Why am I only now getting around to reading Kathy Acker? Ive known I needed to for ages, but it took M reading bits of Blood and Guts in Highschool aloud to nudge me into grabbing this. The point where Anne Quin and Dennis Cooper meet, sort of: cut-up stream-of-consciousness, words almost spilling off the page in urgent derangement of lit forms, post-modern elegance via porno, disorienting appropriated stories, piercing confessional vulnerability or is it. Sex and murder oozing from every pore in the binding.That said, this is either not entirely successful, or entirely successful in form-breaking goals that dont necessarily make for the smoothest reading.
I love the some lives of murderesses chapters at the beginning, but as this disintegrates further and further (paralleling psychological fragmentation, presumably, so I see how it works, I think, but still:) it begins to deny any attempts at reading as coherent narrative, or really as incoherent narrative, digests into simple bits: words, thoughts, sensations, each existing alone or in at most a scene.
Its a pretty thrilling first-published novel, but one that is most thrilling in its eye to the future, to the further books on the horizon.