Leslie Jamison Talks to Chris Kraus About Forthcoming Historiography of Kathy Acker

Chris Kraus and Leslie Jamison strike up a lively conversation for Interview Magazine; the topic at hand is After Kathy Acker, the forthcoming, highly anticipated biography Kraus has written of Kathy Acker. "[I]t's not just a biography of one person, but also a historiography," says Kraus. They discuss formal influence, Kraus's first go at the book after Acker died in 1997, and Acker's versions of herself, her ever-changing reportage of events, how speech changes depending on one's interlocutor: 

JAMISON: Could you see different personas in how she corresponded with different people? 

KRAUS: Oh, absolutely! But, then, that's true for anyone. Speech is relational, and people present themselves differently depending on who they are talking to. Maybe this was truer with Kathy, because she was so ambitious and intentional. Her motives were always so clear. For instance, in Bernadette Mayers' archive, you see this huge gap between Kathy's letters to Bernadette and the ones written by Susan Howe and Alice Notley. 

JAMISON: How so?

KRAUS: Susan and Alice rarely talked about themselves. There wasn't this kind of strident "I, I, I." They talked about what they were reading, about their pregnancies, about the weather. They adhered to the classical form of a literary correspondence. They were lovely letters. But Kathy was, like, "I gave Ed Dorn's friend a blowjob in the bathroom. It was a great night. I need money. Send me books" [laughs].

JAMISON: Those are sometimes the best letters to get. When I look back at my old G-Mail threads from my early twenties, I can see some letters that made me feel like, "Fuck, why am I not David Remnick's assistant yet?" But then it was so great when somebody wrote to say, "Today I woke up and, like, waited until 4 to get drunk." 

KRAUS: It's annoying to have friends who see their life as a kind of perpetual elevation, right?

JAMISON: Totally. I would love to get a letter about giving somebody a blowjob in a bathroom stall in Brooklyn. [both laugh]. Did you find that your relationship with Kathy Acker—as a person or a subject—changed over the course of the project?

KRAUS: I didn't really know her personally. But as a spectator I was very alienated by her image in the end. At first I was seduced by it, like most people. But by the end of the '80s or early '90s, it started to look silly and tired and forced. When I started work on the book, it was more about looking beyond the image, you know? Trying to access the person through her writings and through little fragments and bits and pieces of what people said. But I was also trying to access those eras. One of my motives for writing the book was to present an alternative history to the one that appears in memoirs of the glorious '70s and '80s in New York City. They seem so false. Writing about Kathy was a chance to correct some of that and put people into the story who are usually edited out. I mean, that's what art history does, right?

Read it all at Interview, if you please.