the lit bit - june 2o26

After Kathy Acker (2017) - by Chris Krause

I don't do bios very often.  Maybe one to two a year, on average.  No real reason other than mental hygiene.  Fiction's my thing.  I try not to learn too much about my fave creators.  Because scuttlebutt may be part of art but it shouldn't be a primary point of access.

This was finished two days ago.  Normally I wouldn't carry over, and leave this last month, but...  Hell, it's the scuttlebutt aspect.  Kathy Acker knew Neil Gaiman.  Or was it Neil who knew Kathy?  There's an ambivalence in the text to this, in a book replete with tales of Who Fucked Whom.  In the light of Neil's troubles, and the fact that he could afford to throw lawyers at Todd McFarlane (with help from Marvel), it's near impossible not to speculate.

See, Kathy was in the London S&M scene, and she bought & sold 3-4 different flats around London & Brighton.  As Neil puts it, it's the resale of one of these flats that caused their friendship's elision.  He thinks.  Kathy was notoriously flighty with her friendships, and her passions, if they weren't one and the same.  And they rarely stayed stably in any of the three categories:  friendly, fucking, and friends who fuck.  It was pretty well known how she handled her intellectual & amorous affairs, which is why the reluctance around Gaiman's appearances stands out...

There was a specific lover who Kathy called "the German", and he's distinct from Gaiman in terms of having a proper name and different vocation, but there's some overlap in The German's m.o. in how he & Kathy conducted their affair.  The German, like Gaiman, was married.  Like Gaiman--  reputedly  --The German loved power games, headfucky semi-public scenarios, and thrilled to theatrical cruelty.  While it's possible they didn't ball, similarities between The German's amorous m.o. & testimony from Gaiman's accusers about the games he played are remarkable.  Maybe she told Neil about her adventures with The German, and he decided to re-enact those games with later partners.  Perhaps?

The ambivalence in Krause's narrative around the period these two are onstage with Acker is extremely curious; there is a sense of overlap between the characters for several pages, then the affair ends, quite abruptly, and Kathy sells her flat, fleeing London, optimistically, for a return to New York.

Gaiman doesn't show up again until the final two chapters, and that's when their friendship drifts out.  Over a real estate favour, where Gaiman was somehow responsible for selling her then-recently acquired but never-lived-in Brighton digs.  Gaiman himself sounds uncertain about what happened.  "I didn't sell it fast enough, I suppose," he mulls.  There is no further speculation.

And--  here's a thing  --there is not so much as a single mention of Delirium.  Or Kathy's reactions to being depicted in Sandman.  Which would have come up, as Delirium's development in the comic series occurred as she was living, and in those years Kathy was in her multimedia phase, moving from spoken word recordings to live shows with The Mekons and playing at scriptwriting...  Kathy being Kathy, all-about-Kathy, it's positively bizarre that there's no mention of her reacting to having a comix avatar over at DC.  She would have known.  She would have talked about it.  She had seven years to talk about it!!!

Sandman ended the year before she died.

I am not saying I smell lawyers circling the outer research waters of this book.  Because that would be actionable, and Neil has Miracleman on his side.  They were friends.  What more need be said.

See why I don't read biographies?

High Risk: An Anthology of Forbidden Writings (1991) - edited by Amy Scholder & Ira Silverberg

Bought this two years ago for an essay by William S. Burroughs.   Contains Kathy and Dennis Cooper and all the other belles of the big gay lit ball.  Since I needed a breather between, embarked on a short story by Gary Indiana, who I've never read before.  Gary was friends (frenemies?) with Kathy Acker & David Wojnarowicz.  Which has sweet fuck all to do with his cred as a writer.  This is strikingly well-written, clear-eyed work, with excellent atmosphere.

 

I'll pursue more Indiana soon.

Cruising (1970) - by Gerard Walker

Another carryover from last month.  Siegfried just finished reading it.  From everything he said about the plot, Friedkin worked to incorporate as much as possible into its film adaptation.  So I'm genuinely curious now.  Started first chapter last night.  Apparently the author was a fan of Samuel Fuller...?  Like, he namechecks Hitchcock, Kubrick, and "Sam what's-his-name, the B-movie guy whose mysteries are so big in France."

As I'm reading the sentence I finishing it aloud, and my husband's like "Knew you would fill in the blank.  Nerd."

The House of Impossible Beauties  (2018) - by Joseph Cassara

Next up!

when it's finished burning, let me know

Here's how I'm dealing with the end of the american century:  I'm waiting.

I am waiting for the stupid-ass, self-aggrandizing thing to burn.  I will wait for the careers & reputations & legacies & aspirations & monuments & expectations to catch the wild spark that will carry them out of this present hell and into finitude.  I will wait, and continue waiting, and when the cinders are starting to cool, I will wrap some nice potatoes in tin foil and slip them into the ash.

There is no coming back from this.  You all know that, right?  We're never going to put every one of these malingering whoremongers in jail.  Punishment is beyond our remit, as a citizenry; we are neither actively encouraged nor permitted to actually advance our progress, as a society, and it is our economic system that's at fault for that, first, and it is our vaingloriously up-its-own-ass legal system that makes it not only possible, but certain, that we will take uncountable lives and poison our environment, for war, and the profits from war, and the potential for profit above all.

We have thirsted for a god-king to spotlight & underline the essential rottenness of the american myth, and we got the fucker.  Racist grandpa is the one.  There's never been an example like this: and america is, politically speaking, the zenith of Bad Examples.  Roosevelt dreamt like Cthulhu itself of corruption & invidious largesse, forever, but even Roosevelt's distended id couldn't conceive of the beast A.I. rampant and bloody-handed in the marketplace.  This is the one, friends.

And hey, I'm waiting for him to die.  Who doesn't like to dream a petty dream?  I'm a big fan of waiting for the inevitable.  I'm sure either Rubio or Vance will prove to be incompetent and ditzy enough to satiate the average Saturday Night Life fan thirsting for a different set of personality tics to scoff at.  My money's on Rubio getting the seat next.  But however it rolls, believe me when I say it does not matter whether the shits won or not, anymore, because the fault was all ours for believing in this thing.

This two-party thing.  This set of false binaries.  This shell game.

I was not raised to believe in it.  Like some skin tag with delusions of being Athena, I grew from the brow of a peanut farmer.  Carter was the failure that bore me, specifically, just as my parents were failures for their dim abreactions to the Nixon administration, believing Kennedy, Johnson & co had established the furtherest limits of cupidity, avarice, and war.

Every last one of these names, deluded and rotten, my parents barely elevated amongst them.  Bad hippies & intransigient dope fiends, technophiles & science fiction dorks, believers in ice magick & the power of art, my parents founded their fucked-up little fam based on a surfeit of fabricated evidence.  They thought they'd seen enough to prove they knew how it would roll out.

And then they got Reagan, and that's when we all realized we had the math wrong.  By Reagan it was already too late.  My dreams, as a youth, were founded on apocalypse.  Though I did not know it.  Everything was the eschaton, everything was gaining momentum, the fundamentalists were prepared, plans in hand when the neo-liberals were barely hatched.  The game, as some stable genius neatly put it, was rigged.  American culture & American society is predicated on there being an End Time.  To have America, one must have a decline & a stop.  There is no dream without the wakeup.

There is no false dream of revolution without rubes to sell it to.  Grant Morrison needed an audience to sell the Invisibles, and he had exactly that in millennial-edge America, with our cute need to gobble ecstasy and attend Burning Man.  Lucky fucker.  He got me.  Morrison isn't fussed about pronouns anymore, are they?  Mozzer got filthy lucre and a Big Name in lights and even a settlement from the Wachowskis.  Who could ask for more, from America?

Dream a little dream.  Dream the littlest dream.

In the 80s we all held our breath and waited for Orwell's little book to come to pass, and were relieved when it proved to only be another anniversary, another birthdate, proving only the advancement of our gilded age.  1976 was the centennial, and we celebrated it with hack songs & a country twang.  Minted a special quarter.  Whoopie shit.  At least we got an Altman movie out of it.  The 250th is a cage match for human animals with no talent beyond basic brutality, a guest list of hasbeen disappointments-- including its Special Guest Speaker & Master of Ceremonies, the gilded birthday boy his own suety self --and a case of box office theft to rival Woodstock 50.

Ahh, that number.  That special, meaningless integer.

I am fifty this year.  I grew up dreaming about Skynet, and the ruins of Great Cities, and a mechanized heel sundering a human skull.  And here we are.  Here we bloody are.

I love you.  Whoever you are, reading these words.  We had a fun run.  Set your alarms for 2027.

three glimpses thru a window

The pile on the noon lawn is protean breakup debris: dude's clothes and plastic junk the shapes of which elude the sidewalking casual eye and hangers and papers and wrappers and razors and usb chargers and I keep walking, and when I return by an hour later the only thing to disturb it is the wind and eventually it is gone, over the course of the day, scattered, dispersed, collected, gone except for bill statements wetted and hung over privet hedge to dry and flake in the sun and be carried away over two days.  The secondfloor window from whence it spilled open one hour and closed the next for rain.  Nothing much seems to happen.

Days later going back home to finish laundry passing the cops wondering where they parked and nothing much seems to be happening on noonstreet, our foot patrol thumbs in their vests doing the slow strut up the steps to the building where the pile was, eyes on the secondfloor, calling in wondering Where she is.  I don't see their car and they don't seem on alert.  Switch the laundry out and back outside back past and the twentysomething hair up in a dayathome bun in blackshirt blackpants is explaining He's gone I put everything out But he has a key If you'll stay here I'll go up He's unpredictable.  My last walk back on the last load her head out the window one patrolman's saying If he comes back.

Same afternoon same street altogether empty except for the smoker in cloudgray wrestling taped-up gym bag 'round a sixpack gut, a standout, unfamiliar face wreathed in white cirrus as he passes fresh cigarette bogeyed to lips he busts out BRENDA behind me and I chance a look back, up, and to the left at the closed busted-out bedroom window the hole in the glass a parallellogram drawn with french curves, pieces of the whole laid on the patchy grass where billpaper mache coats the brush and cloudgray stranger shouts BRENDA, BRENDA he bawls again cigarette between his fingers and pacing the fence up and down up and down howling BRENDAAAHHH, and I'm fingering my phone but five minutes later he's gone.

what's he building in there (not comix)

 

the drawback to this paint on these found materials

is it takes forever for the wood to drink the paint

and you watch the paint change colour & texture

as it dries, thins & solidifies, bonding to the old layer

how it looks when you painted is NEVER how it appears dry

Tracing Gould - o16

"What can we expect from the 'reformed' Frank White?"

Christopher Walken smiles that nervous little needle-toothed grin, an aw gosh spasm of mirth, and the lines around his eyes are swept away by the seriousness of inspiration.

"Do you, know what I want to do to you, counselor?"

The counselor laughs, feeling glamorous as Kim Basinger cast as Vicki Vale--  there's a wallpapered poster just off Times Square covered in the Tim Burton Batlogo and she's wondering how long 'til it peels and starts to tatter and pretty soon junk ad tickertape parade for the paving over of the porno theatres  --and she jousts with the freshly showered, freshly sprung mobster.

"What's that?"

"I...  want to take you...  on, the subway."

And he does.  Because, after five years being escorted cage to cage to cage, he can.  And when the hoods come they don't come in a dozen, they're kids prowling, not real criminals.  Three to one eraserheaded cracker with a piece.  The counselor covering her bare breast almost as an afterthought.

Her eyes on Frank.  Everyone's eyes on Frank.  The grip angled like a hardon.  The lady or the tiger.

Frank pulls his money clip with an underhand toss and the wad spins into the skinny kid's damp palm.

"Come down to the Plaza.  I got work, for you."

Frank smiles his preferred Trump hotel customer smile.  Winks.  The kids backing away, eyes big, feeling the luckiest they've ever been, to be able to retreat.  Rich, healthy, pants freshly pissed.  Feeling wild and a little outta breath, not high.  Weirded out.

Thinking 'That piece was real.  This money's real.  Wazzat motherfucker actually real?'

There's no evidence Abel Ferrara ever gave a fuck about Dick Tracy.  But his little electric blue and goldlit epic paen to Christopher Walken's face, it's a Dick Tracy kinda vibe.  So this one goes here.

the lit bit - may 2o26

Man that brain damage don't fade quick.  Wrote last month up as April, just like the comix list.

The Films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Master of Fear (2007) - by Jerry White

Not terribly scintillating stuff.  A decent read if you want a clear-eyed view of the early filmography.  The plot recaps are the snooziest part, honestly.  Not much in the way of interpretation.  Baseline competent.  I am seriously overdue to watch 'Cloud' and 'Loft'.

Chicago: City on the Make (1951 / 1961) - by Nelson Algren

Annual re-read.  Nope, not one word about Chester Gould, nor a single allusion to Dick Tracy.  But pertinent nonetheless.  One of the best poems I've ever read.  You could do worse than try to mimic Algren's voice.  The coda, written in '61, has as much snark, sting and stentorian wrath as you might desire, standing directly on the steeltoed tips of the Cuban missile crisis, freshly simmering.  I'll probably be clipping & pasting pertinent bits into forthcoming Tracing Gould entries over the next few weeks.

One For Sorrow (2007) - by Christopher Barzak

There's a movie, which I haven't seen.  Thought I'd taste the book first.  Not quite in love with the language.  Has a flat, wallpapery affect.  I should finish this before 'Outline Of My Lover'.  But I didn't.  The writing is soporific.  The only thing more flat was the cover art, which looked to be AI generated, cropped weirdly and printed cheaply.  A swing and a whiff.

Outline Of My Lover  (2000) - by Douglas A. Martin

Michael Stipe's legendarily longest LTR wrote a book about dating Michael Stipe.  Figured I'd give it a read.  Quite imbibable style.  There's an immediacy to the emotional content created by unconventional phrasing.  There's more scuttlebutt to be inferred from this than I'd like--  speculating about whether Stipe was ever intimate with Kurt Cobain isn't something I should be thinking  --but there's also a very clear moral lesson throughout about fame and its perks.  Much as I loved R.E.M.'s music, in my teens, I find the arc of Stipe's career tediously American in a way that doesn't gel with why I loved their sound.  He became a rich drunk and drifted into film finance.  That doesn't speak to the lonesome love for life that I found resonant, as a young man.

It's a lovely little heartbroken book, and a clear warning against idol worship.  And, hunh!  I have a Douglas Martin-edited book of interviews with Kathy Acker on my shelf.  I didn't know one of Martin's books was in my library.  Going to re-read that after 'Cruising' week ends...

Cruising: An Intimate Study of a Radical Pastime (2019) - by Alex Espinoza

Research.  It's true!  [Reading now.  Will update afterward.]

Cruising (1970) - by Gerard Walker

The copy the library sent me was a first edition hardback, added to the Chi library system in November of 1970.  Shortly after publication.  Now I'm sure--  I am certain  --that William Friedkin had a copy all his own.  I know he didn't need to check this out of a library...  He got a studio to pay rights to adapt it, for fucksake, it's not like he would've been hurting to pay for a copy.  Yet I can't help but wonder if he read this book I'm holding, because I'm living in a city where Honorary William Friedkin Way is only a few blocks from my house.  These are the tendencies of this broken brain, forever bending reality to in some way reflect on my lived experiences.

But, like I say, research!

Rilly looking forward to cracking this.  I've been a fan of Friedkin's film for decades.  It will be revealing to see what the source material looked like, after fielding years of critical disdain & speculative scuttlebutt--  which even Alex Espinoza's book indulges in, going straight for the story about Paul Bateson working on The Exorcist, and Blatty feeling so weird about that... he made a movie about a gay serial killer?  I've never quite bought that story.  So we'll see if it's the book that provoked the film, or if Friedkin's film was a provocation aimed at the public.

After Kathy Acker (2017) - by Chris Krause

Found in a l'il free library, just next door.  Sometimes a book is waiting for you to read it.  You specifically.  Because of course I'm an Ackerhead in addition to all the other nonsense my brain has sponged up in fifty years of being a mutant born to this tortured century & continent.  Because of course, me specifically, I'm the person who is supposed to hold this.

I identified with Destiny of the Endless, back when I was a Gaimanfag in high school.  Have I ever mentioned this deeply mortifying thing?  It's better than when I was censured by every peer on the playground in elementary for pretending to be Diana Rigg doing a Wonder Woman transformation pirouette.  Yep, I read Sandman comix, and I really liked Destiny.  How she spoke, her punk thing...  What I didn't know was, who Kathy Acker was.  What I also didn't know was, who Kathy Acker was in relation to Neil, nor why he'd stuntcasted her in his big weird comic confessional of being a serial adulterer and shitty lover who feared the day he'd be called to account for his fuckery.

Can't say that I've quite figured that out yet, either.  But this book could go a ways towards unpicking that snarl, maybe.

Anyhoo.  Kathy kind of had a hugely belated impact on me, in my thirties, when I finally started killing some of those ubiquitous, unsellable tomes Grove Press ground out throughout the 90s--  My Mother: Demonology remains a favourite, as does Florida  --and some of her lit theory stuff, and by then it was too late, the Black Tarantula had her vagina dentata in me, deep.

It's the dada thing, the Burroughs thing, the Rimbaud thing, the aging punk thing.  Probably why I'm into Delany at this late stage, when I was too stupid to read him a decade ago.  All this is white aging male intellectualism anyhoo, who gives a rat's ass.  These are the games we play, amusing ourselves with Figuring Out References and building arcane yarnboards to garrote ourselves with, in the least autoerotic way possible.

Kathy made me look at art different.  For real.  I did make an aborted attempt at reading her, once, right after I ran away and was too brainfucked to comprehend anything more complicated than a comic book.  I think it was 'Portrait Of An Eye'.  But she didn't hit for me until around 2011.  I stumbled across 'Hannibal Lecter, My Father' in Atlanta's famous, now-forgotten dragon's hoard, a little store known only as BOOKS (r.i.p.), and the little book with the red cover made me think, "It's used, and Semiotext(e)'s always good for a chuckle."  And that was it.

She formally introduced me to the concept of antinominalism.  Consequently I found her many & varied ways of theorizing about art so beneficial I crawled up my own ass and pulled my legs in after me, in zen tribute:  Kathy Acker is how I became a blog.

True story.

Tracing Gould - o15

Cut to title card:

Behind the wheel, the weary detective in his trenchcoat races to the scene, police beacon signaling like a defective halo.  Inconstant light barely touching his eyes.

The further the D.T. influence spreads, the less identifiable Tracy becomes, the more diluted.  Gould's influence circuclates like the very air.  Coolly alive, in the flow & pulse of water.  In the spark & flicker of fire, as secret and plainly exposed as the very devil.  The influence, mutable, immutable, evanescent yet beyond transmutation, inveigling everything like a plague or conspiracy of ghosts.

He arrives.  The villain from nowhere.

"All the things that used to be inside me, now they're outside.  So I can see all the things inside you....  But the inside of me is empty."

The curious, plodding, sleepy-looking young man with wiry hair walks seemingly in place, growing ever-larger in the mind & eyes of his captive audience.  He emerges as if from the horizon itself, a swelling born from the collision of earth, sea and sky.   A point against all geometric reason encompassing, absorbing, linearity.  The enigmatic villain seems to only speak in questions, his somnolent, placid voice ever on the verge of collapse into ellipsis.

"The detective, or the husband?  Which is the real you?  Neither one is the real you.  There is no 'real you'.  Your wife knows that, too."

His only identifying trait, the name sewn into the lining of his coat.  Mamiya.

The detective knows who the Killer is:  but the detective finds it impossible to Know the man.  The killer is a missionary from an occulted past.  His methods are inferential, at best; insidious.  Involuted.  The killer may not be pursued beyond the boundaries of his crimes.  Secure in the hollow he's carved inside himself, the killer looks out on the detective with contempt bordering on transcendence.

The killer within looking down on the killer without.

Triggered by the word fate, the detective fires three times.

"Remember now?"

Kiyoshi Kurosawa pivots, abrupt as the final day torn from a calender, from gangster flicks to weird serial murder tinged with hypnotic menace.  It's 1998, and the filmmaker is bored by the philosophical quandaries of V-cinema with its inbuilt limitations of commerce and pop genre fiction.

"People like to think crime has meaning.  But most of them don't."

Nemesis frees the detective to free the killer.  The killer, freed, returns to his origins; origins he can only recognize through inference.  The killer does not know who he is, only where he is: in the world, walking up and down, to and fro.  Waiting to be found in the hearts of the men whose lives he touched with fingers stainless as unwritten law.  Waiting for deliverance.

The gun fires five final exclamation marks.  One for each finger on his healing hand.

Eight bullets, total, to kill a man beyond life.  Snuffed by an abundance of fortunate death, the dying arc of the murderer's bloody finger paints a ceremony in the expectant air.  Evokes something where there is nothing.  Falls, use extinguished.

The detective looks around the space of the shrine, mute, his curiosity at its end.

Inner peace restored, the detective takes his dinner.  Opting against his trademark trenchcoat, for a change.  Retired to the dry cleaners, to exorcise Mamiya's splatter.  Leaning away from his table the detective looks spiritually sated.  Coffee the perfect companion to a postprandial smoke, he orders from a nearby marionette.  The waitress stiff and formal as her uniform.  She does not walk so much as obey an invisible mechanism, faultless, guiding her toward the cutlery.

Plate clean, appetite restored, the detective extracts a cigarette and lights it, drawing the smoke into his lungs.  Ember tip flaring like a caution signal over the industrial heart of Tokyo.

Wipe to credits.

from friedkin to delany (with love)

In the space of a single morning.  Discussed 'Crusing'-- the book and the film adaptation --with my husband, as well as the Situationist concept of the dérive, and what Samuel R. Delany meant by "contact" in 'Times Square Red, Times Square Blue'.

We also covered how transvestigators have this dorky overlap with racist schmucks, and how often sexually paranoid individuals arrive at conclusions like "the Rothschilds secretly funded a satanic plot to make Emmanual Macron fuck his own brother".  Which seems like a lot of work for a satanic inversion of values, if you ask me.  Surely there's a cheaper way?

Ultimately with this biz Sig & I are like, One Yarn Board Looks Very Like Another, and maybe it would be less mockworthy and personally isolating if these dinguses would revert to blaming Satan, imps and goblins for giving them failboners.

Chuchy shouty type who claims the devil incited their toe fungus looks remarkably less foolish than the average Content Generator who has to create a seven-part Youtube essay to unpack their "investigation".  

The average churchy shouter is also less likely to be sued by the president of France.

But what the eff do we know.

a study in forgetting

 

i remember this being done as i was watching metropolis

do i actually remember drawing it?  no

 

 

forgotten sketches for a script i don't remember writing

(which i later found in my desk drawer)  pure vapourcomix

 

& just now, failed to recognize this sketch entirely...

because i'm so accustomed to the finished render

my husband, at least, remembers when i drew "bananass"

Tracing Gould - o14

These dreams are shared.  Dreams of stark primary colour and furtive perversion: dreams of weakness manifested in impotent rage: dreams stolen from little boys, given to those starvelings not yet men.

"You must be curious to know. But, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you not only not to tell anybody about your find, but also not to ask more about the case. One day when it's all sewed up, I'll let you know all the details. Right now, though, I can't."

"I understand. I'm just real curious, like you said."

"I was the same way myself when I was your age. I guess, that's what got me into this business."

"Must be great."

"It's horrible, too."

David Lynch's 'Blue Velvet' surely shares in Gouldspace.  Influence is manifest everywhere, in unwise love of mystery and tears for fathers stricken; in little agonies, femme fatales & mutilated victims.

The pattern is Crime, and Lawful Wrath, and the Kid inbetween.

The man in yellow teeters, a bullet to the head.  One false alarm and the reflex is murder.  And where is the villain of our piece?  Why, he's queer as a well-dressed man with a gasmask apparatus on his belt.

The kid crouches in the closet and remembers a dream he had, of wanting to break into a stranger's room and watch them unrobe.  The kid holds his breath, wondering why there is so much trouble in this world.

The prowling, growling, gray murderer huffs, ridiculous in his fake mustache.  "I shoot when I see the whites of the eyes."

It is 1986.  The scene is a staged multiple homicide, and the boy who sees it believes he is a man when he is able to say, to himself, with confidence: "I'm going to let them find you on their own."

The kid is not Dick Tracy Junior.  The kid is not me.  The kid holds his breath, wondering.