Blood and Guts in High School: A Novel

I like to consider myself edgy but maybe I need to re-think my reading material through again.East Village, Performance Artist, Rebel Etc. YEAH MAN sounds like a fun read....NOT. Just rambling on and on about blah blah blah Etc. I know this type of writing falls into a hip category of writing but I just don't get it. Some authors can do it but most cannot.I need a story....characters ,,,,feelings ....dreams material to make me think. This doesn't provide any of that.I finished it out of habit.

Man this book is crazy. Read it for an experimental fiction class. Great poetic stuff here. Can be dark and tough to read a points. Not suitable for children.

About halfway through when the shock value is subsided, this is just another mediocre novel. I get that it was groundbreaking for its time, but, still-- it's actually not that well written.

Pros: Like most of the books I've been reading lately (Gulliver's Travels, The Gallic Wars, Gardens of the Moon) this book contains some brilliant prose. The parts where Acker deconstructs the Scarlet Letter, comments on capitalist language, and provides the philosophy of the slave trader are particularly good. Even in less coherent passages, it is at least vivid. It is also short.Cons: Its brevity is a good thing because also like most of the books I've been reading lately, over half the novel is pointless. In this case, the narrative gets so abstract that you can just skip over anything that begins to repeat itself or that makes no sense. Also in this case, the answer as to why the author chose to do this is in the novel - it's a rebellion against capitalist interest. The language is intentionally bad to deny the very people it is criticizing. If you bought the book, as I did, you are the scum she is talking about. Most people won't like this sort of criticism, and even if they do, as I did, it was still a pretty big waste of time. In a way, I love that this novel is pulling down every reader that picks it up. I can respect that kind of spite.Summary: If you read this novel, you are its victim. If you are interested in that, then by all means read it. It wont be a pleasant journey, but you maybe satisfied anyway.

So bizarre but a quick and fascinating read. I would not recommend this as subway material given the illustrations.

good

love this book!

transgressive fiction is rarely done well, and generally lapses into sloppy self-indulgence and outright self-parody in short order. acker was a brilliant writer who could bedazzle you or make your skin crawl more/less at will. the book is lewd, pornographic, savage, funny, and casually heartbreaking. acker can make you sick and then laugh at you for your dainty moral squeamishness.parts of the book fall flat, but when she's at her best acker is viciously effective.

Kathy Acker’s wonderful novel was written in the Seventies, and the copyright is for 1978, although it wasn’t eventually published until 1984 by Grove Press, who were always ready to defend certain freedoms and thus were considered controversial.Here then we meet Janey Smith, who at ten is already in an incestuous affair with her father, and we continue with her life up unto she is fourteen, and her death. For someone so young she experiences more in her life than most will ever do, as we read of her many sexual encounters, working in a bakery, joining a gang at school, and being forcibly abducted so that she can be forced to become a sex slave, as well as her being imprisoned and becoming an illegal immigrant. Also like the author herself, so we read of her cancer.This is frenetic and set out as a collage, as we have illustrations, pieces that are more scripts and also poetry, effortlessly segueing between them all. I should stress though that this is very much a marmite book, you are going to love or loathe this, and I must admit that I fall into the former camp. Also at times this does contain plagiarism which Acker fully acknowledged, after all she was trying to create something more than just a novel, what with her background in other medias, and so this also contains parody, pastiche, and themes of a more sexual and controversial nature. Such a novel as this then you would think more high-brow publications would have shied away from reviewing, but on release they didn’t, simply as in most cases people realised that this was something a little bit different, more cutting than usual, and not afraid to bring our attentions to the darker side of life.Some of the themes that appear in this book still were not really openly discussed in the Eighties, but we can think of Kathy Acker as being a pioneer, as we have opened up and discuss and point fingers more. Would such things as Jimmy Savile and Harvey Weinstein be widely known about if such a book as this hadn’t opened people’s eyes and made mainstream literature more open in subject matter?One thing is for sure, this book which brought Acker attention from the literary world and made her more mainstream shows what a wonderful and skilled artist she was, and even if you do not like this book you can surely appreciate what she was trying to do and making us think of many unpleasant things that go on in this world.

this is sure a sore one to read, but i think anyone with an interest in the times (1977) should read, or force themselves to read it! it is patchy, some of it doesn't work, the opening sequences are very unsettling, it doesn't flow well, but isn't that just like punk?on the back of reading much burroughs i bought this on publication in 1984 in an edition with a further two pieces in it - it's in the house somewhere, probably in a lead-lined box - a refresher with this kindle edition (for less than a poond!) has shown no dilution in it's hard hitting effect, as difficult a read now as then! but one i feel that has to be made! sometimes a forced read can make you feel better about things, or at least better informed than you were at the onset. there is more than a hint of the burroughs influence here, but in alignment with a different kind of rage, a raw and fractured one - how low can you go? not much it would seem.does this have the same shock value it had back then? for me? no (because i knew what to expect), but for anyone curious enough to pick it up? most definitely! might even make you sick to your stomach, but that's the power that's in this book!

A confused fever dream of entangled stories, Janey's life is mixed with fables and maps of dreams and reworked histories and works of literature through a child's eyes as written by a bitter cynical adult. It's not a rewarding experience to read this but definitely interesting.

I guess I read this to see what it was all about - it feels dated to me now, and I probably should have it read it years ago - it feels contrived. I don't believe the voice. But it is very smart, and witty. Colourful.

I'm sure this is high art, and there are elements you can tell the author is opening her heart, but it reads more as brief sketches of notes while written on a lot of drugs. Nothing appealing here for me, but maybe others will get something out of it.

This is one of the best novels I've ever read, it completely changed how I view a novel.

Visual art + writing = I'm speechless. Thought-provoking and masterful work of art.

I wonder how I might have received Acker's book had I read its provocative howl of shock, back in the day.Acker's narrator is a 10 year old girl at the start, shockingly recounting her needy, abused account of an incestuous relationship with her father.The thrust of the story is a kind of up yours, victim-refusing-to-be-just-a victim-but-dynamically-choosing-degradation-as-a-walk-on-the-wild-side-of-empowerment. It is a brutal, energetic piece of writing accompanied by lots of anatomical drawings of genitalia.Acker herself is described as ' a punk poet, post-modernist and sex-positive feminist writer' Unfortunately I did not glean anything from the book outside its attitudes, which are all really about those cultural attitudes and positions. Subtle and nuanced this ain'tAt the time, maybe this all meant something. I was left with little except a sense of such extreme pain and dysfunction in the writer (well, this is how she came across to me) that the book felt as if I was being repeatedly beaten over the head with bleeding, severed limb which the writer had hacked off from her own torso. The unremitting pain and rage in the end stopped even the shock response. I was left, curiously with a feeling of stultifying boredom and a kind of emotional deafness. I had to stop reading. This had little to offer me as a reader, except if I were to write an academic treatise about punk, post-modernist, sex-positive feminist writers

Kathy Acker was the post-punk writer the 80s needed. An iconic figure of the literary underground if ever she was one, she was a worthy successor to the beats - a Kerouac without the road, a Burroughs without the smack, a Dylan without the tunes. And, crucially, she was a strong woman emerging out of what had been exclusively male and largely misogynistic domain.Her work - which included poems, drawings and plays as well as prose - was preoccupied with sex, often with strong S & M overtones, a lustful, painful, romantic quest for freedom. Yet for all the anger there was a vulnerability to her which made strangely compelling - despite the element of porn, you can't help feeling she was a sweet girl who just wanted to be loved. Contrary to the violence of her image, by all accounts she was a warm and likeable person, great to hang out with.Blood And Guts In High School is her most famous work, published in 1984,at the height of her fame - the same year Melvyn Bragg devoted a South Bank Show to her. Her subsequent work got increasingly poor reviews - one critic referred to her as the 'most influential bad writer of the 80s'.Acker died in 1997 of cancer after, tragically, refusing conventional medicine in favour of every quack therapy available. Her role as cultural icon is undisputed, but was she actually any good?At its best, Blood And Guts In High School has a painful honesty and desperation to it which will appeal to those who feel trapped by the conventions of a an increasingly pointless society. At is worst, it is a scrappy collection of semi-autobiographical fantasies and dreams and scribbled drawings of genitalia. It no longer seems shocking or outrageous and, to 21st century eyes, strangely devoid of politics.I can understand the attempts to rehabilitate her to a contemporary audience. She is a fascinating character, but time has not been kind to her.

I still remember the first time I read this book and the impression that not only the subjects, but the crazy collage style with drawings, hand writing, "normal/expected" text etc. was all added in a confusing, but intriguing, mix.I was instantly attracted to this punk style and it opened my eyes to the wonder of more experimental style books - and to book clubs, because how else are you going to digest this without somebody to talk it over with?! Anyways, I think it is a book that deserves to be read. Hate it or love it - there will likely be moments where you do both - but it was innovative and taboo-breaking and brought up both subjects that were important to talk about and a crazy ride of Kathy Acker's imagination. I've seen many authors try to replicate the style more or less successfully over the years.Anyways, I read it again here 25 years later and it didn't make quite the same impression. Sometimes you should not try to re-create the feelings of a book or a film the first time round, but of course there is also the fact that reading it as an adult, there are moments where the text and the protagonist's actions are decidedly less interesting than the first time around.Still, I think it is one for the bookshelf

Certain novels encapsulate a moment, the spirit of a time. They had a huge impact when they were published, because they changed the face of fiction and went on to influence numerous writers, but on revisiting those books decades after they were written, some of that original magic - the magic of reading them in the time they were written for - is gone.Blood and Guts in High School is one of those books. Published in 1984 (but written in the late 70s and copyrighted 1978), it is a punk book that uses a DIY, collage-technique. There are sections written like drama, letters, a handwritten section where the author learns Persian, pages of sketches, and more traditional novelistic writing. The fragmented style reflects the protagonist, Janey's, fragmented sense of self. Traumatised by a relationship with a father who she sleeps with and sees as “boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father," the novel reminds one in parts of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (but with the mind-altering cocktail of drugs switched for mountains of taboo-busting sex), as Janey bounces around America, Mexico and eventually Algeria.As well as Hunter S Thompson, there are echoes of William Burroughs in here, and traces of Acker can be found in the work of Sarah Kane and Sheila Heti. Blood and Guts is not a comfortable or easy read (if incest, four-letter words or sketches of genitals are going to make you squirm, you're best finding your reading material elsewhere), and it's perhaps also these days not that interesting a read (the endless sex and the flicking between forms, as well as some of the metafictional elements, feel quite gimmicky now). But it is a book worth reading for those interested in surveying a literary landmark and seeing how it has influenced today's literary landscape.

Acker has always been an acquired taste which is entirely the way she wanted it, and this is probably one of the more interesting- in places accomplished- examples of that initial wave of literary, punky post-modernism that developed in the seventies. Although it was exciting and cutting edge at the time, with it's stream of consciousness narrative, rejection of all conventional literary structures, frank often brutal obscenity and an autobiographical honesty that at times hurt- all mixed up with arty sketches and diagrams- the downside, and perhaps ultimate judge of quality, is that it hasn't aged well. It reads now more as an historical piece, which shouldn't really be a problem, but in this area of literature, it sort of is. Some works of this nature stand the test of time and still have something vital to say- Acker's unfortunately, doesn't to my mind.So what you get is a very good slice of the NYC literary zeitgeist of the time- as a window into that world, it works very well- but in other areas you are more often than not bludgeoned into a peculiarly sterile, and now achingly dated, reading experience. Now some may well like that, but for me, I can't help feel it defeats the whole object of Acker's life project. A shame- but for the true student of the era- and those who lived through it and want a quick blast of their youth to enjoy- there's still plenty of interest in this book.

"Blood and Guts in High School", first published in 1984, is a difficult book to both read and review. It tells the story of Janey and her quest to find love in a conformist, capitalist, women-hating world. Acker's writing is experimental and allusive, switching from stream of consciousness, descriptions of sex, violence, and filth, to fable and literary criticism. The novel also contains Acker's own illustrations, some of which are quite graphic (as I discovered when I started reading it on a crowded train...). The overall effect is exhilarating, funny, and sometimes frustrating. I would recommend reading Chris Kraus's recent biography of Acker alongside this volume, as it provides useful background into Acker's methods and influences.

Originally written in the 1970s, this Penguin re-release coincides with Acker's untimely death from cancer 20 years ago this year. Ever the enfant terrible, this is deliberately designed to provoke and shock - and that it still can in 2017 would, I think, have amused Acker vastly.She throws everything into this dislocated narrative: sex, violence, disease, exploitation, corruption, abuse, incest, feminism, capitalism, anger, submission, identity, the grotesque body... with nods along the way to all those master-narratives that construct culture, from Freud and Marx to Hamlet and Sartre. At times deliberately disgusting, at others blackly funny (Janey's analysis of The Scarlet Letter is twisted genius!), this tears up the rule books of what 'fiction', 'narrative', a 'novel' are supposed to be, and creates what only barely passes for a story via a collage of prose, dialogue, verse, drawings, scrawled capitals, 'Persian' writing.For all of the ways that this intersects with critical theory, the theorisation of women's writing (think Cixous' écriture féminine, Irigaray, Kristeva) and Lacanian psychoanalysis, it's also dirty and grubby and revelling in its own gleeful rebelliousness and subversive energy.Certainly not for everyone...

To be honest, the first section where she is describing having sex with her father nearly made me put the book down. As it was I left it for some time and then returned to it, reading on. The next section dealing with an abortion, the clinics and the alternatives; turned it around for me. There was a searing frankness in the writing that was shocking, but also honest. I warmed to her and the book.The book is in many ways crude. Not only the writing, but also the childish pictures of genitals and descriptions. The cover looks like a photocopy, and for those of us who were there, the whole style, layout, typefaces, drawings and writing is like the xeroxed fanzines of the punk era from which it springs.What emerges from the book is something that is searingly honest in its humdrum description of nightmarish events. Perhaps the 1980s are still too close to revisted like this, maybe it still needs a few years and a punk revival to lift the book to where it belongs. But I think it's worth a read now.