Kathy Acker (1947–1997)

The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec is opaque, confusing, referential—Acker lifted over one thousand words from Harold Robbins’s The Pirate into this work without attribution—but it’s suddenly accessible when spoken by the living Acker. Acker gives an extemporaneous introduction to her work before she starts the reading, giving us a clear entry point:

I put down sort of the story of my life, and in the beginning what happened is, well you know about Toulouse Lautrec, that he’s a hunchback and very ugly, or she, I should say. And poor Toulouse was living in Paris in the 19 century. And because Toulouse, I should say myself, I’m a hunchback and a dwarf and I can’t really get laid or anything, I have this horrible problem and I also have these horribly ugly genitals. So I hang out with the other artists such as Van Gogh at this brothel . . . And one day getting hornier and hornier what happens is I decide that I’m going to join the brothel so at least I can get laid. Because at least if I’m a whore then when people come, you know, they’ll be people who’ll want some kind of perverted whatever, and they’ll pick me . . .

So we’re all sitting around one night in the brothel after work, this is the scene. And it’s very dark, just like this. and we don’t know what to do, because we’re very tired, we’ve had a long day’s work, but we can’t get to sleep because we still have that kind of funny frenetic energy you get when you fuck too much. So what we do to get each other to sleep since we can’t fuck or anything cause we’re so sick of it is we tell each other fairy tales. And what I’m going to read you is the second fairytale, which I, Toulouse, tell you, the whores, to get you to sleep.

Acker makes the slippage of autobiography easy: “Toulouse, I should say myself.” And she takes the audience to the scene: “It’s very dark, just like this.” And she gives us a way of hearing the story: as the whores, trying to sleep. Suddenly we’re far from the “deadly readings” she mentions earlier; we don’t have to sit up straight, we don’t have to analyze anything, we’re right there with her. How generous. What a kind way in.

https://vimeo.com/39280856… (more)

"I'm not satisfied with the shit eating I did do." — Bob Flanagan, The Pain Journal

Toward a Theory of "Edgy Humor"

One of my side projects has been the development of a more comprehensive understanding of so-called "edgy humor" for use in reading flirty books like this. I'm Very Into You is an interesting transitional cultural artifact, i.e. an epistolary novel in paperback form containing an email correspondence now already dated by SMS. I had previously remarked the humorous moment in the works of de Sade that accompanies the falsifying movement in which the reader dismisses the shit-eating (e.g. the "delicious turd") as too hardcore to be taken literally. A kind of spacing develops, in which the edgy joke teller is moving from the declarative to the subjunctive. (i.e. From "such a thing is happening" to "imagine if such a thing were happening.") This distinguishes edgy humor from so-called "black humor" with the corollary that edgy humor doesn't pass the hardness test: i.e. losing its salt when the interlocutor responds, "You don't know what you're talking about."

I'm no stranger to edgy humor, especially in its role of "maturity making" among tween boys; in my experience the edgy joke, along with the beheading video, is functioning less as a destabilizing anarchic force than as (in the words of Guy Debord) a "spectacular" form of rebelliousness that is not, by any means, incompatible with a “smug acceptance of what exists . . . for the simple reason that dissatisfaction and [edginess] itself becomes a commodity." It would be edgy to compare this phenomenon to the practices of the Contra death squads, in which no member is permitted to abstain from wounding the body of the victim, such that the act of killing is converted into a circulation of signs within an "in-group" in which no one can be said to have dealt the single killing blow. That's another way of saying the edgy joke is transforming a disruptive element at its center into the basis for a further strengthening of connection, i.e. "group formation," which some people are already using for a flirt.

We're thinking of this flirty signification when reading, in this collection, such howlers as Acker's condemnation of the NYC social scene: The boys are all gay or male feminists or whatever they're called. A non-playful breed. I'll take Nazis any day of the week" (36), and Wark's condemnation of "racism" against Rupert Murdoch: "It's not that I love Murdoch, but this piece was fucking racist! They wouldn't dare talk about Jewish money [that way]. But it's like Murdoch is fair game cause he's an Australian" (43). These are variations on the edgy joke; an overstatement that's only permissible because we already know it to be false — falling back on the subjunctive, "Could you imagine!" It's an enthralling way of charming.… (more)