A wide-ranging group of writers, theoreticians, artists, and rock-and-rollers will gather in San Francisco on 22 January to honor Kathy Acker, author of Empire of the Senseless, Blood and Guts in High School, Pussy, King of the Pirates, and other influential works of experimental fiction. Acker died at 53 on 30 November in Mexico, while undergoing spiritual and herbal treatments for a particularly aggressive form of cancer.
The "memorial celebration," to be held at Slim's nightclub from 8 p.m. PST until midnight, will be hosted by writer R. U. Sirius and filmmaker Machiko Saito, and will feature readings by authors Susie Bright, Richard Kadrey, Robert Glück, Kevin Killian, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (editors of CTheory, where one of Acker's last works, an opera commissioned by the American Opera Project called Requiem, was published), and cyberpunk progenitor John Shirley. The bands Tribe8, Dirtbox, and Trance Mission will also perform.
Kadrey, author of From Myst to Riven as well as other works of cyberpunk fiction, praised Acker's unflinching, boundary-pushing prose as "all about communication ... [and] the difficulty of establishing a point-of-view ... in a culture in which meaning and understanding slip in and out of fashion, just like any other commodity. Kathy understood that those who control communication and language control thought."
San Francisco writer and teacher Sharon Grace, who knew Acker for 20 years, is organizing the event. Grace said the range of participants at Thursday's memorial will reflect the depth and breadth of those touched and challenged by Acker's work. "Kathy appealed to neo-feminists, bad-boy cyberlibertarians, pierced and tattooed voodoo-ritual body artists, and academics," Grace said. "In this diverse bunch of people - from theoreticians to thrasher-punks - you find her complexity."
Often compared to insurgent male writers like William Burroughs and Jean Genet, Acker shunned traditional Western medical treatments for her illness. New York poet John Giorno has established a memorial fund to help pay off her medical expenses.
In the libretto for Requiem, Acker declared, "If this world is meaningful ... then so must be each of its parts, no matter how minute. If this world is meaningful, then I need to concern myself, not with cancer, but with its cause. Whatever caused it must change. I knew one thing. That writing is a way to change reality."
