Kathy Acker was against creativity
“I set up this task, this nutty task basically, and I’d do it!”
Welcome to the 136th issue of Subtle Maneuvers, my fortnightly newsletter on wriggling through a creative life. Or maybe “creative” is the wrong word? Keep reading for more on that… and if you’d like to support the newsletter, your paid subscriptions mean a lot, thank you!
Kathy Acker (1947–1997)
Last week, for my ongoing/never-ending book project, I spent some time reading about the American writer Kathy Acker’s history of day jobs. As a young writer in the early 1970s, Acker loathed the idea of normal, nine-to-five employment—“A straight job would lobotomize me,” she said—and opted for sex work instead: acting in porn films with her then-boyfriend; performing live sex shows at Fun City in Times Square with the same boyfriend (they had a Santa Claus routine; the sex was simulated); and stripping in sailor bars in San Diego. These gigs paid better and took up less time than “straight” jobs—at Fun City, Acker only had to work one day a week; she wrote the other six days—and they gave Acker a new perspective on society and relationships that proved fruitful for her writing. “You see people from the bottom up,” she said.
Acker’s approach to writing was just as radical as her approach to paying the rent. Inspired by a poetry class taught by David Antin in which he instructed students to make poems out of snippets of text they copied from library books, Acker started making longer prose works with this same method. She would lift passages from existing books, make some small changes as she felt like it (or not), and insert excerpts from her own real-life diaries alongside the “plagiarized” passages to create something bracingly original, though not everyone agreed about the readability of the final results. (For every reader who found Acker’s method brilliant and inspiring, there were probably a dozen who found it insufferable and self-indulgent.)
Asked how she made things hold together without a proper narrative, Acker said, “I couldn’t have cared less in those days. I wrote so many pages a day and that was that.” She set up “guidelines” for each piece, and then simply executed the work according to the rules she had established. “It was task work,” she said. “I really didn’t want any creativity, so I set up this task, this nutty task basically, and I’d do it!”
“I’m trying to get away from self-expression but not from personal life,” one of Acker’s narrators says in The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, one of her earliest works, originally published as a series of self-produced pamphlets that Acker mailed to a small subscriber list. “I hate creativity. I’m simply exploring other ways of dealing with events than ways my lousy habits—mainly instilled by parents and institutions—have forced me to act.”
I really didn’t want any creativity . . . I hate creativity. To be honest, I find this approach pretty refreshing? In the last decade-plus, “creativity” has become such a universally celebrated virtue—desirable not just for writers and artists but for pretty much everyone in pretty much every context—that, more and more, I feel myself wanting to rebel against it. Maybe we need less creativity! Or at least less of this warm, fuzzy, corporate-friendly “creativity” and more of the spiky, transgressive, anti-establishment brand that Acker gleefully lobbed over the transom.
ACKER’S ROUTINE
“I’ve always made myself write two pages a day, sometimes more, never less,” Acker said in a 1989–90 conversation with Sylvére Lotringer published in Kathy Acker: The Last Interview. She kept this up regardless of what else was going on in her life, whether it was stripping in sailor bars, traveling around the world to give readings, or obsessively bodybuilding in the 1980s—though, for Acker, bodybuilding wasn’t so different from writing. The biographer Jason McBride writes:
Acker loved to talk about bodybuilding in terms of failure, noting that a weight lifter could only build new muscle by first breaking it down, by pushing it past the point of failure. She saw in this an analogy for her own writing process. Language, for her, was also about collapse and creation.
By the 1980s, Acker had also developed a rigorous editing method: She said that she rewrote every book eight times (!), each time with a different criteria in mind: “once for sound, once for meaning, once for ‘beauty’, once for structure, once in the mirror for performativity etc.” Acker was notorious for stretching the truth in interviews, but even if this is only partway true it shows how much iron discipline underlay her seemingly chaotic texts.
↑ Acker lifting weights in an hourlong TV documentary that aired in England in 1984 and made her an almost instant literary celebrity there; she moved to London shortly afterward.
DO YOU EVEN NEED A ROUTINE?
Acker may have been against creativity but she wasn’t against routine—is anyone?? Personally, I’ve always agreed with William James, who said: “There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.”
Anyway, this is a long windup to saying that I was delighted last week to find my books mentioned on Angela Duckworth and Mike Maughan’s No Stupid Questions podcast, in an episode on this very subject: “Do You Need a Routine?” Obviously I think the answer is yes; listen to their (very smart) thoughts on the subject here.
VIBRATIONS OF CHANCE
Another fun recent connection: The Inland Empire–based musician and composer Ritual Fade just released a new album, and the title, Vibrations of Chance, comes from an Agnes Varda quote she found in my second Daily Rituals book. Here’s the moody first single from the album—buy it on Bandcamp here—followed by the Varda quote.
Varda said in a 1985 interview:
You know artists used to talk about inspiration and the muse. The muse! That’s amusing! But it’s not your muse, it’s your relationships with the creative forces that makes things appear when you need them.… So you have to work with free association and dreaminess, let yourself go with memories, chance encounters, objects. I try to achieve a balance between the rigorous discipline I’ve learned in my thirty years of making films and these many unforeseen moments and the vibrations of chance.
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Creativity is a trap. We’re all fishing in the same pond. Some of us have bigger boats and more expensive gear. Some of us stick around after hours to find the weird fish with fangs that glow in the dark.
I love the idea of being against creativity (or at least the commercial application of it). Acker’s approach to rules is lovely and whether she is avoiding being creative, having rules frees her up to make / do her tasks.
The discussion in No Stupid Questions was very smart and also resonated in the same way. One thing that struck me was how Duckworth talked about the different areas of the brain - how the goal part was separate to the habit part. So are ‘creative’ routines more like goals? If so, having rules will help.