshelf I had to cut the lines out of my college essay about being too high and reading his book in Tompkins square park . I become normal under the influence almost as if it has the reverse effects no one should ever let me ramble but they do and I love them for it . I often think how stupid my problems are and I think that is the most helpfull thing I can do . I think about the kids getting their lives ripped apart  in Palestine at the moment and they are still able to smile at least a fake one and I am not. I’m so prententious

#ariana grande #diva #photo shoot

I want to die I’m reading a book and I enjoy it. it’s written by Lena Dunham’s best friend does that make me not cool does that make me one of the bushwick fagotts who think their all that and move here from Ohio . I imagine myself in 30 years living in my car somewhere in the middle of nowhere smoking packs of cigarettes with all my money spent on odd vhs tapes and records and Ephrema that no one else seems to care about I hate New York and what’s its becoming I sat and listened to navy blue looking at clips of New York from when I was a kid and crying it wasn’t as good as it feels I was just a kid I still am I got kicked of my statistics class for not talking yet everyone always wants that to happen i never shut up I envision my self slamming my head into a door and blood trickling down until I drop I used to be scared of these thoughts but I’m not anymore they are almost like a sadistic lullaby , that at some point this will all stop

I’m scared pls don’t admit me back into belluve it’s not fun drugs are funny till they’re not and it’s all fun and games till you get fat and everyone’s skinny I want eating disorder that makes me skinny is that bad to say everyone’s too pc and I hate it not because I’m someone who wants to go on rants about people who don’t deserve it but It leaves no room for emotions the emotions you won’t say I remember watching the videos of the people falling out of the building during 9/11 in the sixth grade I think it plays on a loop in my head PLEASE KILL ME. Ok bye  bye pls don’t read this even though I’ll post for the world to see  “goodbye horses im crying over you”- q Lazzarus everything fades I hope I do too plz don’t help me I’m feeling better now the meds are kicking in thank god for scientists kill the politicians and to all goodnight . My crush is Stevie buscemi and Ronald McDonald is my savior I love you Lindsay Lohan but that’s a story for another day FUCK YOU. And the credits role

from my substack pls read

Fiona Apple I’m amorous but out of reach a still life drawing of a peach. Insert Kathy acker quote about frigidity I’ll reference my PDF of Eurydice in the underworld after work I can’t think of any right now

Stills from Blue Tape Reprise 2023

(after Kathy Acker)

Exhibited at Through the Eyes of a Pigeon

Google How to act like a normal person after reading kathy acker Right Now Fast

There is so much, so much to say. So much, these days. And I’m sleep-deprived so this entry will be a haphazard list rather than a well-thought-out piece of prose, but I need to get some of this down because there’s just going to keep being more and more and more.

—The last day of March I dressed up in a very queer-punk getup to attend the Queer Youth Assemble rally in Kenosha. I put my harness on along with my other undergarments, and over that I wore tall black boots and a loose, long black dress and my leather jacket that has studs and appliqué roses on it (the one I always describe as cowpunk-meets-Kathy Acker). I did elaborate eye makeup and darkened my wispy lil’ mustache with mascara, and went to the rally. And a bunch of my cishet ally friends were there, and a bunch of my queer and trans friends were there, including my crush Shelley. (Shelley is a pseudonym and yes, I did christen them that in an homage to both Mary and Percy Byshe, because they are goth and a poet.) All of us were in our Most Gender finery, complimenting each other, and Shelley looked super hot in their leopard coat and cat’s-eye glasses. After the rally ended due to rain, Shelley and a few other folks and I went out for beers and nachos and I can’t tell you how good it felt to be Out and Queer. In fact, our waiter (gender neutral) said they had wanted to be at the rally but couldn’t make it due to work and they thanked us for going and said we all looked ‘hot as fuck.’

—It got warmer as the day went on, rained more, then the fog rolled in, then thunderstorms, then back to just rain, and it was warm enough I was able to leave the window open overnight for the first time this year, and I could hear the rain and the trains.

—April first it got cold again, and the wind returned, and it was not my lover, this was brutal bitter asshole wind. I ran some errands, including meeting up with K. to pick up the Joe Strummer piece I commissioned him to do for Ali’s birthday. And then I had a bit of the sads, because the kids were cranky and I was PMSing. And because I was thinking about M., how it’s now been 18 years since he died, and how it still hurts that I can never tell him how much he meant to me. But I wrote some poems and took some selfies and then I drank a little too much wine and listened to W/IFS, like I do when I’m in my feelings.

—And the two days after that were kind of crappy, I was still sad and cranky from PMS, and stressed about the upcoming election. But I did some voter outreach stuff and wrote more poems and did some painting and ate dark chocolate and drank tea.

—Then election day, and despite the storms (including hail!) Wisconsin turned the fuck out, and the election turned out the way I had hoped, and I am so relieved that my state overwhelmingly voted against the right-wing extremist judge and that my town voted against the MAGA freak mayoral candidate. And P. and I had amazing sex that night.

—And the next couple days were mostly about packing for a trip to Door County, and more poems, and more sex. And there was more rain, more storms, but also warmth, and bits of sun and butterflies, and the greening grass.

—Two days before Easter, we headed north. Everything was muddy and brown and we saw e a lot of birds—hawks and herons and wild turkeys. There were road snacks and road silliness. We saw a truck that said Lubenow on it, and we figured out later it had to be someone’s last name (like Luben-ow), but it was like “got it, looks like Lube Now.” And at the rest area we usually stop at there’s this big Wisconsin tourism sign that’s supposed to look like a license plate, and it says LUV R AG (as in Love Our Agriculture), but again, because of the kerning and design, it looks like Luv Rag. So P. and I were making jokes about how Luv Rag sounds like the name of a band of sleazy middle-aged dudes trying to cling to their ‘80s hair metal days, and I said: “Thank you! We are Luv Rag, and this is our new single, ‘Lube Now!’”

—We were up there for five nights, 4.5 days. It was less stressful than staying with my parents usually is, and except for the first half of our first full day there, the weather was great. I ate a ton of good food and stayed up late writing most nights; found out about a sonnet contest I’m going to enter. P. and I got to go out, just the two of us, several times. We went out for drinks a few times; got to sit out by the fire pit at Door County Brewing Co. and listen to a great folk musician who goes by the name of Hunter Gatherer. (I already liked him cuz when we first arrived, he was playing a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and then a bit later he was introducing one of his originals and said: “This song’s about running from the cops.” And I liked him even more.) Other times we just drove around the peninsula, or went hiking in Peninsula State Park and exploring our favorite tiny old cemetery. Our last full day there, we took the kids swimming (in a pool, not the lake—it’s still way too cold for that!), and I hadn’t been swimming in years and I had forgotten how much I love it, how at home I feel in the water, like that’s where I belong, like that’s where my body works the way it should.

—We arrived home to the daffodils and violets in bloom and everything even greener, buds on the trees, more warm weather, and there were days of childlike joys and nights of adult pleasures. Days of playing hopscotch with C. and reading endless books, of iced coffee and shooting hoops and watching the backyard birds and squirrels. One evening, we even got to grill for the first time this year, and make s’mores for dessert. Nights of drinking a bit, and hot sex, and staying up late writing.

—Then it got cold again, and it rained, then snowed. Yesterday I felt really bad for the first half of the day. Partly cuz of the weather; gray and cold and gloomy and it was hard being cooped up inside again after that week of warmth and sunshine. Partly cuz I was sleep-deprived (the kids have been waking up hella early lately.) Partly cuz fucking everything was making me cry. I dunno, I was having weird-bad gender feels, and also feeling uninspired/unmotivated writing-wise, like ‘oh, I made it through the first half of NaPoWriMo, but I think I’m tapped out now.’ And maybe a bit of that ol’ pre-Mercury Rx shadow period creeping in there, bringing up old issues and feelings—I was missing my good old bad old scumbag days. The days of freight hoppin’ and basement shows and circus freakery, and dumpster diving and busking and long bike rides across cities, of wheat paste and graffiti and stick n’ pokes and sleeping out, under the stars, giving myself over to scary thoughts, & omens, & excess. The days when most everyone I knew had a clown act and a copy of the Crew Change Guide. I made a cup of tea and lay in bed watching Netflix for a while. First I watched the “Beyond the Binary” episode of Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness, and then I watched Mae Martin’s new comedy special, Sap. And of course both of those have to do with gender stuff (at least in part), and both of them talked about growing up queer/GNC and having such a hard time and turning to drug abuse and other self-destructive behaviors, even though they were white, middle-class kids who were not kicked out by their parents. And I was like, oh hey, me too. And both shows made me cry, and it was good cathartic crying, but I still felt like shit afterwards. So then I started thinking about some ways to bring back some of the less-destructive aspects of my scumbag days back into my life, and I was still feeling sad, and then I decided to check in on the contest results of the WB Yeats Poetry Prize and the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize.

Both of them said they’d announce the contest winners on their websites sometime in or after March. The Yeats Prize said it would also contact the winners directly; the Ginsberg Prize said no such thing, but I assumed they would. Starting in mid-March, I was checking both sites every few days or so, and obsessively checking my email/snail mail. And nothing, nothing, nothing. The last time I’d checked the sites was April 3, and yesterday I was like: “Well, it’s been two weeks, there must be some news by now,” and I was assuming I would go on and see the list of winners and my name would not be there and maybe it was a bad idea because I was already feeling so crappy, but then I was also kinda like, well, I might as well get all the bad feelings out of the way at once. But still, on both websites, the most recent winner’s list was from 2022. And then, I shit you not, like eight minutes later, P. brought the mail in and handed me an envelope. Return address: The Poetry Center At Passaic County Community College, One College Blvd., Paterson, NJ. Location of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. My hands shook as I opened it. And…I fucking won! Not first, second, or third place, but I don’t even care because one of the poems I sent them (the one that is probably, in my opinion, among the best poems I’ve ever written, but also one of the riskiest) received an Editor’s Choice Award! And it’s gonna be published in the Spring 2024 issue of the Paterson Literary Review, and I’ve been invited to participate in the awards ceremony/reading there, next February.

I don’t even know how to express how much this means to me. Professionally, but also personally. Like, first of all, New Jersey is such a huge part of my personal mythology. I was conceived in New Jersey! So many of the people who have meant the most to me, personally/artistically, have New Jersey roots! Like Allen Ginsberg! And Jack Terricloth! And Bruce Springsteen! And my witchwife, Penny! And also just, well, I mean god, Allen Ginsberg. For better or worse, the Beat Generation and punk rock have been the most enduring influences on me/my writing, starting at a very young age, and Allen Ginsberg is definitely towards the very top of that “beat + punk influence list.” I just. Can’t. Fucking. Get Over It. Can’t quite believe it! I keep touching the letter they sent me to remind myself it’s real. (It’s on the Poetry Center’s official stationery, which is on beautiful, thick, creamy paper.) I keep blowing kisses at my framed photo of Ginsberg, one where he’s sitting at his typewriter, writing a poem.

—So yesterday evening, P. and I dropped the kids off at my folks’ house for a bit. We went to pick up takeout dinner for everyone, but also got to have a celebratory whiskey while we waited. And I stayed up late last night. First, I wrote a poem—guess I wasn’t totally tapped out, after all. Then I was just awake scheming and planning (and wishing and hoping). About immediate future stuff, like this year’s vegetable garden, and going through my books to find some to donate to the library’s book sale. As well as the positive scumbaggery I can reincorporate into my life—I remembered that I bought myself that stick n’ poke kit last year, so soon I’m gonna give myself a new tattoo; and I started thinking up ideas for a poetry wheatpaste project. And then—travel. I still wanna travel a bit this year, but I think I’m gonna keep it mostly midwest. Then, next year, I’m gonna head out east again finally, after all these years, for the awards ceremony, but I’m gonna try to book a mini-tour around it, and there will be old friends and new friends and old haunts and…yeah. I am so fucking ready.

—And today I’m sleep deprived, again—I was up late, and the kiddos once again got up stupid early. But I don’t even mind. I got some writing done and listened to some podcasts and oh, tomorrow I get to go see Bikini Kill. I’ve been waiting for this concert for over three years (from when I first bought the tickets in December 2019, before it got postponed many many times due to CoViD), but I’ve also been waiting for this concert since I was twelve—from when I first heard Bikini Kill, and wanted to go see them, but then they broke up before I got the chance. (And yeah, I saw Le Tigre a couple times, and that was fun, but not the same.) And there’s a lot of stuff going on right now that teen me and early-to-mid twenties me would be super stoked about—like the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize, like seeing Bikini Kill, like stick n’ pokes and wheatpaste and travel plans. And that feels kinda great; showing my younger self that I am still rocking that shit at my advanced (haha) age. And just overall, things are so good lately. There is so much joy, even in the mundane. Even the bad shit doesn’t seem as bad as it did for a while, because in these past four months I have proven to myself that my life isn’t over, that I can still do rad shit, that I can still experience beauty and joy.