Past Visitors

 

Evie H. Reckendrees (May 2024)

I came to the Kathy Acker Reading Room doing artistic research for a mixed media project I'm working on; after reading and consuming Kathy's art & writing for nearly a decade now. The coordination and communication were impeccable and I felt right at home once I arrived and started digging through the books. Her scribbles in the margins, drawings on blank pages, astrological analyses and notes to her friends, lovers and collaborators gave me an insight into her life as she lived it. All of these were also fairly easy to track  down through the cataloging of each of her pen strokes in the books she owned. The atmosphere, being surrounded by her very own library, also proved to be a good environment to inspire and spark ideas around my own practice. The Reading Room is not only invaluable for academic research but also for artists trying to connect to Kathy's  artistic practice.

 

 

Pablo Dominguez (May 2024)

I visited the Kathy Acker Reading Room in May 2024. I am no longer sure how I first came across it, but I am pretty sure I had read about it before, and thought, well this sounds cool, and interesting. I was or am not an Acker expert, by any means, I had read the Chris Kraus biography a while back, I knew some of her stuff, but now, while I was working on a literary project, I suddenly kept coming across Acker, her name just kept popping up as a reference. And so I decided to go, as I had a trip planned to Cologne anyway, and I was able schedule a visit on relatively short notice, which was great. 

I was working on an auto-fictional text about my mother's library, among other things, and this had led me to the question of the library more generally. My mom had been living in a care home for a while, and her apartment, including her books, we had cleared a couple of months earlier. And so her library no longer existed, except for a few books that were now with me. We had sold a small part of the rest, but the majority had ended up in the trash, no antiquarian bookseller wanted these books, even though it was a great collection, to me at least, a lot of Suhrkamp volumes, French Theory, psychoanalysis, feminism, art books, and so on. As we were clearing out her stuff, I realized how many authors she had been reading who were also dear and important to me, but also, coincidentally, to Acker, especially George Bataille, whose writing I was now trying to work my way through, because I did not know his work very well. I was interested in the question of what a person's library has to do with their life, what I could possibly learn about my mother - and myself - from her library, from her reading habits, and whether I could enter into a kind of dialogue with her through her library, now that I was no longer able to speak to her directly about these things, because of her amnesia and dementia, as she really didn't remember anything anymore and had completely lost her bearings. And so there were just some parallels and resonances with Acker, and her library, and I thought it just might be interesting to go, and so you could say that my visit was more based on a vague intuition rather than a very specific research interest or question.

The visit ended up being really inspiring, and fun, and fascinating. I was given a super friendly welcome, I was given an introduction and an explanation of how the catalogue works, and there were already all of Acker’s Bataille books on the table, with her underlinings, and some little notes, and I leafed through all of them, and I looked at all the volumes on the shelves, getting a sense of what she’d read, I imagined her reading and working on all of this, I looked at some of Ackers records, and tapes, and it was a very inspiring atmosphere, and I took a lot of notes, and then three hours or so had passed, and I had to leave, and I said I hope I can come back some other time. 

I can’t recommend visiting the Kathy Acker Reading Room enough, to anyone who is interested in Acker, or in writing and reading and thinking more generally. It is a great resource, I am sure, for scholars interested in specific aspects of Acker’s work, and in my case above all it was a source of inspiration and a great space to reflect. It’s a unique place, you notice that immediately when you come in, and I was very grateful for the visit and the experience. 

 

 

Max Shirley (November 2024)

Consisting of over 6000 texts, items of individual correspondence, draft notebook pages, and other paraphernalia, the Kathy Acker Reading Room offers a unique occasion for researchers to work directly with Acker’s personal library. Visiting the reading room in November 2024 helped me to foster a rich sense of Acker’s reading habits and, crucially, the impact of Acker’s reading on her writing process. After all, Acker’s infamy largely stems from her appropriative aesthetics and techniques, such as the cut-up, which envelops published material into Acker's own collage texts.

In my research, I specifically attend to such instances of formal experimentation in Acker’s work and her influence on contemporary writers and thinkers. Visiting this outstanding collection thus enabled me to consider how Acker engaged with her literary predecessors and reflect on what this means for present-day practitioners working with Acker’s texts. I was primarily interested in Acker’s hand-written annotations and other marginalia—of which there are copious amounts (some 800+ books in the library contain pen marks). For instance, I looked at Acker’s immersion with the feminist theories of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, among others. Not only had Acker underlined specific passages, but she also wrote comments and notes in the texts, which illuminated aspects of her thinking. This reinforced lines of enquiry I had already stumbled down and opened up new potential avenues. The Kathy Acker Reading Room is a must-visit for anyone considering the avant-gardist’s work.

 

 

Julia & Anna from Julianna (November 2024)

We visited the Kathy Acker Reading Room in November 2024 as part of the research for our novel Rote Flecken Denken (working title). Kathy Acker's literature plays a major role in our own writing and is an important reference and anchor point for us. We were impressed by the Reading Room, especially by the careful organization of Acker's library, which makes it very easy to search for specific handwritten notes in her books. We thank Melisa Köroğlu for the wonderful coordination and introduction to the Reading Room. A highlight for us was coming across Kathy Acker's astrology books - including an astrology chart she filled out herself - during our research. As we want to deal with astrology and esoteric language use in one of our next projects (working title: Sus Pool).