ABSTRACT
In 1995, two years before her death, Kathy Acker gave a reading in my home town of Brisbane, Australia. The night was a sell-out, as the city’s feminist, music, student, queer, and cultural undergrounds packed the post-punk live music venue, ‘Van Gogh’s Earlobe’, to hear Acker. The place was buzzing with anticipation—it had been a long wait for her readers since her breakthrough novel, Blood and Guts in High School (1984). And Acker didn’t disappoint. Leather jacket, reflective sunglasses, that low New Yorker voice, just Acker and her novella, Pussycat Fever. The audience was silent, transfixed, even slowed down their drinking as the text came to life. Was this a book reading or a great gig? It didn’t matter. The effect was the same. Afterwards, Acker stood around and chatted with the audience, signed copies, cracked jokes, was patient and unpretentious though she’d just worked really hard in a hot, humid room. Then we filed out into the night, sensing that something special had just happened. By 1995 Acker was a literary star; regardless, she was a woman of our underground, still raging against the system, still writing funny and smart and uncompromising stories for us, changing literature in the process.
