RaveBookforumChris Kraus did not love Kathy Acker, did not even ‘like’ her, though love and like are mean props in the perpetual war of letters. Kraus did think that this woman, who had slept with her (eventually ex-) husband (Sylvère Lotringer), was ‘kind of frightening and awesome’ … The only woman, according to Kraus, to achieve the status of ‘Great Writer as Countercultural Hero,’ Acker’s only real crime besides profligacy was ‘bad’ writing, by which I mean a refusal to tell a story straight … After Kathy Acker, while also being a sort of Before Chris Kraus, is a memorial or femmage to an era of big criticism’s great expectations, when maybe a certain playfulness with the morphology of truth could seem noble, beautiful, or at least innocent.
