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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Choosing between Pussy and High School

Ruchbah me, Armaduras

11:37 / 28.03.05

My friends and I have a little book group going, and after a surfeit of Henry James I suggested we try some Kathy Acker because I'd heard how great she was but never read any of her stuff. Nobody else had heard of her so there was general enthusiasm, but it's proving hard to track her down. Obviously, what with second-hand bookshops and the interweb, it'll be reasonably easy to get hold of copies, but there's no oppurtunity to browse. Can someone recommend a particular Acker book good for a book group? I will love you forever, or at least well into April.

14:23 / 28.03.05

My suggestion would be to go with 'Pussy' just 'cause, pirates and boarding school and sexy deathboys with rats and skulls and, y'know, PIRATES! Even the word 'ninja' appears, yes it does. The fact that she culls and dismisses Lawrence Durrel in less than two sentences is something nigh remarkable, to me, as well.
Plus, it's frequently findable (not a word is that?) at Barnes & Noble and other major chain booksellers, even if it gets the Sade treatment where they turn the book on its side so the spine faces up - to avoid traumatising the innocent browsers or something, I guess.
It's not mind-blowing by any stretch, but it's properly invasive and exploratory, funny and heartbreaking and often both at once, and there's some entertaining illustrations, which lead me to classify it as a comic whether anybody else would or not. I mean the pictures and the text are necessary to tell the story, so it's a comic, right?
It probably doesn't help my take that a lot of her stuff reminds me of the Ellis-by-the-numbers pieces everybody holds against Warren ('Angel Stomp Future' especially), but she does it in different ways. Now, very dated for me, though loads of folks are still catching up - I mean, she was nineties PoMo spectacle-and-rush before that even got going, so... And she's dead, how far beyond us (culturally) can we expect her (work) to be, after that? She's often declared 'society's favorite transgressive author' and I think that's because she isn't anything of the sort - other than a willingness to discuss perfectly normal, everyday things, like shit and power and the occasional unhealthy obsession or schoolgirl crush, she's not really pushing the envelope, much. Comfortable for anyone who's read anything from, say, W.S. Burroughs to Clive Barker.
It also happens to be sitting in my bag as I type this, 'cause I was supposed to talk to a class this morning about her.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

14:34 / 28.03.05

I'd recommend "Empire Of The Senseless", though ymmv. What really caught me was a reworking (or, to be more accurate, a recontextualisation) of the run with the Panther Moderns in Gibson's "Neuromancer".
Although I should point out that the reason I liked this one most of all the Acker stuff I read was that it reminded me of Burroughs. If you guys aren't into Burroughs you may not find it to be her best- it certainly seems to be underrated among her oeuvre.

15:45 / 28.03.05

Empire of the Senseless is a favorite, though I'm also a big fan of My Mother: Demonology. I started with High School and would say that it's probably easier to read her work in rough chronological order, to get a sense of how she refined and focussed her treatment of her themes.

Disco is My Class War

05:08 / 29.03.05

I would actually go with Great Expectations rather than PKotPs or Blood and Guts. It's shorter, for a start, and it's almost the only one of Acker's books that has a narrative you can follow. This is not to diss the other Acker volumes, but as an introduction it can work well. Anyhow, I really love it.

Ruchbah me, Armaduras

17:16 / 29.03.05

Blimey, what an interesting range of opinions. I feel like I'm being given a glimpse of something brightly coloured moving very quickly from one branch to another in a high tree. I'll climb after it!

Umm, it looks Blood and Gutsy so far, if only for the whole 'chronological' thing. Why isn't Acker published by a more mainstream publisher? Not necessarily a criticism. She seems like a big name but she's hard to find in the UK.

nyarlathotep's shoe horn

22:06 / 03.04.05

She's a big name in academic circles, not so much outside of them.

I second the vote on "Great Expectations" particularly if you're familiar with Dickens'.

"Pussy, King of the Pirates" also has a CD she released with the Mekons to go along with it. Pirate chanties and so forth. A real meeting of the odds on that one.

I had them both, but lent them away to someone. I think they're pillaging the wide world of traditional literary perspective...

enjoy
pablo

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03:34 / 10.04.05

"Pussy" is one of the only Acker books that the local mainstream bookstores in my area stocks. I recently got my first Acker, "Rip Off Red & the Burning Bombing of America". Haven't read the first part but I liked "Burning Bombing of America", even though it seemed derivative of Burroughs at times.

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03:34 / 10.04.05

"Pussy" is one of the only Acker books that the local mainstream bookstores in my area stocks. I recently got my first Acker, "Rip Off Red & the Burning Bombing of America". Haven't read the first part but I liked "Burning Bombing of America", even though it seemed derivative of Burroughs at times.

Goodness Gracious Meme

17:24 / 11.04.05

I would go with Great Expectations, for pretty much the same reasons as Disco.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

17:25 / 12.04.05

Why isn't Acker published by a more mainstream publisher?

Not sure who's got her now, but Picador used to publish her a few years ago.

03:30 / 18.04.05

Rip Off Red was Acker's first novel, which she never published, and which she said in an interview she was glad wasn't published. So I dunno whether that and Burning are such great examples of her stuff.

My favourite of her books has always been Kathy Goes To Haiti, which she supposedly wrote because some poet got a job editing a porn line and hired all his poet friends to hack out potboiling pornos. Then the line folded and Acker decided to publish hers anyway - so although in some ways it has 'a plot', it's hard to imagine what your average porn punter would have made of it. But I don't think it would work particularly well for a book group for those reasons.

Yeah I reckon either Blood and Guts or Pussy work well! And I really like Empire of the Senseless too.

12:35 / 18.04.05

For what it's worth, I had a great deal of success (IMHO) in reading Acker more or less chronologically. The Rip-Off Red volume was not yet out then, so I started with Blood and Guts. Certainly a startling introduction to a body of work. I won't tell you the line I'm thinking of, but you'll almost certainly know it when you read it.

However, I think Acker's best novel is Empire of the Senseless. It marks in my mind a shift in her thought away from enumerating the problems in the world (specifically in the patriarchy and in language) and towards a solution to those problems. Thus her movement away from Gibson/Neuromancer (which is, as someone mentions above, a great reworking of this seminal 80s text) and towards a modified Huck Finn, which not only shows us how stupid Tom Sawyer is (in case you missed that in the original Twain) but also , I think, a way out of the signification she sees as being part and parcel of the hegemony of the current Empire.

That said, I never read any Acker I didn't like and would place her overall among the most important 10-15 American writers of the last quarter century. If you can find them, try her essays in Bodies of Work and Hannibal Lecter, My Father. They offer very interesting insights into her work as well as into certain writers/phenomena of the late 20th century: Chip Delany, postmodernism, bodybuilding, etc.

It's too bad she doesn't get the play she deserves. As far as her publisher goes, she's mostly published by Grove in the US. Hardly Random House, but not that far out of the mainstream. They also publish Beckett, Genet, Sade, Burroughs, Duras, Borges, and others. If you want to get your book with published with them it's usually best to be French or transgressive. And it helps to be dead. However, they still publish enough literary giants to be considered at least close to the mainstream.