Fear in 80s Los Angeles: An Interview With Jack Skelley

by Matt Graham

Freeways and Chavez Ravine, Tower Records, Del Amo Mall, skyscrapers, Dodger Stadium, druggy lust, sex-soaked L.A. visions, the crush of Reaganism, punks, posers, and napalm that burns and burns and haunts childhood dreams filled with screaming mudmen and more lapsed Catholicism than an Abel Ferrara movie — the uninhibited imagination and experimental writing of Jack Skelley’s seminal 80s L.A. novel Fear of Kathy Acker remains as necessary and wild and horny as it did in its previous splintered publishings.

This writing is in and of a place. To further set the reader within this geographical bubble, the book opens with an iconography-speckled map of the city titled “Welcome to Fear of Kathy Acker,” perfectly done by underground comix artist Kyle Gunn (as seen below, at the end of this interview). It’s littered with fliers from shows and readings with other L.A. notables like Dennis Cooper and Bob Flanagan. Skelley lets it all spill out on the pages, irreverent and cheeky while at times dashed through with extreme melancholy from capitalist pressures, the vast emptiness of the 80s, or asshole doormen at clubs. The women of L.A. captivate and enthrall the writer and his fierce lust bred from catholic youth, spinning freely with open want that ranges from true desire to the most comical of salacious gratifications. The aesthetics of women and his gaze — the hair, dresses, shoes, panties, all sexualized and ritualized by the narrator and his cravings — pinball in his mind as he drives through familiar streets stoned, stands silent at parties, or takes too many shrooms while his friends chuckle at his hallucinogenic confusion. This text is drenched in the inescapable pop culture of the moment it was written in; it floods through everything, the narrator’s sexual fantasies and creative daydreams. It’s the crush of inevitable commodification and the constant grasping for fame that weighs down the narrator. It’s this bleak American life and it hasn’t changed. That’s the miracle of this book: The vast majority of it was written nearly four decades ago and it was so prescient and ahead of its time that it’s managed to become even more relevant through the years.

There’s a section where the narrator’s father tells him about a factory that made napalm behind their California home. The father informs him that napalm blazes and can’t be put out. The narrator lies in bed having vivid nightmares of unending burning. The heaviness of this is still here. The burning is different now but it continues to flare in those infinite nightmares of place, capital, and unique American Conservatism that to this day are doing everything they can to destabilize and deluge the public with their madness.

This connection to modernity gives the entire book an almost eerie sense of a future blast from the past, like Skelley put this together as an early field guide to the American collapse. Language and structure are a plaything to Skelley and he treats it loosely, crafting seemingly effortless sentences that swirl and deviate, followed by stunning sections of sadness and morose self-reflection.

You can’t nail this work down; it’s ever-evolving and there will be something to be found each time you open it, especially for future generations. It is both present and past. It’s a connector. It’s a work of unhinged genius. Reading this in one sitting is best and makes for the most impact. Fear of Kathy Acker is an essential work in the landscape of indie writing in 2023.

With the amount of time between writing the text and its actual complete publication, do you feel it’s gained relevance?

Fear of Kathy Acker now feels like an early impulse toward what has become known as “autofiction.” This was long before that genre burst out — prior to Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick and other novels influenced by Kathy Acker which “appropriate” (as we called it then) other texts, and which toy wildly with POV.

There is a power to this approach, which perhaps explains why it has become popular: A narrator, illusorily assuming the role of the author, uses that voice to imagine any consciousness or reality. FOKA has a section headed “But That Didn’t Really Happen” where the narrator freaks out over the layers of universes and voices he probes and channels — all constructs of language: “Who am I?... What is ‘my’? What is ‘me’?”

Tell me how you feel about L.A. today? Is there still that sense of mysticism? Is Dodger Stadium still a special place for you?

Where we’re born and the circumstances of growing up define us. In my case, that includes the grand plasticity of Los Angeles: The “dream machine” that pumps out plots, celebrities, and marketing. The cars and suburbs where ego-electrons collide. FOKA superimposes on its narrator’s psyche a map of L.A., his haunts and hangs. The “mysticism” in FOKA mixes with superstructures of capitalism, which usurps all culture. Meccas such as Dodger Stadium and Disneyland are held up to a kind-of mock deification. So are celebrities.

BTW: Dodger Stadium recently launched a new design palette. Its purples and turquoises and glitchy geometries echo Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album art. That’s kind of mystical!

The writing itself whipsaws back and forth between humor and sadness and sex and drugs, as well as various lusts and longings. How important is structure to you? Do you just let it happen or do you have a path you’re trying to carve through the writing?

Anti-narrative narrative frees the text to veer in any direction. This style collages the POV of the narrator and their fetishes, fears, and questions. It also allows the book to be conscious of itself in a kind of meta way, almost as if it’s being imagined in the act of being read. Perhaps this, and the long, manic sentences and other stylistic tricks, give FOKA an improvised feeling. “Just let it happen,” as you say.

BTW, Kathy Acker was not the only inspiration. The Introductions and text also reference Lynne Tillman, Jim Carroll, Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller, William Blake, etc.

What does the future of this kind of writing look like to you? What’s the last great L.A. novel you’ve read?

Despite the menacing consolidation of big publishers and booksellers, this is a fertile time for literary fiction and indie presses! Recently in Los Angeles Review of Books, I defined “new narrative” by its dissociative forms and themes — “the anxiety/bliss of romance/sex, psychic roleplay, identity-in- ideology, dream states, trauma, more sex.” The future is writers exploring what Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Dennis Cooper, and other pioneers got going. Themes feed a latent hunger in writers and readers.

And format-fucking absorbs texts and concepts from other fields — psychotherapy, gender studies, art crit, astronomy, film, psychedelic trips, whatever. But those are just some of my obsessions.

Fear of Kathy Acker is out June 6. Pre-order it here, or else.