\u201cShame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins.\u201d<\/a> In Close Writing: Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, & Love-in-Pieces (2026), the British writer and academic Alice Butler critically and unashamedly falls in love not once but twice, committing herself to the lives and work of two dead writers, whom she affectionately refers to as Kathy and Cookie.<\/p>\nThe familiar address of her subjects becomes the first of many scholarly subversions Butler makes in a process she describes as \u201ccollapsing archive into art into writing into performance.\u201d Without clause, pause, or break, this proposition becomes prophetic of the breathless, obsessional, and mimetic bent of the prose that lies ahead. Hardly deferential to scholarly standards of rigor, balance, and substantiated argument, Butler offers an insurmountable \u201cfuck you\u201d to them\u2014and to the conventional tone of critical writing\u2014by bringing Kathy and Cookie into contact through a series of tenuous connections.<\/p>\n
It is true that both were anti-intellectual good-time girls, lovers of surface\u2014of hair and clothes, of sex and art\u2014who died too young: Kathy of breast cancer at 50, Cookie a decade earlier, at 40, of AIDS-related illness. They also shared a scene: a late 1970s and \u201980s Manhattan shaped by conceptual art and New York School poets (such as mutual friend Bernadette Mayer), combined with a burgeoning underground club scene, captured in perpetuity by the likes of Nan Goldin and Robert Mapplethorpe. Kathy and Cookie did, at some point, also share a publisher, the Native Agents imprint of Semiotext(e), headed up by fellow writer Chris Kraus, and both had their author portraits taken by friend and associate Mapplethorpe. Butler reminds us how, on Valentine\u2019s Day 1980, they performed alongside one another at the Mudd Club. At best, \u201cthey were casual friends,\u201d Butler writes of Cookie and Kathy\u2019s broad connection, \u201cbut I\u2019m bringing them closer together\u2014drawing out their shared political commitments to rewriting the sick body and its desires, the intimacies and care networks they crafted\u2014in this strange, writerly love triangle.\u201d<\/p>\n
Butler wields, perhaps even perverts, the objectivity of a biographer, the intent of a critic, and the license of a poet in order to bring the two figures together on the page, though she admits that the deepest connection between Kathy and Cookie is her own love for them\u2014for their lives and writing\u2014referring to them as her \u201cbeloveds\u201d and drawing them into a literary \u201cthreesome\u201d in which she speaks of and to and, eventually, beside them. This trialectic form also structures the book, which is split into three chapters, with a centerfold of archival materials: Cookie\u2019s lists on pink paper, her letters on marbled card; Kathy\u2019s diaristic notes and their corresponding Mapplethorpe portraits. Butler\u2019s long introduction reminds us that this is a work of scholarship\u2014formerly her doctoral dissertation\u2014cycling through her motives, approach, references, and formal intentions. The first chapter centers on Kathy and her early diaristic practice (four hours a day without fail), which Butler discusses\u2014with some license\u2014as if it were an artwork intended for public consumption. The second chapter follows Cookie\u2019s early epistolary practice, which Butler perceives as adolescent gestures: \u201cscrappy, sloppy, piecemeal.\u201d The third chapter brings Kathy and Cookie closer, through their eventual turn to fiction writing: published and unpublished, self-published, never-realized fragments of stories that work through sickness, sex, art, and eventually death.<\/p>\n
Beyond their near-mythic presence in that near-mythic moment, that long decade in the East Village, what draws Butler to Kathy and Cookie is their nonstudious, unrefined, and often unfinished approach to the page\u2014or pages\u2014and to a kind of writing that is secondary to living, a living in which fucking and earning money and being sick often became impediments to the writerly life. \u201cThis diary is (about) the destruction of myself,\u201d writes Kathy in her notebooks around 1972. For both Kathy and Cookie, the destruction of the self was also a destruction, or deconstruction, of gender, which played out first through their image and then on the page. Kathy paired a buzz cut and androgynous clothing with lace bodysuits. With her heavy slick of eye makeup, sinewy body, and strong jaw, Cookie was often mistaken for a drag queen. Theirs was the kind of queerness that manifested from a white middle-class adolescence in the suburbs (Cookie) or uptown (Kathy), shedding, or losing, their biological families to forge their own in and around New York, but also in San Diego and Los Angeles (Kathy) and Baltimore and Provincetown, Massachusetts (Cookie). Butler describes the adolescent impulse in Cookie\u2019s writing as a \u201cqueerly oriented perversion, full of ambiguous gendering and a sexual identity that slips and slides between recognizable binary categories,\u201d while Kathy, often bedbound and incapacitated by pelvic inflammatory disease, lets \u201csickness and sexual fantasy intertwine\u201d as she \u201cdeviates from the promise of heterosexual genital \u2018union\u2019 to waywardly wander in the pleasures of writing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kathy and Cookie wandered sexually. Between them, their list of former lovers reads like a who\u2019s who of downtown art and literary circles\u2014from filmmaker Peter Wollen and the Mudd Club\u2019s Steve Mass (Kathy) to filmmaker Sharon Niesp (Cookie). But the queerest thing about them was the way they integrated those relationships into their writing, what Butler refers to as an \u201cautoerotic production,\u201d explicit, playful, and unrestrained by literary or sexual expectation: \u201cI didn\u2019t want to watch watching Lenny fuck someone & not being involved would blow me,\u201d writes Kathy. In the catalog that accompanied a group show organized by friend Nan Goldin, featuring David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar, on the devastating impact of AIDS on their immediate community, Wojnarowicz proposes that the imagination is \u201cone of the last frontiers left for radical gesture.\u201d Butler folds these artists\u2019 thoughts and words into her own, in a heady consummation. Wojnarowicz refers to this frontier as an \u201cungoverned\u201d space, \u201clike writing,\u201d Butler adds. That is \u201cwhere [Wojnarowicz] can dream\/write of fucking somebody \u2018without a rubber\u2019 [\u2026] or dousing the obscene-censoring Senator Jesse Helms \u2018with a bucket of gasoline and set his putrid ass on fire.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Like Cookie and Kathy, Butler\u2019s writerly wanderings are the queerest thing about her. Seemingly cis, heterosexual, and longing for a baby, Butler is transgressive in her accumulative writing\u2014rich and heavy and sticky with citation\u2014which does the work of queering literary scholarship and criticism: \u201cIs this how you ink-scratched your sick life, your sex life, the close edges between them? Is this how you slipped between it all, the plural pages of your body?\u201d she writes to either one or both of her beloveds, teasing out some shared endeavor in their writing, and then participates in it. Butler\u2019s own desire is not explicitly sexual or defiant of gender but drives the book\u2019s intellectual proposition, in which the heart and mind are unapologetically entwined: \u201cI take you\u2014or is it that you take me (?)\u2014with this belated touch.\u201d<\/p>\n
Expanding upon the practice of close reading\u2014a cornerstone of New Criticism in the mid-20th century and later developed by the likes of gender theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, feminist critic Jane Gallop, and Butler\u2019s mentor, the writer and academic Carol Mavor\u2014Butler moves closer still. Broadly, she defines close writing as a way to \u201ctouch, explore, write, and breathe life (momentarily, partially)\u201d into the lives of a subject, but it is also an attempt \u201cto draw closer, without fully healing, the severed line separating life and death, the present and the past.\u201d Early on, Butler uses the term afterlife\u2014a fashionable way to refer to what a writer or artist leaves behind: their impression, or trace. She imagines how a person can be constantly made anew in the present: \u201cYou transform states of sickness into events of beauty within the stories it contains; it is a project you give life to, over and over, again,\u201d Butler writes to, and of, Cookie, while grasping the \u201cannotated, bended, and much-creased pages\u201d of her book. Kathy\u2019s and Cookie\u2019s stories are gathered from the glitter-strewn floor of a party or from a sickbed, which Butler eruditely weaves with meaning through gender theory and careful critical analysis while all the time tugging on the loose threads and tender affections of close writing: \u201cI flirt with improper conduct in knowledge making.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite these tonal and stylistic conceits, Close Writing is rigorously researched, drawing upon a range of sources that demonstrate Butler\u2019s deep reading in the field. The distinction between Close Writing and conventional scholarship lies in Butler\u2019s refusal to render something comprehensively whole\u2014licked and sealed like an envelope. Instead, she moves through a description of Robert Mapplethorpe\u2019s portrait of Kathy, musings on Josef Breuer\u2019s hysteria patient Berthe Pappenheim, and an \u00c9mile Zola character named Madame de Boves, tethering them together with the image of a \u201clace envelope\u201d the undergarment worn by Kathy in the picture. The form of a folded envelope, unstuck or left unsealed, becomes emblematic of Butler\u2019s approach to her subjects\u2014often tenuous and wildly speculative, brilliantly so.<\/p>\n
At the heart of Butler, Cookie, and Kathy\u2019s shared practice of close writing is the epistolary form\u2014intimate in its direct address, often furtive, sometimes forbidden. For Kathy, letter writing became a panting and horny form of artistic experimentation, exhausting the subject of her romantic obsession, as in her \u201cstrange letter to the artist Alan Sondheim, asking him to collaborate on an epistolary art project that would explore the mutual desire they shared for one another after a brief meeting in New York.\u201d For Cookie, it was forging connections across time and place, as she did with musician-turned-poet-and-novelist Richard Hell on home-marbled postcards. And, like them, Butler employs letters\u2014love letters\u2014to get close, and then closer still, to her subjects, though not always being \u201cduly precise.\u201d She describes the \u201caffective, attentive, desiring, erotic, loving, fantastical, and speculative energies of the love letter\u201d while perverting its conventional form. The gendered implication of a love letter, performed by women from within the privacy\u2014or entrapment\u2014of the home, is upended first by Kathy and Cookie and then by Butler, who addresses them directly in sapphic fragments, punctuating the overarching essayistic mode of the book:<\/p>\n
You scribbled your address on the inside cover of a ring-bound notebook, veiling and unveiling your visceral insides. It is a lipstick watermark. A mouth parted. An unsealed envelope. A first-person smear. Did you do this on purpose, so I could send you a reply? So bodily is your notebook writing: It wants to be touched again. Here it is, Kathy. My kiss. My stain.\u00a0X. I hope it reaches you.<\/p>\n
Butler draws on Sappho\u2019s poetic fragments\u2014\u201cluminous in their very incompleteness\u201d\u2014in order to express the \u201ccontradictory, messy, plural, wayward, and oblique angles of desire.\u201d A break or shattering produces a fragment, but for Butler the fragment produces the break\u2014against essayistic flow.<\/p>\n
\u201cAccompanying the reader throughout all of this, too, is Me,\u201d writes Butler, which feels like the wrong verb for the breathless, obsessional, sometimes lusty eruptions she makes to the calm surface of the essay. For Butler, form is content, but the reverse might also be true: her subjects\u2014their content\u2014also shape the form of the writing. In the first chapter, Butler lingers on the adolescent bent of their work, which for Kathy plays out at the level of the sentence: rarely using punctuation, her sentences pour, as if from her mouth, onto the page. Cookie, meanwhile, took to creating staccato lists on Barbie-pink paper, which read like a teenage girl\u2019s ambitions. Neither of them could ever finish anything, sometimes not even a sentence. For Kathy, and sometimes Cookie, the \u201csubversive angles of the adolescent\u2019s creative and erotic imagination\u201d manifested in a fandom that sits beside, or within, adolescence. \u201cI figured out my male stars are David Antin, L. Weiner, Ashley, Peter. Dan Graham on outs. You & E. Antin [are] my female stars,\u201d Kathy tells Bernadette Mayer around 1974. Butler writes:<\/p>\n
Like erotomania, like kleptomania, like masturbatory mania, like the manic collecting of clothes, fandom has also been understood as involving a network of pathological symptoms\u2014irrational, overemotional, excessive, hysterical, deviant, compulsive, sick\u2014which is often felt in the (adolescent) body.<\/p>\n
I think of acne, growing pains, and unexplained spikes in hormones but also those blurrier spaces\u2014being sick, as in misunderstood, or perverse, as in curious.<\/p>\n
Butler cites Sedgwick, who said that obsession is \u201cthe most durable form of intellectual capital,\u201d and writes from an inexhaustible and unashamed love of her subjects\u2014the way they loved theirs. Butler calls it \u201can affective, networked, and citational kind of fandom,\u201d playfully and knowingly fanatical. Butler trades the toxic star-fan hierarchy (one predicated on capitalist exploitation) for writing beside Cookie and Kathy, the way Cookie wrote beside Mapplethorpe, \u201cas fan, lover, carer, and ally.\u201d This prepositional shift from to to beside \u201ccaptures the subject\/object closeness of the writing act: as in at the (bed)side of, or right next to [\u2026] [T]o write beside is to inhabit reparative, horizontal kinships\u2014across the living and the dying, the sickbed and the bedside.\u201d Writing with or beside Cookie and Kathy begins to mean writing with or beside sickness and death. \u201cTogether but apart, my beloveds cared for the often-hidden, always-plural perversities and pleasures of lovesickness (meaning loving, and writing, in and with sickness).\u201d Cookie \u201cwrote palliatively beside and not against\u201d illness\u2014beside her friend Hujar, as he died of AIDS-related complications, but against the violent stigma facing those with AIDS in the United States under Ronald Reagan. The effusive appetite of Butler\u2019s writing reads like a queer elegy for the queer dead, not just for Kathy and Cookie but also for the concentric communities surrounding them, and all those lost to AIDS.<\/p>\n
It becomes contagious, this lovesickness, this perversity of loving and writing beside sickness, and I find myself beside Butler, reading with her the way that she writes with Cookie and Kathy. It is during this time, as I am reading with Butler, that my father begins his final, fatal, decline. When he finally slips away from us, all correspondence (his consistent greeting of \u201chello sweetie\u201d down the phone whenever I called, or the badly written boomer text message containing too many exclamation marks) is cut short. That silence\u2014no return caller, no responding message, no voice at all\u2014is the hardest thing about his passing. So, when my best friend sends me a stack of books that are, in one way or another, about grief, and a card that reads \u201csome words for when there are no words,\u201d I am reminded that there are literally no words, not from him or to him. I include this personal aside in the manner of Butler and Cookie and Kathy, but also because my loss creates another way of reading what Butler calls \u201clove-in-pieces.\u201d Her caring for the bodies and lives of her subjects, through and \u201cacross life and text and scattered archives,\u201d becomes particularly poignant in my father\u2019s wake, as tributes and stories pour in, and photographs are dredged up from the past. But \u201clove-in-pieces\u201d takes on a secondary meaning: it becomes the breaking into pieces that happens to us in a person\u2019s wake, one that Butler resolves through her close writing with the dead. \u201cI conjure (out of love) close hospitality with the dead,\u201d she writes, and it resonates.<\/p>\n
As Butler draws to a close, she returns to her initial impulse to write: discovering, liking, and then loving her subjects, conjoined by love, sex, illness, and, of course, New York; loving not just their work but also their self-mythologizing, their corporeal lives and material afterlives, their garments, their correspondences, and their photographic portraits. Butler plumbs the archive unceremoniously, prizing the inconsequential and lesser-cared-for objects from its depths, bringing them close, but never forensically. She loves in order to continue the \u201cunfinished task of close writing,\u201d the implication being that a life extends beyond the body mortal. \u201cWhen I say goodbye, it is only a beginning,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n
Butler hails from a new school of critical writing in which \u201ccritical\u201d means not cutting something down but building it up, the way love builds. Returning to Sedgwick\u2019s earlier question\u2014\u201cWhat does it mean to fall in love with a writer?\u201d\u2014Butler\u2019s answer, I imagine, might be in the plural and in the reparative mode. As a work of creative scholarship, Close Writing refuses \u201cto mend the past, to cohere it, to repair or clean up\u201d what W. E. B. Du Bois calls the \u201ctears, frangible edges, erasures, abrasions,\u201d or if it does, it is in the manner of Lauren Berlant\u2019s \u201cnon-reproductive repair: tending to broken social and material infrastructures without trying to restore the old, harmful status quo or reproduce traditional life patterns.\u201d Butler attempts non-reproductive repair by allowing Kathy\u2019s and Cookie\u2019s own tears, edges, and abrasions to be part of the work, the way it was for them: conjoined by living and loving and writing and dying.<\/p>\n
LARB Contributor<\/p>\n
Rose Higham-Stainton is a writer whose work explores gender and art-making and is published by Los Angeles Review of Books, Apollo, TANK, Flash Art, Texte zur Kunst, The White Review, Art Monthly, Bricks from the Kiln, and Worms Magazine, among others. She has written several chapbooks, and her debut book, Limn the Distance, came out with JOAN Publishing in 2023.<\/p>\n
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Copy link to articleLARB Staff Recommendations<\/p>\n
Nathan Dunne reviews Cookie Mueller\u2019s \u201cWalking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nathan Dunne<\/a>Jul 25, 2022<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An intimate experiment in writing beside two departed authors. Close Writing: Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, & Love-in-Pieces by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":886743,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":["post-886742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=886742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/886743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=886742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=886742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=886742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}