Kathy Acker

you and i have had a big connection mondo yeah Yeah, even Jaron

Laney, at that point, often called the godfather of VR, he was dating a woman named Kathy Acker, who was a very famous author before she passed away, and I was her intern.

So VR was really in my world, and that was something, oh, it's just around the corner.

And it's been just around the corner so much so that and there's a i just read a phenomenal book on vr and where is it going but it's and it was it was really well done it was really neat and nothing in it is technically wrong but i don't believe it at all i just don't believe it at all i i think i've been fond of saying the metaverse exists nowhere other than mark zuckerberg's magic underwear um Right.

Part of this

is kind of, I've been reading a biography of Kathy Acker called something about eating, eat my mind or something like that.

And it talks about her writing her first kind of genre book.

And then it also went into around the same time she was hanging out with a...

a

complication between am I going to make stuff or consume it? Not that I'm not consuming stuff.

Like, I was just listening to that Kathy Acker biography.

And I have, you know, listened to a number of books since I've been making this podcast.

Okay.

This next one is Empire of the Senseless, a novel by Kathy Acker.

And I've never read any Kathy Acker, but she's considered a pretty wild author, kind of known for her transgressive literature.

Have you ever read anything from her? I don't think

so.

So there's a fantastic bookstore down in Mass called Raven News Books in Shelburne Falls.

And every time I go in there, they have a ton of Kathy Acker and always in fantastic condition.

And this one's no exception.

And I also

started this award called the Acre Awards.

Oh, yeah.

Tell me about that.

How do you say that? Acre?

A-C-K-E-R.

A-C-K-E-R. Acker Awards.

What's that stand for?

There were literally people driving around America with that on their bumper stickers on their fucking 4x4s.

You can't underestimate the amount of hatred that they were aware of and that they were railing against and that the disassociated people like me were like finding this and thinking fucking right on and I'd mentioned earlier on there were like little queer magazines like Square Peg that were around at the time that were capturing stuff like Coyle and Kathy Acker and a lot of dissonance that actually didn't really fit in the gay community particularly they weren't I mean, people at Liddy Lunch as well, who were just doing angry stuff at the time.

Yeah.

That we were all experiencing in the mid-80s.

the house

banning bitches from the house but I do think 99 problems and a bitch wasn't one well Jen's bitch wasn't one but I think that they they also kind of um To me, it wasn't necessarily about being gendered, it was about being part of an outlaw community.

So as I mentioned Kathy Acker, mentioned Burroughs, mentioned people like John Giorno, I think Cabri Voltaire are around in that period as well.

So I think that they could very quickly become part of a more international family of transgressors and outlaws.