Blood and Guts in High School: A Novel

By Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus

“Kathy Acker’s writing is virtuoso, maddening, crazy, so sexy, so painful, and beaten out of a wild heart that nothing can tame. Acker is a landmark writer.” —Jeanette Winterson, New York Times–bestselling author

A masterpiece of surrealist fiction, steeped in controversy upon its first publication in 1984, Blood and Guts in High School is the book that established Kathy Acker as the preeminent voice of post-punk feminism. With 2017 marking the 70th anniversary of her birth, as well as the 10th year since her death this transgressive work of philosophical, political, and sexual insight—with a new introduction by Chris Kraus—continues to become more relevant than ever before.

In the Mexican city of Merida, ten-year-old Janey lives with Johnny—her “boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father” —until he leaves her for another woman. Bereft, Janey travels to New York City, plunging into an underworld of gangs and prostitution. After escaping imprisonment, she flees to Tangiers where she meets Jean Genet, and they begin a torrid affair that will lead Janey to her demise. Fantastical, sensual, and fearlessly radical, this hallucinatory collage is both a comic and tragic portrait of erotic awakening.

“The girl in this story had more agency and voice than any girl I’d ever read or would read in my entire life.” —Lydia Yuknavitch, national bestselling author of Thrust

“No writer I know is more audacious than Kathy Acker, whose anarchic wit drives a thoroughgoing attack on conventions and complacencies of all sorts. Not unlike Gertrude Stein in her day, Acker gives us a different way to look at the uses to which language is put.” —Lynne Tillman, author of Men and Apparitions

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9780802146557

Kathy Acker

Kathy Acker (Nueva York, 1947-Tijuana, 1997), novelista, ensayista y dramaturga, construyó una obra personalísima y renovadora a base de sintetizar influencias tan diversas como las de la narrativa de William S. Burroughs, Marguerite Duras o Gertrude Stein, el nouveau roman, la French Theory, el feminismo, la filosofía, el misticismo y la pornografía. Licenciada en Escritura Creativa por la Universidad de San Diego y con estudios de griego y literatura clásica, vivió entre Estados Unidos e Inglaterra y trabajó como administrativa, secretaria, stripper, performer porno y profe-sora de universidad. Entre sus títulos destacan Great Expectations (1982), relectura libérrima y subversiva del clásico de Dickens, la consagratoria Aborto en la escuela (1984), Don Quijote, que fue un sueño (1986) o El imperio de los sinsentidos (1988). Fotografía: ​© Corbis Premium Historical - Getty Images.

Book preview

WORKS BY KATHY ACKER

PUBLISHED BY GROVE PRESS

Blood and Guts in High School

Don Quixote

Empire of the Senseless

Great Expectations

In Memoriam to Identity

Literal Madness

My Mother: Demonology

Portrait of an Eye

Pussy, King of the Pirates

Rip-off Red, Girl Detective

Essential Acker

Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus

BLOOD AND GUTS IN HIGH SCHOOL

Copyright © 1978 by Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus

Cover design by Becca Fox Design

Cover photograph © Michel Delsol

Introduction Copyright © 2017 by Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [e-mail].

CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that Nice Fish is subject to a royalty. It is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and all British Commonwealth countries, and all countries covered by the International Copyright Union, the Pan-American Copyright Convention, and the Universal Copyright Convention. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved.

First-class professional, stock, and amateur applications for permission to perform it, and those other rights stated above, must be made in advance to Samuel French Ltd, 52 Fitzroy Street, London W1T 5JR, fax [phone], or their overseas agents and by paying the requisite fee, whether the play is presented for charity or gain and whether or not admission is charged.

ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: September 1984

This Grove Atlantic edition: November 2017

ISBN 978-0-8021-2762-4

eISBN 978-0-8021-4655-7

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

17 18 19 20    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Introduction by Chris Kraus

Inside high school

Parents stink

The Scorpions

Outside high school

How spring came to the land of snow and icicles

Janey becomes a woman

The mysterious Mr Linker

A book report

Translating

Cancer

A journey to the end of the night

Tangier

In Egypt, the end

A second of time

So the doves

The Journey

The World

Introduction

Kathy Acker was the most intentional of writers, but paradoxically, while Blood and Guts propelled her mid-1980s commercial breakthrough, it was her least intended work. She composed Blood and Guts 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 themselves were written three years later, while she and Gordon were living on E. 5th Street in New York.

Dreams cause the vision world to break loose our consciousness, Acker writes in Blood and Guts. And also: Dear dreams, you are the only thing that matter. She’d known, since beginning her long, self-willed apprenticeship as a writer when she was twenty-three years old, that dreams, and their disorder, would be central to her writing process. Working on her first serial novel, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, in Solana Beach in 1973, she attempted to regain a childhood consciousness, pushing herself towards a point of self-dissolution through sex and hallucinogenic drugs. The dream maps, which weren’t published in that book, record her dream-time forays across regions with names like The Plains, The Village, and The Childhood Land, where she discovers lions, wolves, trees, huts, and streets. My mom, Gordon recalls, "was a psychologist, and found them fascinating. Kathy gave her a large drawing that my mom had framed. Later, Kathy took the maps back, to include in Blood and Guts."

Blood and Guts opens with a hilarious, hyperbolized transcription of the tormented break-up conversations between the protagonist Janey Smith and a Father who she regards as her boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement and father. These pages—the last to be composed—were written in the wake of her and Gordon’s separation in September 1978: Mr. Smith was trying to get rid of Janey so he could spend all his time with Sally, a twenty-one year old starlet who was still refusing to fuck him. By then, Gordon and Acker had long been living separate lives. Kathy had her own life and I had my own life, with Kathy in it, Gordon recalls. The relationship was not going to change, and I was now marked as a married man. I realized I had to get out.

In one sense, Blood and Guts chronicles the years she spent with Peter Gordon. She describes their E. 5th Street apartment—usually no hot water or heat, costs two hundred dollars a month—and their neighborhood—All of the buildings are either burnt down, half-burnt down, or falling down. She writes about her first cancer scare—a mass that fortunately turned out to be benign, but prompted their brief legal marriage in February 1978. Most likely, the disturbance of their final separation prompted Acker to arrange this collection of outtakes and unpublished writings into a disjunctive but emotionally continuous work. But, more importantly, the novel chronicles and melds the writing process she’d begun with Childlike Life. During those five years, she’d written two more serial novels—The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec (1975) and I Dreamt I Was A Nymphomaniac: Imagining (1975)—as well as two, book-length experiments in genre-ridden narrative, Rip-Off Red (1973) and Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978). As she told Barry Alpert in a 1976 interview, I never found that simple collage was an answer, because it has to go through me to mean anything.

By the time she composed the Blood and Guts manuscript in 1979, Acker had already achieved considerable recognition and notoriety in the New York art world and beyond. She’d become the chamber novelist of downtown New York, reporting on sexual misadventures with real-life art world protagonists who were, when not named outright, recognizable to anyone who knew the cast of characters. Her compositional strategies were grounded in the phenomenological experiments of the old-guard minimalist and conceptual artists, but the content of her work—extreme pornography, diatribe, parody, gossip, politics, and trash—reflected the aesthetic of her East Village peers. Her works circulated feverishly in self-published or small-press editions throughout the US and Canada, and were admired by avant-garde insiders in London, Paris, and beyond.

Fame, itself, figures as a character in Blood and Guts. As Janey tells Bill, her friend and confidant, I am Johnny. I’m beginning to have some fame, success, now women want to fuck me … I want everything. I want to go out in the world as far as I can go. And later, as she tells her fellow slave Sahih, while imprisoned in a compound in Alexandria, I have to work as hard as possible so I can get enough fame then money to get away from here so I can become alive.

This time, she sought a larger publisher. The Blood and Guts manuscript was read, and tentatively scheduled for publication three times between 1979 and 1981: first by Urizen Books, then by Stonehill Communications, and finally by the French publisher Christian Bourgois’s 10/18 editions. Each contract fell apart when Acker feuded with her editors. Rather than return to her small-press comfort zone, she decided to hang on. Mainstream commercial publication seemed just a heartbeat away. Finally, in 1982, Blood and Guts was accepted by Picador, to appear in her explosive January 1984 London debut volume. Grove Press published Blood and Guts almost concurrently that year. When editor Fred Jordan returned to Grove after a hiatus of five years, he found a stack of Acker’s complete works in the slush pile on his boss, Barney Rosset’s, desk. He found them interesting, unusual, in many ways remarkable. Steeped in Grove’s avant-garde lineage, her writings reflected the abrasive Lower East Side early-80s zeitgeist. He took them all. Blood and Guts was Acker’s breakthrough novel only in a marketing sense. The work itself developed over time.

Picador’s first print run of Blood and Guts in High School sold out within three weeks of its January 1984 publication. In an hour-long ITVS South Bank Show documentary devoted to Acker’s work, arts broadcaster Melvyn Bragg announced her as the leader of a pack of a hard-edged, tough, fashionable, self-conscious group, now at the top of the New York art world. In their rush to publish and promote the book, Grove and Picador got the ending mixed up, reversing the last two sections. As she recalled in an interview with Semiotext(e) editor Sylvère Lotringer, "They got the last two chapters in the wrong order. No one noticed! I told them they’re in the wrong order and they said, Have a glass of champagne [laughs]. The placement of these sections, The Journey and The World," is finally corrected here.

TEACH ME A NEW LANGUAGE, DIMWIT. A LANGUAGE THAT MEANS SOMETHING TO ME, Acker writes in Blood and Guts. And: We all live in a prison. Most of us don’t know we live in prison. Thirty-three years after its first publication, Blood and Guts speaks powerfully to us as a literary work, and as a reminder that the genre known as autofiction was not a post-internet invention. Acker’s wildly inventive, direct, deceptively spontaneous writing in Blood and Guts loops back to the poetry of Catullus and Propertius, the novels of French modernists Bataille and Laure, and dozens of other predecessors. Acker’s dexterous orchestration of her subjectivity, occurring in real time and informed by her voracious engagement with culture, is animated in Blood and Guts by her search for power. Janey Smith wants power, and she wants to know how power works systemically in the larger world. Today, this seems like an impossible quest. But, from her slum apartment in the East Village in 1978, lovelorn dreamer and sex maniac Janey Smith hallucinates a future that feels a great deal like the one we’re living now.

—Chris Kraus

Bovey, MN; 2017

Inside high school

Parents stink

Never having known a mother, her mother had died when Janey was a year old, Janey depended on her father for everything and regarded her father as boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father.

Janey Smith was ten years old, living with her father in Merida, the main city in the Yucatan. Janey and Mr Smith had been planning a big vacation for Janey in New York City in North America. Actually Mr Smith was trying to get rid of Janey so he could spend all his time with Sally, a twenty-one-year-old starlet who was still refusing to fuck him.

One night Mr Smith and Sally went out and Janey knew her father and that woman were going to fuck. Janey was also very pretty, but she was kind of weird-looking because one of her eyes was lopsided.

Janey tore up her father’s bed and shoved boards against the front door. When Mr Smith returned home, he asked Janey why she was acting like this.

Janey: You’re going to leave me. (She doesn’t know why she’s saying

Reviews for Blood and Guts in High School

[poetontheone · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

No doubt, blood and guts. A disembowelment as well as a reconstruction of the novel; reading suitable only for frothing mad apes. A battle cry demanding pornography become art, that order become chaos and thus become full. A morphing beast of prose, poetry, drama, pen drawings, and Persian lessons. An eyebrow raising, humorous, harrowing, obscene satirical supernova of degradation. So many people will hate this book outright, but I don't talk to you as it is.

[brakketh-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Scattered and hard/impossible to follow in places. The story (broadly speaking) of Janey age 10 to 14 years and the damage that the patriarchy and society inflicts on her and everyone else.

[melaniemaksin · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Sometimes I wonder if there's something wrong with my brain, or at least with my memory/reading comprehension/retention abilities. This happens when I read multiple works by the same author in a short period of time; I go on a spree, devouring everything I can find by a particular writer, and at some point, I'll find myself unable to tell one book from another. It doesn't seem to be related to the quality of the author's work--I've experienced this sensation with feline-centric mystery novels penned by elderly women, and with Updike's WASPy fables, and even with the masterworks of Saint Nabokov. I'm beginning to think that it's not them, it's me.

So I'm hitting that point with Kathy Acker now, and I don't know who's to blame for my overwhelming feeling of hey-that-tree-looks-familiar. Have I gotten The Gist of her work now? Am I just sticking around for a few cool phrases here and there, but no longer able to differentiate between characters, narratives, etc.? Should I have taken a break between readings? Should I have read her works chronologically? Did I do something wrong?

I don't know. The first book of hers that I read (Don Quixote) was perfect for the mood I was in; the second (In Memoriam to Identity) makes use of a text (The Sound and the Fury) that's practically tattooed on my heart. It was dumb luck that I started with those two, and I can see how my interest in Acker could have been altered if I hadn't stumbled upon the most specific-to-me books at that time, in that order, under those circumstances.

It's hard to write a review of Blood and Guts in High School because a.) it's all mixed up in my mind with Acker's other stuff, and b.) I'm so far into Ackerland right now that I can't be objective about it.

I mean, the writing is sharp, of course. Every page seems to have something that's brutal, some knife-twist of words or emotion or intellect. The concerns that I recognize as Acker's are also there--sex, politics, identity, illness--as are the engagements with literature and philosophy. And, hell, she made me almost consider re-reading The Scarlet Letter, so that's impressive.

But this book does test my limits as a reader. It's like...Burroughs. In high school, I loved William S. Burroughs, and I did the same thing with him then that I'm doing with Kathy Acker now, just slashing and burning through everything I can get my hands on. But I found that some of his more self-consciously experimental stuff began to try my patience; the cut-up method quickly lost its novelty and my interest started to wane. And now, with Blood and Guts..., the illustrations and poetic fragments just...began to wear on me, a bit. This probably makes me a bad postmodernist, but I'll admit it anyway!

So all of this is to say that I think I would have written a different review of this book had I read it before falling for the Acker Mystique. Of course, in the same way that Wile E. Coyote can only run through the air when he doesn't realize he's darted off a cliff, if I start thinking stuff like "There's no way to be objective when reviewing a book (or anything)," GoodReads may very well cease to exist. Hmm.

[sunfi_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I had a really tough time with this one, I could finish it. I had a lot of problems trying to follow the story, I think I'm more of a traditional fiction type of gal as opposed to the experimental fiction type. The story jumped around, I couldn't tell what was a dream, a drug induced trance, real or completely made up. The story had everything present for shock value including graphic violence, sex, rape, crude drawings of genitalia and it looking like elementary Persian.

[leelerbaby · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Incoherent almost nonexistent story line based on sex and sexual disease. Broken sentences of thought and fragmented poetry. The only part even remotely close to make any sort of sense was the book report on The Scarlett Letter. What a waste of reading time.

[helices_2 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I can’t for my life get interested in this angry author’s confused thoughts about her self, relations, sex, and the world. And it doesn’t make it easier that her text is virtually impossible to penetrate with some kind of context kept.---Jag kan för mitt liv inte bli intresserad av denna arga författares virriga tankar om sig själv, relationer, sex och världen. Och inte görs det lättare av att hennes text är i princip omöjlig att penetrera med någon sorts kontext i behåll.

[ragwaine · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Crap. Not even really experimental just crap. Disgusting sex and STDs, bad grammer that doesn't sound poetic. No story.