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.
