Fear of Kathy Acker is one of the great lost masterpieces of ‘80s experimental fiction. That it’s no longer an inaccessible legend is huge.
– Dennis Cooper
A furious burst of drug-fueled artistic and sexual energy, spiritual seeking and critique of American culture.
– Amy Gerstler, from Introduction to Fear of Kathy Acker
Jack Skelley pours it on like sometimes blam blam blam like the riff in Death Valley 69 but mostly with a surfer’s rhythm like the cool throb of his guitar, his writing the poetics of pink love and punk pool splash action, the sound I adore.
– Thurston Moore
Despite the dislike of seeing my own name, you’re really a good writer – never what’s expected.
– Kathy Acker
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THE WAR AGAINST CLOP
High Noon with Moloch in the Malls of L.A.
By Daniel Weizmann
Let’s get this one piece of business out of the way first: I distrust the term auto-fiction which vaguely connotes flashers, asphyxiation, and really bad free jazz. Jack Skelley’s FEAR OF KATHY ACKER, which, as you probably already know has been wandering in the desert for forty years, is just the opposite of all that. For one, it’s THE Great Los Angeles Eighties Novel—a burst of erotic exuberance and vision that manages to capture an era, define a sensibility, and vibe life-affirming dizzying human foible like nothing before or since. The only important auto here is the one he drives into Hollywood.
If I sound a little vehement, we’re talking about one of my “privileged texts,” dude, the kind that are un-reduce-able. I first heard Jack read bits of it in 1985 at McCabe’s and the Permanent Gallery when I was in my teens and was so knocked out by his fleet-footed, psychedelically cornucopian prose that I literally begged him (pre-email!) literally got on the phone and begged him for a complete manuscript. For forty years I held onto that spiral-bound manuscript. I let go of whole record collections, cities, relationships, maybe even identities—but I have clung to my copy of FEAR OF KATHY ACKER with the queasy-making fear that this book could exist, yet not. In darkest moments, I’d hold the thing up to the light and wonder if we lived in a just universe.
Turns out we do. FEAR OF KATHY ACKER lives.
Honestly, it’s like seeing a loved one released from prison. The picaresque, which starts at Del Amo Mall and ends in a manner of speaking at the Beverly Center, was the first time I ever read or heard fiction that spoke “our native tongue”—the free-blabbing, SoCal, reality-and-TV-are-one, surfer/stoner/punker/nerdo talk that sees the Mall for what it actually is, a dwarfing Monolith at the tail end of Western history, a temptation and a trap, and also just a place where you and I will meet for Orange Julius. But the fact is that Skelley’s narrator doesn’t just “go to the mall to hustle his indie LP,” he goes dreaming at the mall, falling into a labyrinth of memory and desire like Leo Bloom or Moses Herzog and therein lies the gallantry of this book. It validated the inner life of every one of us at that mall.
In James M. Decker’s “Henry Miller and Narrative Form,” the Professor of English and Language Studies at Illinois Central College makes a stunning claim: It’s not just Miller’s content (rants, jeremiads, ribaldry) but his digressive style that wages the true war on civilization. In fact, Decker asserts, the twin revolutions of narrative anarchy and rebel perception are one. Miller, according to Decker, is insisting through his style that we’ve got the life thing backwards, that our spiraling, unmappable internal life is as real, no…realer, more important than the skyscrapers that surround us.
Auto-fiction, shmotto-fiction—Jack Skelley’s FEAR OF KATHY ACKER does for Reagan-era Los Angeles what Miller did for Depression-era NYC—it has a hallucinatory showdown with the very premise of SoCal, a city of automatic movie sets and rollaway backdrops. What’s at stake in this showdown is nothing less than the future of language—how we deploy it, to what end. Just as the supermall has dwarfed us, a nightmare sci-fi entity called Clop will come to do the same:
Everything else which sounds like Language but is really words used to corrupt people or chop them into little bite-size pieces is not Language, but Clop. Clop is something people swallow to kill themselves. It’s a detergent washing life away. It is sets of word-images that hold people’s minds in one spot for 2.5 seconds until another set of Clop words is introduced. It’s not language, it’s Clop. Corporations produce Clop in order to kill people. (They also produce a TV show called “Entertainment Tonight.”) One of the largest Clop-making Corporations is in Washington D.C. It is called the U.S. Government and it makes great quantities of Clop. Millions of people consume Clop and are dying from it. Only Language can save us from Clop. Only a visionary apprehension of reality will repel the vast Clop of Corporate verbiage.
To wage war with Clop, Skelley’s spin-outs, like Miller’s, often go to sex, and it’s no accident. Sex, and specifically sexual fantasy, is the Great Interrupter of our shared civic kabuki—and it’s something we can do that Clop can’t, therefore a primary line of defense. The late Seventies and early Eighties in Los Angeles had a surplus of erotic charge (ask somebody) and nobody ever took it on like Skelley, with unapologetic girl-crazy youthful wonder, yearning, dread, and straight-up horniness. A cruise up Highland into the foothills becomes foreplay with Samantha from Bewitched; a young prostitute (or maybe that’s an actress playing one) morphs into Marie Osmond and pens a triple-X punk lust letter; Madonna the pop singer gives birth to the Anti-Christ. Hell yeah.
It was late afternoon in America to misquote President Ronnie, and FEAR OF KATHY ACKER both predicts and captures the curtain dropping on our Golden Age with a marvelous touch. In one scene, a night nurse at the narrator’s post-op sick bed masturbates while lecturing him on the future of media.
“The networks are continually narrowing the range of mental states,” she said as she churned her hips, “just as they narrow the physical types of News Anchorpersons. The final 7 categories of Network Reality are Soap-Opera Tragedy, Sit-Com Embarrassment, The Weather, Economic Recovery, Break Dancing, Sex, and Uncontrollable Paranoia. Often combinations of these categories are made to facilitate an unplanned event or to sell a new product, or an old product with a different category. UGHH… But even this is becoming rare as the Networks relish reducing the range of viewer response and test the 7 categories. The categories which reach the largest demographic groups are Sex and Uncontrollable Paranoia. These two can sell anything, especially when used together. UH UH UH UGH… ABC is planning a mini-series sequel to THE DAY AFTER, with Christie Brinkley and Billy Idol trapped in a post-nuclear aerobics studio with… OHOHOH… civilization… UGHUGHUGHUGHUGHUGHUHG… in ruins.”
FEAR OF KATHY ACKER, then and now, is so funny, so sexy, so pouring over the brim with joy, giddiness, and originality, that it’s easy to forget this dead-serious war it wages, against Clop, against mass media, and against the city’s disconnection, it’s propulsive lean toward heartlessness. Some of the most poignant moments are quieter—turning into a stoned wallflower at a hip party or the lull of a lonesome weekend, listening to cassette of a Japanese pop singer crooning of romantic love in broken English like someone trying to protect a dying ember.
Skelley is like that singer, arresting a brand-new vocabulary to protect the human heart.
And FEAR OF KATHY ACKER lives.
Daniel Weizmann’s debut mystery The Last Songbird was released this Spring on Melville House.
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INNOCENCE AFLAME
“I write books that talk to you about the agony of American life…”
–Kathy Acker, Hello, I’m Erica Jong.
By Amy Gerstler
—-Welcome, dear reader, to Fear of Kathy Acker, and to mid 1980s America, the book’s setting as well as the era when this wonderful eruption was written. Time and place are crucial elements of this text. They stomp through the narrative like Godzilla on a rampage. Though, of course, it’s not quite that simple. Like other nemeses of the embattled speaker in this book, the version of a Los Angeles demi-monde the protagonist inhabits is not all monster. Rather, his milieu is both assailant and nurturer, curse and refuge. His environs are the site of his innocence staging repeated, head-on collisions with his experiences. His haunts become the crazy furnace in which he’s being melted down, from a kid into some form of reluctant American adult. And if you’re thinking, yeah, but what’s this 1980s shit got to do with me? Is this book relatable now? listen up. You may discover that the vision quest freak-out of this auto fictive, twenty-something narrator from decades ago feels spookily prescient. Fear of Kathy Acker vibrates with still-breaking news about public and private scourges/muses which continue to plague and motivate us today. These include but are not limited to: the five alarm fires of libido, capitalism, celebrity culture, transcendence-hunger, advertising, drugs, artistic yearning, worries about the destruction of the planet, the siren song of media, coming of age terrors, and taboo smashing.
—-So, what were the 80s like, if you didn’t experience them, or don’t remember? This book deals with just one young man’s 1980s, so here’s a bit of scattershot cultural context by way of preface:
—-Ronald Reagan was president. During his reign a savings and loan meltdown began, and hundreds of banking institutions toppled like dominos. The resulting bail-out eventually cost taxpayers billions. Philadelphia police firebombed a house occupied by members of the political group MOVE and their families. Eleven people, including children, were killed. Sixty-one houses were destroyed, and two hundred and fifty people were left homeless. Rock Hudson died of AIDS. Andy Warhol mounted art shows. The films Shoah and The Color Purple debuted. CDs and CD players were introduced. The single “We Are The World,” written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie was released, proceeds going to aid for Africa. Coca Cola sweetened their soft drink recipe. Consumer outrage ensued. The company backpedaled, reintroducing the original Coke as an additional product called “Coke Classic.” Between 1983 and 1985 the divorce rate was 50%.
Who Was Kathy Acker?
—-Kathy Acker (1947-1997) was an experimental writer, artist, and performer, though such terms feel inadequate when applied to her. Explosive, sex-drenched, inventive, and omnivorous in its liftings, her work is brave beyond measure. And like Skelley’s, it’s often scathing, and funny.
—-The book in your hands, which borrows Acker’s name for the latter half of its title also shoplifts a chunk of another book’s title. Erica Jong’s 1973 Fear of Flying, a novel of female sexual appetite and exploration, was an international best seller, and origin of the concept of “the zipless fuck.” Skelley’s use of the first two words of Jong’s title is, at least in part, another example of him leaning into Acker’s work, because he is re-referencing an earlier Acker reference. In 1984 Acker published a chapbook called Hello, I’m Erica Jong, which Skelley cites as a watershed text for him, describing it in an email as “The best chapbook ever!” Skelley pickpocketing the pickpocket, quoting the quoter, practicing literary appropriation is 1000% in Acker’s spirit. A collagist of formidable proportions, Acker said, “I’ve never liked the idea of originality, and so my whole life I’ve always written by taking other texts, inhabiting them in some way so I can do something with them.”
—-As Skelley states in his author’s preface, Acker is by no means the subject of this book. In fact, as he asserts, she figures in it very little. Acker is important here as inciter, permission-giver and methodological precipitator. In and after college Skelley was drawn to the work of not only Acker, but writers like William Burroughs, and to cutups, and so-called transgressive literature. Skelley’s discovery of Burroughs’, Acker’sand others’ “preposterously exaggerated and unreliable” writing stoked his imagination. Acker’s syncretistic approach to genre excited him, too. Aching to breach fiction/ nonfiction/ poetry firewalls, Skelley described Acker’s work as “…a roiling stream of genre recombinations…that also bammed me when I was bursting too with pop/ TeeVee/ movie/ comix/ toons/ glut gulps & reframing the evil joys of commodification.” And Acker’s writing led with the id. This aspect of her work was particularly essential to Skelley. He took it as a directive to go thou and do likewise.
—-I think of Acker not only as literary rebel, but also as a wounded, outraged soul, whose native innocence, ravaged by others, she vigorously reclaimed through her work. I mention this because for me Fear of Kathy Acker and some of its literary influences have a lot to do with rethinking innocence and experience, their boundaries, definitions, and how they shape writing and lives.
William Blake
By his own report, Jack Skelley emerged from college a devout “Blakehead.” He describes his state of mind then as “…already 24 hrs a day drunk on Blake and the romantics and romance itself {bold type Skelley’s} and agitated attempts to recapture inner resurrection and music… Blake was one catalyst for my own ideas about transcendence and unification… about trying to accommodate a sense of a soul’s place in the cosmos.” Skelley resonated with Blake’s “vision of personal liberation, sexual liberation/sexual anarchy,” and of “mental fight” against capitalism and its “dark Satanic mills.”” Blake is a persistent champion of wronged innocents. “A dog starved at his master’s gate/Predicts the ruin of the state. //A horse misused upon the road/Calls to heaven for human blood.” So one way Blake presides over Skelley’s text, I think, is as another lit-up innocent, scared about the state of humanity, calling into existence visions of alternate realities. Blake, like the hero of Fear of Kathy Acker, tries to parse good from evil, and real from fake as he wends his way through the glorious, besmirched world of his time and the teeming galaxies of his obsessions.
Does Allen Ginsberg fit into this?
—-Skelley never brought up Ginsberg re: this book, but when the topic was broached he said he was open to my mentioning him. While I don’t think “Howl” influenced the book at hand, I was nonetheless struck by concerns shared by Ginsberg’s iconic poem (written 1955-6) and Skelley’s decades later poetic novella. Where Skelley took cues about technique and the license to go ape about sex from Acker, I think his book shares a raft of commonalities of state of mind and predicament with Ginsberg’s poem.
—-“…in June 1955, Ginsberg expressed to {his friend Jack} Kerouac his dissatisfaction with life. He described his life as a “‘monstrous nightmare’ that had him ‘on the verge of true despair.'” This is right around when Ginsberg starts to write “Howl” and it seems like a fair description of the mental weather of the speaker in Fear of Kathy Acker, too. Skelley and Ginsberg were approximately the same age (29) when each wrote his generational jeremiad. Both men were about to tip into their 30s. Fear of Kathy Acker is a furious burst of drug-fueled, artistic and sexual energy, spiritual seeking and critique of American culture. Here’s how Ginsberg described his poem, in filings for his obscenity trial: “…an ‘affirmation’ of individual experience of God, sex, drugs, absurdity etc… {and}that ‘Society’ is merciless.”
—-Of course, there are plenty of contrasts between these two works. Ginsberg is a sensual gay Jew/Buddhist who doesn’t seem particularly wracked by guilt, and “Howl” is peppered with Jewish and Eastern religious imagery. The guy in Fear of Kathy Acker, on the other hand, has gone through Catholic school and its demonization of lust. Fear of Kathy Acker wrestles with its speaker’s Catholic upbringing–while also riffing on Catholicism’s evocative symbology. Skelley put it best, observing that the relationship of the speaker in this book to Catholicism is “Half celebratory/half condemning.”
—-Jazz is a touchstone in “Howl”. In Skelley’s book, as has been mentioned, the 80s greater Los Angeles punk and rock scene is central to the speaker’s life as aspiring poet and band member. Both Ginsberg and Skelley worship(ed) William Blake. Like Blake, Skelley and Ginsberg are no fans of capitalism. Both are alienated and disgusted by the politics of their day and “the agony of American life.” Both are fascinated by the liberating power of so-called degradation. Both are insatiable in their appetites and worry that they and/or beloved peers may become casualties of the excesses of their scene and historical moment. Both repudiate what the dominant culture imposes and demands in poetic rants that are both manifesto and cri de Coeur.
In Closing…
A text Skelley does mention being influenced by while writing this book is Jim Carroll’s 1978 memoir The Basketball Diaries. Even before Skelley cited it, Carroll’s gritty, druggy, incandescent confession had come to mind several times in relation to Skelley’s novella. The Basketball Diaries’ protagonist’s almost religious pursuit of intense sensation, and the sense of his innocence being threatened by dark powers without and within, along with his sense of ever-dawning, ephiphanic awe were themes I felt echoes of in Fear of Kathy Acker. When the high school diarist in Carroll’s book says, in a moment of something akin to prayer, “I just want to be pure,” I feel resonances with Acker’s fierce vulnerability, Blake’s wide-eyed vatic stance, Ginsberg’s idealistic panting, throbbing and sobbing and Skelley’s kaleidescopic, tortured longings. Dear reader, see what you think.
–Amy Gerstler, 2022
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Flyer by Mike Kelley
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Dear Marci, video by Lydia Sviatoslavsky, music by Stephen Spera
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DEAR MARCI
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So what use is emotion? What use is anything? Oh, Oh, I’m not understanding anything anymore, even as perceptions stream in at all angles all hours all pores all doors to the soul in mortal anguish, while nobody is understanding anything. The only question is when to kill oneself.
Not only is there NO ESCAPE FROM PERCEIVING but the only way to deal with pain is to kill oneself. AND NOW YOU ARE THINKING ABOUT SUICIDE, about your sadness that isn’t self-pitying, but simply suicidal. I fell in love with your undaunted pessimism. You never wanted any sympathy. Just to be left alone. And your face had this scorched, depleted, devastated, mauled, ragged beauty, which I’ll never be able to forget.
Your jagged features are etched in my mind. So are your words: when you said you can’t sleep at night because of nightmares of dead fathers and brothers, waving their bloody limbs, and when you said in the morning that you were sick and couldn’t get up, and when you talked about your mother. You were a gorgeous manic-depressive and I was just a boy scout, an innocent bystander that wanted to help a soul in trouble when I saw your tear-tracks in the morning, saw this beautiful creature lost in wild bummers and I had to help. I was so struck by this.
Ouch!
I can still see you and hear you and start getting crazy myself and have to divert myself to stop thinking of your gorgeous sad face and how you made me get sick and cry.
As society becomes increasingly depersonalized, and as there are less and less baseball players with nicknames, my chance diminishes for real personal rapport.
Still, I have my desires and my inner life. If no one can ever share these, neither can they take them away.
Meanwhile, you’re waking up hungover and suddenly realizing all the failures of last night and your deep depression and there’s no escape from the troubles of you and your family and once there were a few victories every now and then in your life, but now it’s defeat after defeat and you’re only getting older and mostly you’re lonely, you’re so terribly lonely and just want to die alone.
You walk around, you’re not understanding anything. All your day like all your life you’re walking around dejected, the school’s ugly duckling, then you have an accident and wake up under the plastic surgeon’s knife as the most beautiful coed on campus. But when you wake up, you are making out with Ed Asner, and millions of Americans are watching you on TV I am one of those Americans. I hear your dark voice and watch you cock your head. On TV, perceptions stream in like this, no way to deal with the pain. My consciousness is seeping out without my ever having understood what came in. Emotions and baseball games. I’m crying as I watch the commercials.
—–PUSH YOUR TITTIES TOGETHER. PINCH THE TIPS OF YOUR TITTIES. I WALK IN THE DOOR.
—–I AM YOUR TEACHER.
—–TAKE OFF YOUR SKIRT.
—–SUCK ME.
—–RUB YOUR CLIT.
—–TURN OVER AND SHOW ME YOUR ASSHOLE AND PUSSY UNDERNEATH.
—–PLAY WITH YOUR CLIT.
—–MY HANDS ARE RUBBING YOUR TITS.
—–MY LIPS ARE TOUCHING YOUR LIPS. MY LIPS ARE YOUR LIPS.
—–WE ARE CRAWLING IN AND OUT OF EACH OTHER THROUGH OUR LIPS.
—–YOU MASTURBATE AND COME HARD.
—–YOU ARE LETTING LOOSE EVERY KIND OF EMOTION… LOVE IS AN EMOTION.
(And Kathy Acker walks through London rain in scruffy black cowboy boots.)
Then, the UFO.
Even as you know all this is preposterous, it has the cold pinch of reality. It’s all happening all over again, just like you’re walking down your own street. But when you walk down your street and look up at the cold windy sky that’s about to start raining again, you see something new. You see the lights, the beautiful architectonic design of lights on the large flying interconnecting diamonds, dancing harlequin diamonds of light in the sky coming down and silently resting on the street next door to the Champion Auto Parts store. Now a crowd is gathered around, your neighbors and all the shopkeepers and people off the bus. And a hush falls over the crowd as a cool blue throbbing panel slides down invitingly. You long to enter there, and you start to move forward, but you feel the fear and censure of the crowd. All your family and friends. Once you go inside and that thing flies off again, you’ll be gone forever. I’ll never see you again.
I break into tears right there and they splatter on the sidewalk. The buildings close in around me. I wander home to bed.
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I AM BILLY IDOL
And I fall back into the warm night and don’t think about waking up again to face the morning of traffic and hot sun streaming into my windshield and engine as I drive to work, or the hot sun threatening again to overheat my engine as I ascend the middle lane of Dodger Stadium Way—threatening to bum-out my Pop-Archetype-Dodger-Stadium experience of the mass-imagination: Dodger Stadium is the objective counterpart to the vast field of popular myths in my psyche. Every player is a Homeric Hero, and the crowd is the great mass of humanity itself which receives the game as an historic artifact, cheering or groaning as the players’ fates are theirs. As I sit stoned out of my mind in the top deck behind home plate, the first and third baselines are my right and left arms, right and left fields are my two legs, the outfield bleachers are the back of my mind, the top decks are my world-wielding shoulders, hunched and poised, and in the press box above me is Vin Scully, my superego play-by-play awareness, the voice behind my eyes, moon beyond the storm, my Dad out in the garage putting away the tools, cataloging with a maniacal serenity, all things parts of a story, all stories part of the double-header played out in the Dodger Stadium of my mind. But life is not all just baseball games and stories and bloated theories. The hills of Chavez Ravine, once a cozy barrio to immigrants since bulldozed to make way for Dodgers, are the ineluctable facticity of world injustice which surrounds my arty ruminations, threatens their airy theorems and multisyllabic rhetoric – yeck —just like my car threatens to overheat as I drive up Stadium Way. I should have just gone to see the Lakers at the Forum.
But you can’t predict these things. The world could collapse any second. Reagan could invade America to enforce his deep desire to bring back prayer to schools. And Marines will stand vigil in the classrooms as the children pray to Reagan, our Savior, who delivered us from the hands of the Godless Humanists, who now hang from our flagpole-cross above the school, bayonetted in their Atheist butts, stiff reminders of our dreaded fate had Reagan not castrated all the Blacks and Mexicans and Arabs and Environmentalists and Consumer Advocates and made America great again.
And it all makes me think about my Grandma who’s in the hospital now. She’s 88 years old but suddenly they’ve discovered a tumor on her breast. When I visit her in the hospital she is slow of speech and drops things on the floor. But she’s still my Grandma and I love her and it makes me cry to see her so sick and slow when she’s always been so sharp. One day my Grandma will die. She’s my last grandparent left alive. The hospital room is just like the one I was in for my operation. For 5 days I lay in that hospital room bored to death, reading and watching TV, and going without orgasms. The only white night nurse among all the Filipina nurses was the one who came in on my last night to take my blood pressure. And she noticed I was playing Eno on my bedside boom box and that I was pretending to read some little book while I watched her in her stiff white nurse’s uniform, and that the TV was on, and she said, “You little prick, you think you’re so totally cool, but you don’t know shit. You’re just watching TV. TV is the lowest common denominator of mental states. That’s how the Networks brainwash us, inundate us with the lower mental states. The same themes over and over. They create false categories of thinking, with utterly basic concepts.”
My night nurse lowered her panty hose and twirled her fingers through her tart salad of sparse blond cunt hairs.
“The networks are continually narrowing the range of mental states,” she said as she churned her hips, “just as they narrow the physical types of News Anchorpersons. The final 7 categories of Network Reality are Soap-Opera Tragedy, Sit-Com Embarrassment, The Weather, Economic Recovery, Break Dancing, Sex, and Uncontrollable Paranoia. Often combinations of these categories are made to facilitate an unplanned event or to sell a new product, or an old product with a different category. UGHH… But even this is becoming rare as the Networks relish reducing the range of viewer response and test the 7 categories. The categories which reach the largest demographic groups are Sex and Uncontrollable Paranoia. These two can sell anything, especially when used together. UH UH UH UGH… ABC is planning a mini-series sequel to THE DAY AFTER, with Christie Brinkley and Billy Idol trapped in a post-nuclear aerobics studio with… OHOHOH… civilization… UGHUGHUGHUGHUGHUGHUHG… in ruins.”
Then my night nurse rocked the whole bed with her nurse orgasm, pulled up her panty hose and finished checking my blood pressure. She said it was up, that she’d have to come back later on. But later on I was gone.
Anyway, that night nurse didn’t know what she’s talking about. Because I AM BILLY IDOL! And the ABC gig is not a miniseries but a feature-length Music Video. Get out of my way because I AM BILLY IDOL! I am the Final Network Category. Every other category reduces to me hanging on the smokestacks and TV towers of the world. I’m bigger than King Kong and I died on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and all my boyfriends and girlfriends brought me home and consumed my body, that’s right, cannibalized ME, consumed ME, and scattered my remains across the sky. And now I stand upon the globe, surround it, cradle and suckle the earth with my purplish glow of post-nuclear paranoia. That’s how I saved mankind. That’s how Billy Idol became God!
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My Night Nurse and the Final Seven Categories of Network Reality. Video by DeepSNAKES.
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PROOF OF A COOL UNIVERSE
By Sabrina Tarasoff
I seem to seep out and blend into the Universe that blinds me like these bright piercing eyes that talk to me, tell stories through the skin, and I LOVE the UNI¬VERSE.
Point a telescope into the penumbra of this volume’s universe and notice that the titular “fear” we are dealing with has, in fact, very little to do with Kathy Acker, the writer, and everything to do with matters of locality—as per the physics of reality put to test in the poem’s proof of conscious existence. It helps to understand the concept of a “cool universe,” here, in terms of the vast expanses of invisible matter that preoccupy the minds of astrophysicists. These darkened, starless stretches of the night sky are made of lightless matter, profuse with specks of dust and gas that provide proof of dead stars, per the aftermath of implosions, but are also, in their sights unseen, the cosmic grounds from which new astral bodies emerge. Cool space, the dynamic universe’s unmoved mover, indivisible and beautiful, was understood classically as a perfect model for contemplation; its vastness represented the active mind making the world go round in its momentum.
Jack Skelley, like astronomers seeking to refine optic tools to peer through the distressing barriers of darkness, is in Fear of Kathy Acker looking, as it were, into the relentless depths of Disneyland’s space-stages and Hollywood basements to provide proof of self in a different kind of stardust. Everything in this volume basks in the infinite darkness of the mind’s elation, radiating, or communicating—trying, and failing to communicate—at wavelengths invisible to the naked eye. In the Skelley-verse Los Angeles is final frontier, an Imagineered idea of the end of civilization, that is, a cosmic junkspace filled with bright, hot things, long since extinguished. To read is to Toon into the Infrared with cheaply made 3D goggles and an ounce of weed. In other words, in the first degree, Fear of Kathy Acker is simply the signature bestowed upon this work; the title marks a place, and a time, Los Angeles in the 1980s, as it flies by, comet-like, somewhere between the coordinates of hot lit like Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, Kathy Acker’s Hello, I’m Erica Jong, and this text, the one we have at hand: The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker. “Kathy Acker” is a construct of the cool, dynamic universe, a literary scene caught in the poet’s scopic gaze—not just the particular glow of Acker’s home planet, but New Narrative, and other lit-fluences that zip through the text: Gertrude Stein, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, William Blake, or Skelley’s peers in orbit of Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California—sun to their system.
At the edge of this world, in Venice, California, conveniently underneath Skelley’s old apartment, was Beyond Baroque, which came to founder George Drury Smith in a dream, and was subsequently, and initially, set up as a clubhouse for his eponymous newsprint zine in 1968. By the 1980s, the center had become a regular haunt for a rising literati with their pens set to re-write what was otherwise considered a minor scene in the context of American letters. Theirs was an unlikely cohort of poet laureates connected less by the high peaks of academic poetry, or its prevailing political goals, than by the simple fact of mutual thrill-seeking, an entirely other peak reached by influences found in theme parks and psychedelics; by BDSM and body horror; ideas animated in the cartoon quantum of Looney Tunes loop theories; or by hitting Bedrock in emotional hells and black holes; corporate media’s Omnimovers, and television’s bewitched nose-twitching. Skelley, particularly, was writing in the city-simulation’s multiple dimensions, seeing sim-L.A. in part as a Monsanto-spun toxicosmic site that contained and contaminated all his friends with its 1980s Esso/LSD agitprop and Pepsi-Cola cuties, and, on the other hand, as a geographically and/or intellectually distant site that was lyric home to a pop-perky poetic “elsewhere,” per Gaston Bachelard’s internal drift zones. Think Poetics of Space but make it Space Mountain: a mind-ride in which it “becomes clear that works of art are the by-products of this existentialism of the imagining being.”
Daydreams of a nature cracked open by the iconographic, and its immense psychosexual reach, become exemplary of the lyric mindset at Beyond Baroque in the ‘80s, and so of Skelley’s, as he scopes, through everything transmitted into the narrator’s brain-raves, a media-centric era intent on absorbing attention, and so making viewers see, and question, and still doubt, their own selves. Juicy ass and hot gossip, advertised sublimes, astral bodies, that is, special effects and psychic enhancements: Each made reality quiver with the possibility of magnifying being. “Immensity,” if we’re to Hubba Bubba blow-up Bachelard’s category, the expansion of being that “life curbs and caution arrests,” or the space that begins when we are dreaming in the world, opened up to Skelley in franchising frenzies, Disneyfication, drugs, sex, and TV, though not without admonition: “TV is the lowest common denominator,” he writes in FOKA. “Networks … inundate us with the lower mental states, false categories of thinking.” Certainly, our poet is as skeptical as he is spaced-out and aroused by the natural activity of the self-going outside itself, of becoming more, and so consuming more, wanting, desiring, and needing more. Life curbs, but the stoner lore cannot be stopped.
Skelley takes a post-Romantic tack in tracking the literary scene’s tripped-out quotidian, spilling spiritual milk, day in and day out, over something of a breakfast cereal version of the sublime. Poet-pals Dennis Cooper, Ed Smith, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, Michelle T. Clinton, Mary Emerzian as well as musicians Dave Childs, Paul Roessler and Rick Lawndale, bands Redd Kross, Sonic Youth and Fishbone, are cast into the hot mess/mix to intervene on and influence narrator-Jack’s cosmic quest through a “dark underbelly of decadent neo-Romantic low-life, waste, greed, corruption, power, money, sex and drugs.” He’s star-fucking through Los Angeles cool crowds to collect stories and scenes for his stoner epic, set in the immense outer space of the imagination. Thought’s light speed gets us there in seconds, dropping out of warp only to log instant reactions to what strikes/seduces around. Girlfriends blur into twisted perceptions of networked space, and its cashed out, semi-washed-up Hollywood backdrop. Episodic drifts (that may or may not be happening “only” in the narrator’s head) lead to, for example, T.J. Hooker-levels of fallen fame: lower and lower lows. In Skelley’s attention span, William Shatner’s no longer a Star Trekking stud, but on the Hooker set with Marie Osmond: “Beam me up, Captain Cock,” shrieks a homeless Venice bystander to co-casted Shatner and Osmond, post-fuck. The banality of the low-brow magnifies in the poem’s post-production into something sublime, or at least sublimely funny.
Backtracking to the titular Kathy Acker, what we discover is a place-name put on a literary universe expanding as fast as a media empire; the titular fear is directive to the specific position the narrator is writing from. Certainly, this entails the actual scripted hot-spots, like Beyond Baroque, or Del Amo Mall, Tower Records, Burbank Studios, Disneyland—places with tour de force plot potential: “because everything is so perfect and fake.” But there’s more to the shot than one might think. Skelley sets off his narrator, a poet named Jack, in medias res, as epics go, into narrative space’s white-hot scenester parties only to end up truly absorbed with a higher order of coolness—an expanse that radiates under the radar, unseen excerpt through the lens of his very special instruments. His telescope penetrates distressing barriers of black-outs, bad trips, and the threadbare loss of love. The totaled psyche wobbles at such wavelengths, and later wakes up; probably pretty hungover.
Noted with stoner precision are specks of stardust caught in the periphery of the narrator’s unfixed gaze, that is, in the seeming emptiness of the spaces it surveys: traffic jams, lapses of thought, sexy distractions, episodes of 60 Minutes, sun sliding into the smog, bright ideas burning up fast, and crashing comedowns: “That’s when the whispers start. Miniature whispers in my revolving hangover, which puff and hiss before I can actually imagine what they might be saying to me.”
Total Jack micro-doses to ego-death and slips through the cracks of experience. His Nobel Prize-winning idea is that reality is not necessarily locally real—but what then? Imagineered is a perpetual elsewhere in the mind: “For now I know I’m a human being in this body, but WHO AM I? and who are these people I call my friends? Who is Michelle Clinton?” No point trying to wake up from the hallucination of self. It drifts in the obscurity of others’ interpretations, in mirror-mazes, mirages and holographic rooms, in static transmissions and blaring miscommunications: the “I” 4ever dreaming in a faux-real distorted by perceptions.
Life around derails, crashes, and implodes, while Jack’s mind remains occupied elsewhere—transfixed on cuties, good lyrics, party-people, childhood flashbacks, potentialities, our many mini-selves as made of specks of stardust, sparkling in the psychedelic drift of unreal space—of video games, of Dodger Stadium, LSD, Stone Age caves, and crevices that court the curious kind. We enter the Delphic expanse of Pop’s enterprising dream-machines and objet petit a’s through lost experiences only recovered in writing. That is, zoning out, dissociation, or drawing blanks may appear as moments of mental vacuity, but are here proven to be teeming with sub rosa brain-raves, darkened Poptimism, horny-horror vacui, Romantic transmissions, and many mini-manifestations of Endora of TV’s Bewitched. Ideas are tested for their influence on the real. Galaxy filaments start to form in stellar lines, like, “OK, William Blake! I’ll talk to you later!”
Everything points to a budding theory of emotional entanglement; Jack is trying to locate “real” intimacy in poetry’s twin forces: sex and gravitas. Stories of his own and those of friends supercluster writerly complexes, forming, that is, formulating boundaries between vast voids in logic, or memory, the mind traversing its starless expanses as if enterprising to find, and still doubting, answers to life’s big questions, like: Where am I? Did that really happen? Countless hours are spent calling into the caverns of the night-mind, searching for proof of self in fuckable crevices of the cutie-verse. Endora appears again. The laws of physics, like disbelief, are suspended. We’re at Bob and Sheree’s house, and simultaneously not. The mind stalls en route to Dodger Stadium and enters the 4th Dimension. Narrator-Jack may have split up Dennis Wilson and his wife, but who can keep track? Candy-coated kisses missed drift in the emptiness of the mind, expanding in the imagination to explode. A mannequin becomes any possible girl.
Completeness is core to this carousel of effects, as when observed closely, what’s at hand concerns world-building. FOKA’s many-mini scenes are Imagineered encounters with the self’s boundaries; Skelley is vested in exploring spaces scripted in stoner lines of thought as these lead to experiences of illimitation. Like so, the text is situated in the freaked-out first-person POV of a narrator, parallel-universe Jack, as he writes about the world as it appears to him—that is, as it comes into being, perhaps as crafted in the very brain-raves of his mind.
It helps to think about Jack as a black hole, absorbing everything that comes his way. His game-player POV is first-person-singularity. Imagination is the narrator’s unmovable Omnimover that creates the entire world and makes it spin, and wobble, and vibrate. The prime mover is Monsanto in Skelley’s mind entering 3D Mental Hologram, Video-Cave Whatever. “Everything,” one might infer, is what parallel universe Jack’s book is about, as it writes itself into being; it is a term dosed with acid, and held to the hol(e)y standards of the High Art that has sought to achieve the whole: Romantic Cosmologies; planetariums; Stone Age caves; Terence McKenna’s exploding brain; Video Game Arcades; “The Celestial TV Lounge,” per network television’s transmitted hive-mind; Imagineering; Quantum Mechanics; Dante’s Divine Comedy, or other, more ordinary, spatial Hells; like Disney’s dark rides, notably, Monsanto Adventure Thru Inner Space, as it prods the inside of molecular experience. FOKA is a cosmic system, a ride script, an entertainment architecture. It is put forth as a theory of everything Los Angeles: its epic proportions, infinite dark, imagined elsewhere. Friends shake him back to Earth.
Everything, to Narrator-Jack is an opening. Restrictions are erotic, poetic. He’s horny to enter the world. Portals, day dreams, and Matterhorn miniatures access other worlds, and other minds, as modelled in entertainment architectures, characters one “thinks through,” like the first-person single-shooter POV of a chosen avatar, collecting pop tokens of influence and intoxication, with all toxic arrows pushing Eros, like radiation besotted upon a quest hero traversing a city stuck somewhere between its dream-machine history and a future irreversibly shifting on its fault-line. Per his own admission, Jack’s mind wants and controls all of reality, everything—from the Pasadena Freeway to metamorphosing Hot Babes to black holes, William Blake and the banana stairs of his dreamed-up Matterhorn. Until, that is, the crushing comedown brings into broad daylight its Endoras-of-Doubt and reality-affirming fuck-ups. He totals all of life’s lyric experiences into one whole, one big fuck-up, in savage triumph. Intent on this cosmic quest to wet ends of Romance, narrator-Jack misses many mini- “real” moments that flew by amid his black-out. The hangover is death-drive. Alienation expands into infinity. Game over.
Now the world swirls sickeningly around you and blank inevitability trembles under yr eyelids, right?
Peer inside the colophon of More Fear of Kathy Acker, published in 1985 by Los Angeles’ Illuminati Press, and find tiny teasers that intimate Skelley’s desire to see his chapbook slip outside of its own bounds. This mind-boggling note’s on par with a crummy wormhole the reader may or may not even notice; it informs us, in the first hand, that ‘More Fear of Kathy Acker’ is not the actual name of this work; and then, as if establishing the whole a priori ego disintegration-thing as central to the extended and/or accumulated whole, that ‘Fear of Kathy Acker’ is not the actual name of the longer piece of which it is a part. Taken at face value, this statement just conveys those parts of FOKA had, and would, appear in independent publications such as Lemon Fingers Emerge, Little Product, Magazine, or Nude Erections, kindly clueing us into the larger context of the literary scene where the text first circulated. Still, suggested in these lines is also the work’s secret weapon, that is, the structural evasion of ever really being complete: the ‘More,’ as we are told, is a matter of directive, rather than inscription; these are parts to an unseen whole that avoids detection. What Skelley’s note perhaps serendipitously points to is the paradox inherent to declaring the composite text (yes, this Semiotext(e) text) as “complete.” Implied by the very structure and composition of the volumes, as per the “not”-FOKA that is the accumulated total of all FOKAs, is the implication of potential other FOKAs, or even infinite FOKAs, as made possible by the Imagination. It might be a Schrödinger thing, but I can’t be sure. He writes: “Then, of course, this no longer satisfied either. I needed more and more of the combined fantasies … to drive my drive.”
Constantly tested are the disorienting limits of “self” as a concept somewhat questionably stuck inside the poet’s mind, which, in its own course, is entangled in a reality that hardly seems real. Writing, to the narrator, is proof of concept, singularly capable of peering into the mind’s many mini-reals to tease theories about all its possible psychic dimensions and permutations. One second we’re on Stadium Way, and in the next, Grandma’s dying, and capitalism is coming for us all through network television’s lizard folk, and the whole globe’s alit with post-nuclear paranoia, and the only logical conclusion left is to declare oneself Billy Idol as God—if only to have someone to call out to, in the darkened starless night, when tormented by the infinite temptation to big bang all the “cuties of the universe.”
Text unfolds, and so exists. In the uncertain space-time of a first-person singular always after “More”—as a totality amassed of more anecdotes, more experiences, more names to drop, stars to fuck, brains to fry, more sex and highs and ideas in hot cosmic orbit, alas, more proof of self, and so, of the self’s many mini-selves. These tiny egos slip out of the mind and float onto the page, where they can reproduce: more more more. placing Skelley’s narrator in some version of the real. He’s quantum mining through folds of lyric space-time. Here, a Rick Lawndale can also be William Blake. The hot chick at the DMV counter is Agnes Moorehead. The black hole first-person singularity sucking up all that approaches. More more more. Kathy Acker could expand on and on, exponentially, until all that’s hot is exhausted.
“It’s hard to explain,” the narrator shrugs.
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Playlist Inspired by The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker. Playlist by Andrew Miracle
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p.s. Hey. ** This weekend the blog is seriously chuffed to be the location of a post helping to celebrate the arrival of Jack Skelley’s early 90s masterstroke ‘Fear of Kathy Acker’, a novel so many decades in the womb it seemed mythical at times, but it’s finally real. Mr. Skelley has put together a voluminous look-see that includes some exclusive-to-this-blog goodies for you all, and have a giant blast whetting your appetites, please. Thank you ever so much, Jack! ** Tosh Berman, Hi. Well, it’s cool that Sparks had time to play almost their whole set minus one, although the missing ‘Escalator’ was a serious treat, of course. Yeah, I couldn’t believe it when they started ‘Beaver O’ Lindy’. I’d love to know what prompted that particular deep dig. Everyone, Any fellow Sparks fans out there will certainly be rewarded should they choose to read Tosh’s wrap-up on Sparks’ recent big concert at the Hollywood Bowl, and it’s housed at Substack aka here. ** Ian, Thanks! I saw an email from David upon awakening this morning, and I’ll get right to it. Oh, wow, kid #2 on the way. You guys are going for it. Congrats! And on the apartment find. Very happy to hear you’re also managing to write, of very course. Life is good then, need I even ask? If you want to put it that way, yes, I think Paris is treating me mistressly. I’m trying to think of a US equivalent for you. Like Miss America? Nah. ** Misanthrope, Well, the thing only stopping you from your dream-year is money, unfortunately. Well, and the fellow interest of your two designated scribes. As an early to bed, early to rise guy, I so feel your space. ** Charalampos, Oh, man, yeah, I’ve been reading about your heat. I don’t think I’ve seen ‘Lifespan’, but I’m not sure. Always like looking at Amsterdam. On film at least. It’s your birthday! Happy birthday! Blue cake rules. ** Steve Erickson, Yeah, ‘Muta’ is really terrific, right? I still can’t wrap my mind around even the vague possibility that Martel could have directed a Marvel movie. I honestly sort of don’t even believe it ever got to the point of a meeting. Your review of ‘Barbie’ matches most of the ones I’ve read that seem trustworthy. Eyes peeled for ‘Passages’ then. And ‘Hazer’ more imminently. Thanks! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hope you like it, man. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Oh, ‘Betty Blue’, I’ve seen that. Kind of fun. ’37°2 le Matin’ it is. I’ll scour the appropriate shelves. They do that in Paris too, i.e. nighttime construction. Luckily, my apartment windows look over a vestibule rather than the street. So for me it’s just late night partying neighbors to gripe about. Oh, that’s a nice love right there. Kind of like a poem even. Love transforming every beach into a large slice of melting cheese, G. ** Monsieur Darbz 👨🎤, Monsieur! (My auto-correct just tried very hard to turn Monsieur into Monster). My favorite French word is donc. It just means ‘so’, and people say it all the time but, for some reason, every time a French person uses that word I get a little giddy. What an amazing facial expression that Catatonic Schizophrenic guy has. I had lots of friends who were glued to their beds as teens, so I don’t think it’s out of the ordinary. I was always a go-getter, so not me, but I was always weird. I will use your ‘sucked ass’ designation of ‘Barbie’ as a preventative against going to see it this weekend. Thank you. I agree that all of Luca Guadagnino’s movies are ass. Charisma, right, that makes much more sense. I’m going to start using it. When I was about 16 years old a friend of mine told me I was charismatic, but no one has ever said that since, so I think I used to be. It’s great to feel like a lover. I think it helps with everything, not just your love life. Iow, yay! ** T. J., Hi. I liked ‘Zama’ very much, if that helps. I think I remember really liking that Garrel. I don’t really think so much of his more recent films. Do you? ** Charlie, Hi! Okay, now I’ve gotten three very different ‘Barbie’ reviews from you guys: mixed, hate, and love. So now I’m really confused. Wait, there are two Kens? Okay, now it’s starting to sound more interesting. I don’t think I could dress a paper doll in gym gear. I just don’t think I’ve got it in me. How about as a Norwegian Death Metal guy? Too wrong? ** Cody Goodnight, Hi, Cody. I think I’m fine. You too, I sure hope/presume. Burton lost me after ‘Big Fish’, although I did keep going to see his stuff until ‘Dark Shadows’, which is one of the most miserable film I’ve ever seen. I did enjoy ‘Wednesday’ though. ‘The Wild Bunch’ is kind of nice, very sort of crude and gruff. I do like Gorey, yes. Jesus, those people really are prudes. It doesn’t sound like they actually watched it. Weird. May your weekend epitomise greatness. ** Nasir, Hey, Nasir! Good to see you! Two weeks with family, yow, glad you’re still you. Yes, writing, prioritise it, I also say. Oh, uh, can you tell me what your visiting friend is into or potentially into? I’m happy to recommend things, yes. I wish you the least boring weekend in all of eternity. ** Okay. Be as completely with ‘Fear of Kathy Acker’ as your bodily functions allow you to be whilst looking at this page this weekend, and I’ll see you on Monday.
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