Here before you is the surviving correspondence between Kathy Acker and MacKenzie Wark. These emails were hastily written, casual and often indirect; they crossed “in the mail” and both the sequence and references may confuse the reader. The authors barely knew each other, the correspondence lasts a little over two weeks, and their relationship lasted only a few weeks beyond the last of the letters. You might ask why publish them at all, and so did I, but only after a novelist Ken Wark and I (and Kathy Acker) held in great esteem turned down our request for a preface. Initially very enthusiastic, on closer reading the novelist found the letters too personal. In declining, the novelist said it felt too much like rooting around in someone’s underwear drawer. Is this a terrible mistake? I pulled back to reconsider. I reread everything. The letters are personal, but they tell us only a little about the author’s lives. Many of the things they reveal you can easily find in these writers’ published works. They gossip a little about their friends, some famous and some not, but all of them interesting. Most of the content rests on what they are thinking about rather than how they feel, on their questions for each other, and on what they are reading, rather than what other people have said or done. In part the letters read like bibliographies or indexes, chock full of cultural referents that map the corresondants within their literary, critical and pop cultural eras. They talk a lot about sex, about gender roles, about drag unveiled and re-ironized for familiar purpose: to flirt.