A COSMIC POP VIRUS - INTERVIEW BETWEEN LYDIA SVIATOSLAVSKY AND JACK SKELLEY

In fall 2022 BlazeVOX published Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing by Jack Skelley. In spring 2023 Semiotext(e) publishes The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker by Jack Skelley. Interstellar Theme Park spans decades right up through 2022. Fear of Kathy Acker is the complete edition of Skelley’s 1980s novel – published only in fragments thus far. Lydia Sviatoslavsky explores with Jack themes in both books: archetypes, evolution, commodification, cartoons, sex/romance, and divas from both music and lit.

LS: William S. Burroughs said, “Language is a virus.” I think one could argue that pop culture, too, is a virus, and increasingly so. Is pop culture a product of ideas/obsessions/illnesses plucked from the collective unconscious? These massive organic machines/mothers inform one another, swap spit.

JS: Massive is correct! The pop culture virus extends from the language virus, which in the largest sense is the culture virus, the ultimate intertextual construct. That Burroughs line suggests my personal rediscovery of psychedelic botanist Terrence McKenna. In McKenna’s scenario, human evolution jump-started with the neuro-transmitters of psilocybin mushrooms on the plains of prehistory. Along with increased visual acuity and sex ritual, mushrooms triggered glossolalia, the “virus” of language. And its self-reflecting mythmaking ultimately defined everything human plus the cosmos. Language saved hominids from climate extinction. It lifted them above nature. Your “mothers” reference is useful, as this mythmaking emphasized female or pan-gender deities… at least according to the theory.

At present stages of (de)-evolution, popular culture invades all other modes. The virus metastasizes into vast commodification as a late-capitalist virus rising within the language virus. It’s a commercial parody of our already linguistic-based hallucinations of ego, society, reality and collective mind. That’s a lot of spit-swapping, as you say.

How has this intrusion of pop iconography evolved over time, collectively and in your own work, as media dominates our lives ever more?

As artists, we have to ask: What stance do we take towards pop culture? Shouldn’t we be breaking down language and waking up from the culture dream? On the other hand, this vernacular is our birthright. It is the Western world’s meta-idiomatic lingua franca. If we don’t own it, it will own us. For me there is always a love/hate relationship. Maybe it’s best to be both delighted and disgusted by observing the descent of archetypes into pop and back again. As poet  Elaine Equi said in her Interstellar Theme Park blurb, it’s about “discovering the transcendent in the trivial, the mythic in the mundane.”

Examples from Interstellar Theme Park include the series of “Ekphrastic Movie Reviews.” In one, George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life is a wanna-be Satan figure. In another, Tippi Hedren in The Birds is a stylish Valkyrie fending off nature’s harpies. There is another poem, “Athena del Rey” (written in the form of a press release), that depicts current divas such as Miley Cyrus and Lana del Rey in the ancient roles of “tutelary” goddesses protecting civilization from today’s pandemics.

Re-readings of post-feminist art critic Camille Paglia influenced all those poems.

Collage by Lydia Sviatoslavsky The Third Mind by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, nocturna7.tumblr.com, Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou, Lana Del Rey via Pitchfork, Miley Cyrus via Peter Pedonomou for Cosmopolitan.

I sense this overall approach to pop culture – and Paglia scholarship in particular – is what you are getting at in this part of your Author’s Intro: “It elevates to symbology the preposterous yet tenacious expression of the mythic in the personal—the polyverse of sexual personae that holds and molds our identities.”

For sure. Sexual Personae is Paglia’s encyclopedic classic. It matrixes psychic impulses via icons through art, film and music. Juicy stuff. On a more post-semiotic level, I suppose, I was recently inspired by Julia Kristeva’s The Severed Head: Capital Visions. It finds liberation depicted in images of decapitation in art, ancient to modern. And increasingly, Kristeva’s concept of “intertextual” content is real and relevant.

I have always been disproportionately hooked on contemporary women writers. There is some inverse sway of these voices in my male ego, I guess. Recently I enjoy linking their linguistic powers to ancient female-focused texts of Gnostic scriptures. In some of these psychedelic and sick-ass gospels, an ultimate female entity supersedes the usurper male ego represented by Yahweh. The cosmos is female engendered. When Christianity congealed from revelation into dogma, these texts were suppressed, which gives them extra naughty subversive power.

Also inspiring lately is the exuberance of French theorist Helene Cixous exalting ecriture feminine – "women's writing” – in her essay The Laugh of the Medusa. That text, the Gnostic heresies and Julia Kristeva’s decapitation book make their way into a current prose-thing of mine – “Walt Disney’s Head.” It’s partly about how language must re-engineer culture to a much-needed emotional, sexual and Gaian holism. Sexual anarchy, emotional/romantic myths, and the Gnostic concept of “redemption by sin” do battle with the patriarchal linguistic products that death-trap our minds. This is for an upcoming book of prose.

But back to the “polyverse of sexual personae that holds and molds our identities.” There is also a level where these archetypes inhabit our psyches. In your poem “Wilma Flintstone as the Anima,” C.G. Jung thrusts his theory of the female principle embedded in consciousness all the way into cultural commodities. Meaning-making is dizzying on this granular level because it’s everywhere and nowhere depending on how you filter your perceptions.

Yes. That short poem attempts a rhetorical argument: One may find release from romantic restlessness by actualizing and harmonizing the sexual identities within. It pairs fundamental insights from analytical psychology with dumb cartoon imagery. These persona and sub-persona forces are “everywhere and nowhere,” which is how you describe their all-suffusing span. Water to our fish. Inside and outside. But a garbage-pop connoisseur like me cringes at the straight-up pomposity of these themes, so I couch them – in this case – in a Flintstones cartoon.

The final section of Interstellar Theme Park is a preview of your next book, Fear of Kathy Acker. This novel, which Semiotext(e) will publish in spring 2023, you wrote way back in the 1980s. Why is your novel coming out 35 years later?

Uh, because Semiotext(e) is godhead? Unbeknownst to me, the publishers had liked it since it first appeared piecemeal in chapbooks by Illuminati Press. And we’re super excited about this being The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker. To contextualize its time-capsule quality, the book includes essays by two magnificent authors: Amy Gerstler and Sabrina Tarasoff. It will also have an index of places and people, from Dodger Stadium to Madonna, and a corresponding illustrated map of L.A.

By the way, I did not change the text at all. So if anyone’s offended by all the sex (straight, cis, male or otherwise), please blame 1980s Jack Skelley.

Returning to William Burroughs, Fear of Kathy Acker (FOKA) seems inspired partly by Acker’s innovative cut-up style. And one FOKA passage references this Burroughs insight: “All writing is in fact cut-up.” So what is your book’s connection to the Acker legacy?

Burroughs might just as well have said, “All reality is cut-up.” This, in fact, is the next line in FOKA, which frames its questing narrator’s days in 1980s L.A. through fractured, molecular metaphors: scrambled porno-TV screens, acid ego disintegration, caves painted with video games, erotic confusions, and Disney dark rides such as Monsanto Adventure Thru Inner Space.

But allow me to posit a clunky org-chart of the “new narrative” style surging through alt-lit today. It was coalescing at the time Acker first attacked my sensibilities. Its body of intertextuality is a roiling stream of genre re-combinations:

- Burroughs, Gertrude Stein and other Modernists elevate cut-ups and collage writing. (Even TS Eliot gets into the act with The Waste Land).

- Vladimir Nabokov and others employ the “unreliable” first-person narrator. (Of course, all fiction writers do this, but perhaps Nabokov heightens it.)

- Emerging from the avant art scene of David Antin and others, KA joins 2 streams. Her novels gleefully ransack the Western canon – Great Expectations, Don Quixote. (We used to call this appropriation.) At the same time her “I” is constantly re-mythologizing and scrambling the “facts” of “her” life. These novels are disorienting. There is delicious angst and elation. Ferocious confusions of desire, romance and self. That and their playful approach to language and narrative hit me hard in the 1980s.

- Semiotext(e) publisher and author Chris Kraus writes the novel I Love Dick (1997) which narrows and re-channels KA’s approach. I Love Dick emphasizes:

1) The unreliable “I.” Did “she” really “do” all these things? Why is “she” unashamedly exposing “her” actions? It antagonizes readers. And…

2) The cut-ups. But rather than fold-in other writers’ texts, Kraus niftily inserts her own art criticism and Marxist theory etc. This formalizes some of KA’s mess into a no less confrontational and amusing style. I’m over-simplifying all of this, of course.

- Since I Love Dick, but mostly in the last 5-10 years, has come an explosion of new-narrative. (Dennis Cooper has been hugely influential.) The term auto fiction is attached to some of this. Kraus rejects the term and she’s correct. Auto fiction implies a false dichotomy, because all fiction – except pure genre fiction (Lord of the Rings, spy novels etc.) – is at root autobiography.

So where does FOKA join this stream? There is a FOKA excerpt in Interstellar Theme Park titled, “But that didn’t really happen.” It seems telling and includes the lines, “What is ‘my’? What is ‘me’? How much is Fear of Kathy Acker “about” Kathy Acker?

Not much. Aside from the title, a couple name drops, and one passage that steals from her, KA doesn’t appear in the novel. But her vastly funny, scary, sexy opportunities for expression hit me at a susceptible period. However – and I realize how preposterously presumptuous this is – it is possible that FOKA secretly flows from the “new narrative” stream outlined above. Maybe that’s why it attracted Chris Kraus’ attention decades ago.

At the very least, it is a glimpse into this roiling genre stream, which has become newly powerful to me. In the past few months I’ve been doing a prose mix of “auto-theory” memoir and language experiments. Sex is still a big part of it. I guess that figures.