This newsletter aims to please
When I exchange a book with you, I’m definitely flirting—inviting you to take an intimate peek into the stories that shape my mind.
I want you to flirt too. I hope you read and continue to share the books I recommend here, whether that’s to heat up a book exchange with your current flame, spice things up with your long-term lover(s), or explore ideas to arouse your own intellect.
Prepare to fantasize about new worlds, dominate conversations with your never-ending search for wisdom and submit to the awe-inspiring magic of literature.
I’m Very Into You
By Kathy Acker & McKenzie Wark
👩❤️💋👩 queer theory 🫦 flirting 🍿 pop culture 💌 love letters 🤫 salacious gossip 🤩 iconic writers 😵💫 situationships 🎭 cultural criticism 🥀 90s nostalgia
“I love being wanted. I love being someone’s object.” [K.A.]
Why this book is hot
This intimate epistolary novel is a late 90s time capsule of the tempestuous, intellectual and flirty email correspondence between Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark, writers, intellectuals and pop culture icons.
Acker met Wark on a trip to Australia in 1995, where they had a brief fling and afterwards shared a heated two-week email correspondence. They wrote each other in a frenzy, several times a day, flirting by way of small talk about Alfred Hitchcock, stuffed animals, Georges Bataille, Elvis Presley, The Simpsons, phenomenology, Marxism, The X-files, psychoanalysis, and the I Ching.
If Acker is new to you, she’s having a bit of a moment right now (see: this biography, this contested biography and this art exhibit) but please don’t let that make you think she’s just a fad. An experimental writer and sex worker, she was present in so many pop culture moments of the late 20th century, she’s basically the queer Forest Gump of New Left political activism, conceptual art, 90s punk and third-wave feminism. If you’ve liked anything produced by Joey Soloway, you might like Kathy Acker.
As if all that weren’t hot enough, sex and writing for Acker, were as connected as writing and reading.
“One thing I do is stick a vibrator up my cunt and start writing—writing from the point of orgasm and losing control of the language and seeing what that’s like.”
Acker fucked with gender and genre: moving between novel and poetry, philosophy and journalism, art and entertainment. She plagiarized and reworked texts from Cervantes, Propertius, Dickens, Faulkner, collaging these with excerpts from her own diaries, sexual fantasies, gossip, and analyses of capitalism, patriarchy, and linguistics.
This was about sex as well. On repetition and imitation in writing, Patrick Greaney, associate professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder writes,
“poets burrow into language, but they, too, are dug into, penetrated by the very language that they want to overcome or keep at a distance.”
In 1997, Acker died of breast cancer.
Wark is Professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York City. She writes about and teaches media theory, critical theory, new media, media art, and the Situationist International. Wark’s work, like Acker’s, subverts the linear form of memoir, interweaving fragments of biography and auto-fiction with emails and Facebook posts. Her work argues against the typical hero narrative, insisting that the self is destabilized and can only be known through fractured and fragmented realities, if that. About Kathy’s work, Wark writes,
“Reading Kathy again helped me to transition: I came out as trans in the midst of reading and writing about her. I wanted to escape masculinity, but I didn’t know where to. Kathy just seemed intuitively to be the writer to hold my hand through that.”
Both writers’ work insists that being a person is never a neat and tidy experience. The evolution of self is a non-stop somersault down life’s hill, where along the way we gather debris as we careen and bounce, in a full-tilt plummet, straight from the sky. You’ll either love this kind of brutal disorientation or absolutely hate it. Personally, I’m a complexity thot.
I’m Very Into You is a great introduction to both writers, who in this text oscillate between genders, sexualities, ambiguity and certainty. Their identities and desires are in a constant state of flux, just as their writing always is. It’s a tantalizing time capsule and I hope it seduces you.
Have a crush but not ready to commit?
“Kathy Acker’s Art of Identity Theft”, The New Yorker
“Neil Gaiman on the Great Kathy Acker”, LitHub
“Why Post-Punk Pioneer Kathy Acker is Making a Comeback,” Financial Times
“McKenzie Wark / Refuge in the Unseen: On Queer Raves,” YouTube
McKenzie Wark on Twitter
Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker, McKenzie Wark
Jimmy DeSana: Submission, Exhibit at Brooklyn Museum, November 11, 2022–April 16, 2023