From Semiotext(e)
I'm Very into You
Correspondence 1995–1996
By Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark
Afterward by John Kinsella
Overview
“Why am I telling you all this? Partly ‘cause the whole
queerness/identity thing for me stretches through everything, absolutely
everything. Slipping between straight/gay is child’s play compared to
slipping between writer/teacher/influence-peddler whatever. I forget who
I am. You reminded me of who I prefer to be.” [M.W.]
“It’s two in the morning. . . I know what you mean about slipping roles:
I love it, going high low, power helpless even captive, male female, all
over the place, space totally together and brain-sharp, if it wasn’t for
play I’d be bored stiff and I think boredom is the emotion I find most
unbearable. . . ” [KA]
—from I’m Very into You
After Kathy Acker met McKenzie Wark on a trip to Australia in 1995, they
had a brief fling and immediately began a heated two-week email
correspondence. Their emails shimmer with insight, gossip, sex, and
cultural commentary. They write in a frenzy, several times a day; their
emails cross somewhere over the International Date Line, and themselves
become a site of analysis. What results is an index of how two brilliant
and idiosyncratic writers might go about a courtship across 7,500 miles
of airspace—by pulling in Alfred Hitchcock, stuffed animals, Georges
Bataille, Elvis Presley, phenomenology, Marxism, The X-files,
psychoanalysis, and the I Ching.
Their corresepondence is a Plato’s Symposium for the twenty-first
century, but written for queers, transsexuals, nerds, and book geeks.
I’m Very Into You is a text of incipience, a text of beginnings, and a
set of notes on the short, shared passage of two iconic individuals of
our time.
About the Authors
Kathy Acker was a novelist, essayist and performance artist whose books
include Blood and Guts in High School, The Childlike Life of the Black
Tarantula, Empire of the Senseless, In Memoriam to Identity, Don
Quixote, My Mother: Demonology, and her last novel, Pussy King of the
Pirates. Born and raised on New York’s Upper East Side, she died of
breast cancer in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1997.
McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born writer whose books include Virtual
Geography, A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, The Beach Beneath the
Street,Telesthesia and The Spectacle of Disintegration. He teaches at
The New School in New York City.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/im-very-you
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