Kathy Acker Double Feature

Best to start things off strong, eh?  I'll do two books in this first post!

Kathy Acker:
Don Quixote  and  Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective (+ The Burning Bombing of America)

Don Quixote is the book that really won me over for Kathy Acker.  I'd read Pussy King of the Pirates, and I'd loved that, but after Don Quixote I was an Acker Monster, needing to absorb as much frustration and spite and spikey words as possible.  If you're coming at Acker unprepared, I think I suggest Pussy (haha...) to start, because it follows a more coherent plot--if Acker ever follows a coherent plot?  You have to go into it with the understanding that she tells stories in exploding dream format; one thing leads to another and that other may or may not make any sense.  She wants you to give up linear plot structures, give up syntax and grammar, and just pay attention to the shapes and feel of words.  It's important.

So, onto Don Quixote specifically.  This is great because it follows the protagonist Don Quixote (in this version, a woman) through an abortion and its aftermath, masterfully culminating 37 pages in, with her death (social? moral?  Acker wants you to consider this).  We are then told to examine the culture surrounding women, women in literature and women in fiction.  The second part is introduced with the all-caps epigram: BEING DEAD, DON QUIXOTE COULD NO LONGER SPEAK.  BEING BORN INTO AND PART OF A MALE WORLD, SHE HAD NO SPEECH OF HER OWN.  ALL SHE COULD DO WAS READ MALE TEXTS WHICH WEREN'T HERS.

Acker then takes us through an eerie tour of the history of literature --including! I was so pleased to discover: a rewriting of Catullus 8, from the POV of a brokenhearted Russian with Ackers creative explitives added to the latin.  Love!  Lovelovelove.

The book is also interspersed with some political commentary on Nixon, which may be a bit dated for the modern reader, but still good snark and certainly not irrelevant to modern politics.

The tone of the original Don Quixote is carried over, but Acker's pseudo-feminist re-writing infuses it with a higher sense of urgency, spending much time reflecting on what this idealist's role is in the world. I think the reason I liked Don Quixote more than Pussy was that in it I found, among other things, a critical discussion of activism in an apathetic time.  It seemed to exist on a much grander scale with higher stakes, while Pussy was more internal and emotional (which, of course is not a bad thing at all).


Rip-Off Red is Acker's first work, and was published posthumously.  I recommend it for people who are already Acker fans as a glimpse into the progression of her work and style, because first-time readers will get All Kinds of the wrong idea about Acker from this.

Firstly, because it follows a (gasp!) linear story line!  Don't worry--there are plenty of foggy dream sequences to confuse you, but mostly there is just Sex Scene after Sex Scene.  Mon. Dieu.  I feel compelled to warn readers that this book was TOO AROUSING to read in public.  At least in the beginning, until I got used to it, and until the sex started getting all... incesty (it's cool! It's a dream sequence.  At least, I think).

It's a pretty straightforward mystery, almost film-noir-ish in her attention to shadows, costumes/textures, and her insistence on the "toughness" of her detective image.

The edition I had also includes a set of essays called The Burning Bombing of America written roughly the same time as Rip-Off.  They go well together, because here we have the erratic, probably drug-induced, almost tourettes-y spasmodic verbal vomit that we know and love.  One section is entitled "Abstract Essay Collaged With Dreams," and another is called "OUTER SPACE MESSAGES / TOTAL CHAOS!" so, yeah, it's pretty much what you'd expect.  They are about chaos, and they read like chaos.  Best described, I suppose, as the internal monologue of the people on the ground during the destruction of an urban area.

Acker's chaotic poetry trumps realism any day.