I Love Dick on TV

Good. She’s a genius.

Yes. I don’t know if she liked that! I meant it as a compliment. [Laughs]

There’s a great line from Deleuze that Sylvère and I used to shoot back and forth, which is, “A friend is someone who lets you see their crazy side.” We feel that everyone we publish, we kind of know their crazy side. It manifests in their work and that’s why we like it. Semiotext(e)... it’s like a curated artwork as much as a company. It’s a kind of vision or aesthetic that’s so multi-valenced. And it’s an extended family. We tend to do more than one book with each person.

Not seriously. Sometimes it will be: Sylvère likes X, and I don’t like X, and Hedi’s on the fence. But we never have come to blows over it. Basically, it’s like a good marriage, where if one person feels strongly about a project and the other two don’t, it’s okay, let them do it.

In Reena Spaulings, New York explodes in apocalypse while Reena’s doing an underwear shoot. Pretty funny! Tiqqun’s Theory of a Young-Girl, translated by Ariana Reines, spoke perfectly to that moment, 2012, and it’s not dated yet. Tiqqun divorces the descriptor “young-girl” from gender or age and defines it where it belongs: as an existential, consumerist state that places its subject in a perpetual desire to please, smiling and lost in an abyss of need.

In L.A., the Semiotext(e) house style is an old cashmere pullover sweater, camel or navy or black, sourced—at least by me—from thrift stores. I think probably we’re all copying Hedi; he does it best.

Hedi El Kholti started doing design in 2001 and became a co-editor in 2004. Before he arrived, Semiotext(e) was still kind of frozen in time: there were the “boy books,” Sylvère’s Foreign Agents French theory books, and my “girl books,” first-person fiction. Hedi’s an incredible archivist and artist. He grew up in Morocco and lived in Paris before moving to L.A., and he has an incredible range of culture. The list became wider, more nuanced, although it’s still very hard to define: sex, culture, politics, literature. He’s also the Managing Editor, and he’s turned Semiotext(e) into a stronger, more professional enterprise, in the most creative and non-corporate ways.

There was a great Marilyn Minter cover for Masha Tupitsyn’s Beauty Talk and Monsters. Hedi just designed the cover for my Acker book. He’s using an image by the artist photographer Kaucyila Brooke who took pictures of Kathy Acker’s clothes, so the cover is her ghostly black leather jacket on a hanger.

She was very determined to have a big career as a writer, and that dictated a lot of the choices. Some of them backfired. Her extreme “bad girl” image of the 80s was striking, but it locked her into one moment. It’s taken twenty years for the work to be separated out from the photos of her. Kathy pursued icon-hood with great zeal, but she was also encouraged to do it as a marketing tool. Her work was difficult, highly intellectual. She came to accept her publisher’s idea that by presenting herself as the proto-punk bad girl, her work would be more viable, marketable.

Definitely. Going through archives, that’s a sort of guilty pleasure, catching people out on all their white lies. She said X to this person and Y to another about the same thing. Often she’d choose a man, sometimes a lover, sometimes not, more often he was, as her “silent partner” when she was writing a book. She’d write intensely to that person, and share pages with him. Parts of the letters sometimes found their way into the books. Up through Don Quixote, she directed each of her books toward someone.

You feel like you have a secret addressee? I do too.

Hedi. The book circles around things we’ve talked about over the years about how history is made. We both felt a revulsion for the nostalgia about Olde Tyme New York: the history of the city in the 70s and 80s has been so mythologized. Having been alive long enough to see the disparity between how life is lived, and how it’s historicized, it’s really horrifying. Giving a more honest depiction of these eras was one of my goals in the book. I didn’t choose to do it because Kathy is my favorite writer. Researching her biography became a way of creating an alternate history of different eras, using her as a marker to move through time. She’s a fascinating marker because she’s so complex and contradictory. She’s unlikable in many respects, but then she’ll redeem herself. She would think she was redeeming herself through her kind of faux vulnerability and helplessness, but really she redeems herself through her hard work and discipline. That’s the only thing that lasts—hard work and discipline.

Oh, I don’t want to name names, but—you know. There’ve been an awful lot of memoirs of that era, and photo exhibitions, ephemera, etc. As if 70s or 80s NYC was the last avant-garde. It’s always the last avant-garde. A memoir tells the story of one person’s success, and in the process, edits a lot of other stuff out. That’s how art stars are made. But in the process, the supporting players, the boredom and texture of time as it’s actually lived all disappear.

True, false, simultaneously. Somebody’s truth is always someone else’s lie. What matters more is how history speaks to the present.

Are we going to get to talk about boyfriends in the interview?

I slept with a lot of people, but I didn’t have a lot of boyfriends. Before I met Philip, my partner, when I first moved out to L.A., I was kind of trying to sleep with as many people as possible, making up for a deficit. Now I have this kind of boring, monogamous life. Or maybe not so boring. The whole boyfriend thing… It’s scary to navigate. So much of getting to know a person is like auditioning for the role of girlfriend, and that’s awful.

All time time! The writer Joanna Walsh and I did an event last summer in London, kind of riffing on this. We invited the ticketed audience to submit questions to us in advance, and we’d answer them onstage, like two Agony Aunts.

There was a really difficult question about a three-way romance. And a few about obsessive crushes, of course.

Writers who’ve been important to me include Rachel Nagelberg, Natasha Stagg, Joni Murphy, Natasha Soobramanien, Cecilia Pavon, Emily Gould, and Sheila Heti. It’s good to read your contemporaries, of all demographics. It’s also good to read from the past. Balzac’s Splendours and Miseries of the Courtesans was especially important to me when I was one.

Some days none, some days one or two.

I’m a monogamous reader.

In the fall, we’re doing Jackie Wang’s Carceral Capitalism. She’s been doing amazing work on institutionalized racism, especially through the criminal justice system. We’ve also been republishing Gary Indiana’s work. This season, Three Month Fever, is coming out. That’s his psychobiography of Andrew Cunanan, the guy who killed Versace. Chris Glazek wrote the introduction. We’re also doing a new work with the Invisible Committee called Now. We haven’t got the manuscript yet.