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  • The Paris Review

    Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School

    by Chris Kraus Nov 09, 2017 5 minutes

    From the anniversary edition cover of Blood and Guts in High School

    Kathy Acker was the most intentional of writers, but paradoxically, while propelled her mid-1980s commercial breakthrough, it was her least intended work. She composed in fragments, in her notebooks and as drawings, over five years that began when she was twenty-six years old and living with the composer Peter Gordon in Solana Beach in 1973. Solana Beach was a sleepy California beach town fourteen miles north of UC San Diego in La Jolla. She’d fled New York for California after meeting Gordon on a cross-country ride-share road trip in the summer of 1972. It was there, while happily ensconced in Gordon’s two-bedroom upstairs bungalow apartment near the beach, that she composed the dream maps placed among the fairy tales in the chapter titled “How spring came to the land of snow and icicles.” The fairy tales

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