Reviews

Didn’t like this one as much as Blood and Guts, and it’s definitely not the right book if you’re a beginner to reading Acker. Her unapologetic prose was, however, as strong as ever. Am still eager to read more of her work.

alixf889's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Burroughs but make it ✨for the girls ✨

gaybf's review

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3.5

Fav quotes

My image of my mother is the source of my creativity, I prefer the word consciousness. My image of my hateful mother is blocking consciousness. My image of my hateful mother is blocking consciousness. To obtain a different picture of my mother, I have to forgive my mother for rejecting me and committing suicide. The picture of love, found in one of the clusters, is forgiveness that transforms need into desire.
Why do people kill? A person kills, not from impotence but because he or she doesn’t see what he or she is doing. O had to either deny her father’s sex and have no father or fuck her father and have a father. This event led O to believe that a man would love her only if she did something she didn’t want to do. How can I talk about ignorance, what ignorance unknowing is?
Why is anybody interested in anything? I’m interested when I’m discovering. To me, real moving is discovering. Real moving, then, is that which endures. How can that be?
The mistake is allowing oneself to be desperate. The mistake is believing that indulgence in desire a decision to follow desire isn’t possibly painful. Desire drives everything away: the sky, each building, the enjoyment of a cup of cappuccino. Desire makes the whole body-mind turn on itself and hate itself. Desire is Master and Lord. The trick is to figure out how to get along with someone apart from desire if that’s at all possible.
(Seattle Art Society) timelessness versus time. Thee is very little money available to poor people. Since the American culture allows only the material to be real (actually, only money), those who want to do art unless they transfer their art into non-art i.e. the making of commodities, can’t earn money and stay alive. Almost every living artist who keeps on doing art has family money or at least one helpful sex partner. There’re a few artists whose work this society desires, for the country needs some international propaganda (and there’s nothing as harmless to a materialist as formalist experimentation). So an American artist has about one chance in 100,000 to earn a living making art. Nevertheless all the artists expect to have this one in 100,000 success. After five to thirty years of either slow starvation or, if there’s family or sexual money, lack of feedback recognition and distribution (for only the few artists who are famous get their work amply recognized and distributed), at least three-quarters of the artists who haven’t died off yet are willing to do anything to succeed and turn to more commercial or technical work or become artists because only artists are happy and know reality and there are no other jobs. The art market is becoming more glutted and artists help each other out less and stab each other in the back and do everything else necessary to survive.
(…) art is the elaborating of violence. Don’t look to me to want to do anything about the world: I’m out of it.

Content Warnings

lewis_fishman's review against another edition

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4.0

such a strange little read, kinda loved it

sharb91's review

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dark emotional fast-paced

3.5

glabour's review against another edition

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3.0

What a strange little book. I can’t tell if it’s high art or pretentious nonsense. I’ll keep thinking about it, though. Since people I don’t know aren’t gonna read this review, if you’re interested in my thoughts on the book, give me a call.

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