[NetBehaviour] I'm Very into You | Correspondence 1995–1996 | By Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark

[marc garrett]

 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