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Bodies of Work: Essays
With enervating experimentation but touching directness, postmodern novelist Acker ( Portrait of an Eve , 1992; My Demonology , 1993; etc.) explores art, politics, and being in her first essay collection. Subjects are various, ranging from William Burroughs to Goya to San Francisco; many of the pieces have been published previously (prefaces to books, articles in Marxism Today, the Critical Quarterly , etc.). Despite the variety of subjects and sources, the collection is neatly Essays are grouped agreeably by subject-'On Art and Artists,' 'The City,' 'Bodies of Work.' Though Acker says she aims to 'destroy' the essay form, she does more of what the form openly invites--to tinker and confess. For example, she interweaves stories into a piece on artist Nayland Blake and applies Wittgenstein's 'language games' to 'In a gym, verbal language or language whose purpose is meaning occurs, if at all, only at the edge of becoming lost.' But she also reveals her current weightlifting goals and describes a childhood desire to be a pirate. Not surprisingly, her most accessible works are those written for a wide audience, particularly an illuminating essay for the Village Voice on film director Peter Greenaway and a moving piece for the MMLA on copyright in the age of the Internet. In all, these essays are serious and reflective of a discontented mind bent on deconstruction. Some may find dreary her tale of patriarchy, dualism, and linearity of time; her elliptical tales and stark sentences may lack immediate clarity. For sure, her essays aren't casually authoritative like Updike's or reassuringly religious like Dillard's. Read Acker when you're patient and don't want to be comforted--or even satisfied. An unthreatening introduction to a vexing writer.- Kirkus
200 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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594 people want to read
About the author
Kathy Acker
84 books1,200 followersBorn of German-Jewish stock, Kathy Acker was brought up by her mother and stepfather (her natural father left her mother before Kathy was born) in a prosperous district of NY. At 18, she left home and worked as a stripper. Her involvement in the sex industry helped to make her a hit on the NY art scene, and she was photographed by the newly fashionable Robert Mapplethorpe. Preferring to be known simply as 'Acker' (the name she took from her first husband Robert, and which she continued to use even after a short-lived second marriage to composer Peter Gordon), she moved to London in the mid-eighties and stayed in Britain for five years.
Acker's writing is as difficult to classify into any particular genre as she herself was. She writes fluidly, operating in the borderlands and junkyards of human experience. Her work is experimental, playful, and provocative, engagingly alienating, narratively non sequitur.
Acker's writing is as difficult to classify into any particular genre as she herself was. She writes fluidly, operating in the borderlands and junkyards of human experience. Her work is experimental, playful, and provocative, engagingly alienating, narratively non sequitur.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
November 15, 2015
"One must be where one is. The body does not lie. Language, if it is not propaganda, or media blab, is the body; with such language lies are not possible. If lies were possible, there would be no reason to write fiction."
February 23, 2018
I never know much what to say about non-fiction books as they clearly say it all themselves. Great stuff here. A few things were a bit outdated, but there are some especially interesting insights into Acker's novels' method. This is her last published book and some of it is written during her battle with cancer and is particularly illuminatingly about her final novel Pussy, King of the Pirates, which she must have been writing or had just finished as she wrote the essays that complete this anthology. I'm about halfway through Pussy now--reading her complete works in reverse chronological order--already read them in order as they came out so this seems like a valid way to re-experience them. I remain a longtime fan. one of the highlights of my life was finding the original small press editions of Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, I Dreampt I was a Nymphomaniac and The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec at St. Mark's bookstore in NYC on my way to Europe for the first time in 1986--these were books I'd heard of in San Francisco but which I couldn't find anywhere. I treasured these tokens on my trip, reading them over and over again during my 8 months of travel through Europe and the penning of my own first novel. Kathy and I go way back. met her a couple of times at readings and a signing at City Lights later in the '80s. She was always very gracious.
Best insight here, for me, was her revealing that her fiction is an exploration. Since it's form is mostly a series of short, declamatory statements, it's always struck me as more of a series of certainties (knowledge) than a questioning (search, exploration, projection into a mythic future). Now, however, I'm beginning to see these statements as reformations of possibilities, as, in fact, questions--that accounts for the jumping around, the contradictions, the constantly shifting sands. Mythmaking is always a meta-temporal projection--I guess that's what makes it different from history/realism.
My other favorite writer, Chris Kraus, has just written Kathy's biography. It's in the mail and will be part of this project. The novel I'm working on now is drawing me to Acker and Ballard as models of revolution and subversion in novels as Trump & co.'s anti-rhetorical rhetorical tactics have made me a militant guerrilla writer all of a sudden.
Best insight here, for me, was her revealing that her fiction is an exploration. Since it's form is mostly a series of short, declamatory statements, it's always struck me as more of a series of certainties (knowledge) than a questioning (search, exploration, projection into a mythic future). Now, however, I'm beginning to see these statements as reformations of possibilities, as, in fact, questions--that accounts for the jumping around, the contradictions, the constantly shifting sands. Mythmaking is always a meta-temporal projection--I guess that's what makes it different from history/realism.
My other favorite writer, Chris Kraus, has just written Kathy's biography. It's in the mail and will be part of this project. The novel I'm working on now is drawing me to Acker and Ballard as models of revolution and subversion in novels as Trump & co.'s anti-rhetorical rhetorical tactics have made me a militant guerrilla writer all of a sudden.
July 28, 2019
“To write down what one thinks one knows is to destroy possibilities for joy” Kathy Acker’s non-fiction is so hugely under-rated and this book is the perfect example of how a fiction writer can bring colour to journalism. The piece she writes on ‘The Language of the Body’ (bodybuilding) is sublime and my new favourite piece of writing. One of the best books of essays I’ve ever read.
July 4, 2022
Non-fiction essays by the punk princess of postmodernism. Many of the essays are about art: the films of Peter Greenaway; the realism of painters like Goya and Carravaggio; the literary work of writers like William S. Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade, Collette and Samuel R. Delany. In other essays Acker comments on plagiarism and copyright law, on censorship, and on French literary theory.
While some of the essays, such as her introduction to a book about Boxcar Bertha, are in a conventional style, others are experimental in form. For instance, in addition to psychoanalytic and anthropological concepts, Acker employs myth and narrative in her critique of the sexism in American motorcycle culture; she employs a similar approach in her catalog of the artwork of Nayland Blake. An essay about the city of St. Petersburg appears to be more about language than about the city insofar as parts of the essay are in poetry rather than prose, and some of these latter are in untranslated Latin.
Acquired Apr 15, 2010
Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR
While some of the essays, such as her introduction to a book about Boxcar Bertha, are in a conventional style, others are experimental in form. For instance, in addition to psychoanalytic and anthropological concepts, Acker employs myth and narrative in her critique of the sexism in American motorcycle culture; she employs a similar approach in her catalog of the artwork of Nayland Blake. An essay about the city of St. Petersburg appears to be more about language than about the city insofar as parts of the essay are in poetry rather than prose, and some of these latter are in untranslated Latin.
Acquired Apr 15, 2010
Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR
May 9, 2017
Some of the more complex and intriguing essays I ever read. The title essay about body building was particularly fascinating - about the idea of breaking things down as a method of rebuilding and restructuring.
Reread 2017- I definitely understood more of this book through a second reading, and realize that my earlier memories of this book were very surface level. Much like Zizek, she deconstructs many things from popular culture and the art world to discuss the purpose of, and our relationship with art, language, and the body. Particular to my interests were the parsing of Cronenberg's Crash, the films of Peter Greenaway, and through the Looking Glass.
Reread 2017- I definitely understood more of this book through a second reading, and realize that my earlier memories of this book were very surface level. Much like Zizek, she deconstructs many things from popular culture and the art world to discuss the purpose of, and our relationship with art, language, and the body. Particular to my interests were the parsing of Cronenberg's Crash, the films of Peter Greenaway, and through the Looking Glass.
April 1, 2013
Kathy Acker and the post-structuralist bench press.
November 19, 2014
To me these essays are like Kathy acker eloquently wrote out my own thoughts better than I ever could and read them back to me.
November 12, 2018
It grabbed me, it made me think, it evaded understanding, it’s sexually charged, and it’s inspiring. Finished it in two days. Good weekend read.
December 14, 2022
Amazing! Didn't realise she was such a great essayist.
October 3, 2017
When I was still a boy living with my parents I used to take all the books in their library that looked cool and put them in my room. I even read a couple of them. Then I saw that there were even more, cooler books in these places called book stores. (Yes, I knew about libraries, but I could only steal from my school’s, and their collection was limited.)
I’ve always judged a book by its cover, and Kathy Acker’s had some of the coolest. She fit into my teenage romanticism of punk and literature perfectly, and it didn’t hurt that she graced the covers of a lot of her new-wavishly designed volumes. I think I even read a couple of them. They always had such great titles and the guts with filled with transgressively incoherent prose that made me feel cool.
But that was years ago, and I’ve given up many of those pretensions. I might even be a little smarter, or just enough to penetrate Acker’s oeuvre with a less superficial understanding. So, when I found BODIES OF WORK: ESSAYS, I thought: This will be a good entry point and offer some nostalgia.
It does both. Most of the essay were written between the mid-to-late 1980s into the mid-1990s, people with the underground characters of the time and the social battles that have grown to absurd levels in our time. She opens the collection with a preface basically stating she hates her essays. It’s a bit harsh. But she prefers her fiction.
A lot of these piece read like a type of fiction. Some are straightforward, but most take a turn, usually holding two different subjects in the same essay and seeing how they play together. It’s interesting to watch him mind work out the problems on the page. I found her words inspiring, having read them at a time when I’m none-too happy with my own progress as a creative writer. That’s almost as impactful as the strong intelligence that radiates from her portrait on the cover.
I’ve always judged a book by its cover, and Kathy Acker’s had some of the coolest. She fit into my teenage romanticism of punk and literature perfectly, and it didn’t hurt that she graced the covers of a lot of her new-wavishly designed volumes. I think I even read a couple of them. They always had such great titles and the guts with filled with transgressively incoherent prose that made me feel cool.
But that was years ago, and I’ve given up many of those pretensions. I might even be a little smarter, or just enough to penetrate Acker’s oeuvre with a less superficial understanding. So, when I found BODIES OF WORK: ESSAYS, I thought: This will be a good entry point and offer some nostalgia.
It does both. Most of the essay were written between the mid-to-late 1980s into the mid-1990s, people with the underground characters of the time and the social battles that have grown to absurd levels in our time. She opens the collection with a preface basically stating she hates her essays. It’s a bit harsh. But she prefers her fiction.
A lot of these piece read like a type of fiction. Some are straightforward, but most take a turn, usually holding two different subjects in the same essay and seeing how they play together. It’s interesting to watch him mind work out the problems on the page. I found her words inspiring, having read them at a time when I’m none-too happy with my own progress as a creative writer. That’s almost as impactful as the strong intelligence that radiates from her portrait on the cover.
November 26, 2024
Fun to get insight into Acker’s method. I’ve always found her very freeing — eschewing norms of structure, subject and tone. This series reinforced that she was testing ideas, not asserting them.
I thought the weakest parts were the attempts to confirm some materiality to language (the body being more ‘deeply connected to’ language) Psychoanalytic ideas of womanhood are so unbelievably stupid and empirically wrong. Theoretical play on immediately disprovable grounds. It’s kind of interesting (and speaks to her inconsistency) that she wrote her excellent piece on the embodied nature of bodybuilding while writing that other rubbish too.
Loved when she would shift from review or critical analysis to storytelling, reinterpretation, confessional or myth-making. She’s so good at it 🤍
I thought the weakest parts were the attempts to confirm some materiality to language (the body being more ‘deeply connected to’ language) Psychoanalytic ideas of womanhood are so unbelievably stupid and empirically wrong. Theoretical play on immediately disprovable grounds. It’s kind of interesting (and speaks to her inconsistency) that she wrote her excellent piece on the embodied nature of bodybuilding while writing that other rubbish too.
Loved when she would shift from review or critical analysis to storytelling, reinterpretation, confessional or myth-making. She’s so good at it 🤍
April 5, 2023
Mooie essays over subversieve literatuur, over lichamelijkheid en politiek. Over fictie en over ‘het schrijven’. Verrassend actueel. Kathy Acker is een held(in).
March 24, 2025
genialny zbiór esejów o literaturze, sztuce, polityce i feminizmie
July 3, 2008
just as i was losing faith in the ability of critical writing to do anything but oversimplify, in comes this book to refuel my critical imagination.
:
To write is to do other than announce oneself as an enclosed individual. Even the most narcissist of texts, say Nabokov's Lolita, reaches out to, in Lolita's case grabs at, its reader. To write is to write to another. Not _for another_, as if one could take away that other's otherness, but _to another). To write, as Gertrude Stein and Maurice Blanchot both have said, is to write to a stranger, to a friend. As we go forward, say on the Net, perhaps we are also going back, and I am not a great believer in linear models of time, to times when literature and economics met each other in the region of friendship. "The ancients," comments Arendt, "thought friends indispensable to human life, indeed that a life without friends was not really worth living."
Friendship is always a political act, for it unites citizens into a polis, a (political) community. And it is this friendship that the existence of copyright (as it is now defined) has obfuscated.
The loss of friendship, the giving over of friendship to business based on individualism, has caused loss of energy in the literary world. Think, for a moment, with how much more energy one does something for a lover or for a close friend than when one acts only in the service of oneself.
In his remarkable essay about the writings of his friend Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot opposes two kinds of relationships, that of friendship and that of totalitarianism. Both Blanchot and Bataille lived through Nazism and Stalinism. A totalitarian relationship, Blanchot states, is one in which the subject denies the otherness, therefore the very existence of the other person, the person to whom he or she is talking. Thus, the totalitarian relationship is built upon individualism as closure. Individualism as the closing down of energy, of meaning. Whereas, when I talk to my friend, when I write to her, I am writing to someone whose otherness I accept. It is the difference between me and my friend that allows meaning; meaning begins in this difference. And it is meaning, the meaningfulness of the world, that is consciousness. You see, I am finally talking about my writing.
:
To write is to do other than announce oneself as an enclosed individual. Even the most narcissist of texts, say Nabokov's Lolita, reaches out to, in Lolita's case grabs at, its reader. To write is to write to another. Not _for another_, as if one could take away that other's otherness, but _to another). To write, as Gertrude Stein and Maurice Blanchot both have said, is to write to a stranger, to a friend. As we go forward, say on the Net, perhaps we are also going back, and I am not a great believer in linear models of time, to times when literature and economics met each other in the region of friendship. "The ancients," comments Arendt, "thought friends indispensable to human life, indeed that a life without friends was not really worth living."
Friendship is always a political act, for it unites citizens into a polis, a (political) community. And it is this friendship that the existence of copyright (as it is now defined) has obfuscated.
The loss of friendship, the giving over of friendship to business based on individualism, has caused loss of energy in the literary world. Think, for a moment, with how much more energy one does something for a lover or for a close friend than when one acts only in the service of oneself.
In his remarkable essay about the writings of his friend Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot opposes two kinds of relationships, that of friendship and that of totalitarianism. Both Blanchot and Bataille lived through Nazism and Stalinism. A totalitarian relationship, Blanchot states, is one in which the subject denies the otherness, therefore the very existence of the other person, the person to whom he or she is talking. Thus, the totalitarian relationship is built upon individualism as closure. Individualism as the closing down of energy, of meaning. Whereas, when I talk to my friend, when I write to her, I am writing to someone whose otherness I accept. It is the difference between me and my friend that allows meaning; meaning begins in this difference. And it is meaning, the meaningfulness of the world, that is consciousness. You see, I am finally talking about my writing.
March 21, 2007
Basically, Kathy Acker totally rules and gets all the punk stuff right, without all the annoying stuff. She is the punkest ever, in a really intelligent way, which is hard to pull off.
April 17, 2018
Excellent collection of essays that deal with art, the body, and language. As an author Acker has a brilliant way of executing punk humour with detailed research, and her choices of subject matter (writing, William S. Burroughs, Peter Greenaway, bodybuilding, two seven-year-old penpals) are all dealt with brilliantly. This is criticism at its best, and a nice introduction to Acker.
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January 5, 2019Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews