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BY RICHARD KADREY | Kathy Acker loved Miles Davis and, like Miles, she didn't give a fuck, except about the things she gave a fuck about. She gave a fuck about books (the ones she wrote and the library of 30,000 volumes she amassed over the years), about the subliminal politics of everyday life -- where the brittle edges of gender politics and class would come into sharp focus -- and, mostly, about the power of words to define the world and shape our thoughts. Whoever controlled the words controlled thought, Kathy knew. She set out to understand and liberate words (and herself) by direct action: She'd seize control of language and reinvent it in her work. I first met Kathy at the Phoenix Hotel, a famous/notorious San Francisco inn on the edge of the Tenderloin District. The Phoenix Hotel is known colloquially as the "rock 'n' roll" hotel. It's not too expensive, and its location and modest rooms lend street cred to the pop stars, wannabe hipsters and rock journalists who litter the pool area like the detritus that collects around the edges of airport runways. Kathy, on the other hand, always seemed perfectly at home among the goofy sculptures and piped-in bird calls from hidden speakers. She fit the place without trying. And she liked a nearby Cambodian restaurant. The rest of the Phoenix scene? She didn't give a fuck. When I met Kathy, she'd just returned from several years of living in London. From her letters, I think those years in the U.K. in the mid- and late-'80s were her happiest. After growing up and living in New York for most of her adult life, she found London to be a new world. The British were smart (they liked books and writers!) and even, to her mind, possessed of a kind of innocence. "They still use the word 'villain' over here," she once wrote me. Kathy was already a cult celebrity when she hit London, and the Brits took to her immediately, in the way the English do with some Americans. She was the Xena of American lit: strong and scary, maybe a little crazy, encased in leather. Even when she appeared on literary chat shows you could tell they thought she might jump up and turn the dump over at any minute. It was fun being treated like your ideas mattered. And being away from home gave her the kind of distance that let her examine the language of her homeland with a clear eye. Her happy time in England came to an abrupt end with a call from a lawyer. Harold Robbins' publisher threatened to sue Kathy's U.K. publisher because she'd used the text of a sex scene from one of his books, rewriting the scene into nasty political satire. Plagiarism is a touchy word among writers, but Kathy's whole art was based on the idea of plagiarism -- the appropriation and reworking of existing texts. It certainly wasn't anything she did secretly. She talked openly about appropriation as a way of putting existing texts into a new context, revealing subtle meanings that were inherent, but hidden, in the original. Kathy had lifted texts from her earliest days as a writer, when she was turning out amateur mail art projects in which she wrote her friends into porn stories and sent them out in little photocopied pamphlets. She continued the practice in more complete and complex works like "The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula," in which she took on the stories and personas of Victorian murderesses, mixing their lives with elements from her own life and stirring the whole thing into a hallucinogenic broth compounded of violence, memory and slippery identities. Why, she wondered, was Robbins making her work methods a problem? Visual artists had been working and reworking each other's images for decades, and writers such as William Burroughs had also built literary careers by reworking other writer's texts. The charges seemed indefensible to her. So Kathy was genuinely shocked when her U.K. publisher caved in to Robbins' demands and told her she had to publicly apologize in print. Since her publisher wouldn't back her legally, she had no choice but to go along with the public humiliation. So much for English innocence. She left the U.K. and came back to the States, trying to settle back into New York, but she found the place depressing and awash in death as AIDS tore through the artistic community. Still nursing her own wounds, she headed for San Francisco to try working in yet another new environment. N E X T+P A G E+| Embracing and fearing femaleness
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