Grab Blood And Guts In High School Compiled By Kathy Acker Accessible As Paperback
don't think I've ever read anything quite like this before, This is some gloriously fuckedup shit, Had Sid Vicious amp Nancy Spungen ever been parents now there's a scary thought I'd imagine them reading this to their kids as a bedtime story, ha! A brutal parable of American pain and abuse, highly irreverent, grossly comical, and more often than not, incomprehensible, but in the spirit of honesty.
Sex specifically is treated here as repulsion, dread, and chaos, but our main character never succumbs to being a sex object, rather an object that ballistically dabbles in sex.
Im conflicted, but Im also intrigued and arrested by this book, so thats pretty good! It is so hard to like this book with its clunky prose, weird drawings, garbled thinking, bizarre narrative, a sexobsessed protagonist.
. .
But once in a while, after such horrorladen passages, you come across something like this that brings a lump to your throat:
"Most people are what they sense and if all you see day after day is a mat on a floor that belongs to the rats and four walls with tiny piles of plaster at the bottom, and all you eat is starch, and all you hear is continuous noise, you smell garbage and piss which drips through the walls continually, and all the people you know live like you, it's not horrible, it's just.
. . Who they are. "
Kathy's selfdeprecatory humour is the saving grace here which while laughing out loud also moistens your eyes esp, mention here of the madcap "Inside a small East Village bakery" scene: "what's that cooky"
And that hilarious feminist deconstruction of The Scarlet Letter, the Latinate versification yeah, it's a mash up of many genres amp styles.
But those diamonds in the dross are so few amp far between that it mainly becomes an exercise in tedium I just couldn't wait for this book to be over amp done with.
You'll say "Oh but what about that magic wordExperimental"
More like 'Mental' I shd say!
Susan E, Hawkins has analysed this book as a postmodernist work in her article "All in the Family: Kathy Ackers Blood and Guts in High School, ” Contemporary Literature
From Wikipedia:
"According to Hawkins, Acker is motivated by two discourses: the oedipal and the imperial, Using the mechanism of sexual and economic oppression, Acker is able to actualize the taboo surrounding incest by associating it with capitalism to demystify the oedipal formation of desire in the Western culture Hawkins.
"
That's true but the fact remains that even when Janey is out of the influence of her father, she remains addicted to sex amp hardly makes much of an effort to change her life.
Also the fact that Acker's female protagonist is a mere ten year old who dies by the age of fourteen doesn't really give her much of a say in how her life is run.
It was really frustrating reading these lines:
", . . despite her high fever, she walked the streets, Where could she run to Where was peace someone who loved her No one would take her in, It was raining lightly. The rain was going to increase her infection, She stood in front of Sally's house, Then she made herself walk away, She walked back into her father's and her apartment, She hated the apartment. She didn't know what to do with her hateful tormented mind, "
Unlike the others, I wasn't appalled by the 'incest' angle because it is clear Janey doesn't have the priviledge of an adult perspective / value judgement on her life: this is life exactly how she has known it amp she relays it as such.
Also that weird thing abt President Carter how could Acker get away with such nonsense here when Coover had to face so many problems with The Public Burning
The edition I read was Blood and Guts in High School, plus two: Great Expectations My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasoliniand I was driven so braindead by this book that I didn't even notice there were two more books in it! And went on with glazed eyes in my dogged reading almostpages of it, a parody of Macbeth kind of woke me up amp it was followed by a spoof on The Merchant of Venice, damn!, but I'm not really to be blamed as these also continue more or less the same themes, the same techniques a female in dysfunctional surroundings, exploited by one amp all, obsessed with sex, raging against capitalism, religion, social structures no offense to her fans, but maybe if you've read one of her books you've read them all!
Some readers might enjoy Acker's pastichedriven, typographically varied narrative but that didn't work for this reader.
There is a reason why folks on Gr have shelf named dropped / abandoned, Time I got one of those,
Gift it to a frenemy the good amp the bad parts of this book will nicely balance the good amp bad part of that friendship, One of the most fucked up books I've ever read, I can see, certainly, how it would annoy some in a stylistic manner and infuriate others on a conceptual level for example, Janey is being, . . raped by her father, but Acker presents this relationship in the terms of a dying love affair, Let's say it's not for the weak of heart, nor is it recommended to those without a sense of incredibly, powerfully grotesque and debasing humor,
Thankfully, I'm a kind of monster with no boundaries! So this was an absolute joyride to me, By the time Janey is describing Jimmy Carter's asshole caked in several inches of old shit, and referring to him as a syphilitic pustule that fell off of Nixon's dick, I was nearly crying with laughter in the middle of the Boston Public Garden likely looking like a total maniac, to boot.
Jean Genet makes a wonderfully bizarre appearance, and the "letter" from Erica Jong was likewise too fucking funny to get offended by, If there's ever been a line of appropriateness drawn in any context, Acker's novel pukes on it and keeps on trucking,
Like I said, not for everyone, but if you're totally fucked in the head or the funny bone, you should definitely give it a test run.
Seriously, what's this supposed to be I love a good antinovel as much as the next pretentious hipster, but don't just slap together a bunch of stuff and then bore me to death with it.
I didn't understand about Kathy Acker's fiction before I read this, Since the title was BLOOD AND GUTS IN HIGH SCHOOL, I thought it would be about high school, And would feature blood and guts, it was something totally different, I felt so frustrated I wrote my own book of BLOOD AND GUTS IN HIGH SCHOOL, But I called mine: GIRL, Janey lived in the locked room, Twice a day the Persian slave trader came in and taught her to be a whore, Otherwise there was nothing. One day she found a pencil stub and scrap of paper in a forgotten corner of the room, She began to write down her life, starting with "Parents stink" her father, who is also her boyfriend, has fallen in love with another woman and is about to leave her.
With Blood and Guts in High School, Kathy Acker, whose work has been labeled everything from postpunk porn to postpunk feminism, has created a brilliantly subversive narrative built from conversation, description, conjecture, and moments snatched from history and literature.
groveatlantic. com My God not many books have made me feel this sad and depressed to the point where I had to keep stopping and giving myself a hug.
Not many books have done this whilst at the same time making me laugh, I took far too long to sit down and read this, How to summarise what it's about Well, it's initially about Janey and her
toxic relationships various men, the way that sex impacts on her psyche, the way that she's lost and trying to find herself but there's nothing to be found because so much of her has already been taken away and how it keeps getting taken away over and over.
It's about child prostitution and human trafficking or that's how I interpreted parts of it, I've seen a few negative reviews of this book on here, some people are seemingly put off by the abstraction and weird style of it, I suggest you get over that and just look at it as a form of high expressionism, .