Empire of the Senseless: A Novel (Acker, Kathy)

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• ISBN13: 9780802131799
• Acclimate: NEW
• Notes: Trade-mark New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

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Customer Reviews

overrated -- titles are better than the books
I tried for years to stick up for Acker, but her concepts are always infinitely more interesting than her execution. The truth is she had no natural feel for language -- there's no music to her prose, none at all, and all of the novels sound better when just the titles are read. But the idea of her as the female punk "underground" "subversive" and "transgressive" priestess is very tempting. I say this kind of in sorrow. "Kathy Goes to Haiti" is funny once in a while though. This one is a dreary bore.

2004-07-01 | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 2

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One in a Million
How do I describe this sci-fi/horror/sociological/scatological freak show of a novel? Well, if you're read the brilliant cyberpunk classic *Neuromancer*, you know the plot, more or less. *Empire ...* is part tribute to, part parody of Gibson's work. But let's say we were living in an alternative reality in which Gibson lost his only manuscript of *Neuromancer* before he could get it to the publisher, and who should find it but the crazy, mystical, beatnick author William Burroughs. Burroughs then says 'wow, this is quite a story, but I've got a better take on it,' drops some acid and gets right to work. Lets say, then has the worst bad trip of his of while writing. The result would look somethink life Acker's ultra-violent topsy-turvey future world in which France is a colony of Algeria, wars are fought with sound waves and burned out, amoral adventurers stride through the techno-babble wasteland of a doomed civilization in search of money, drugs, revenge and just to escape boredom.

2001-01-01 (USA) | Helpful Votes: 9 | Rating: 5

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Acker describes the senselessness of this mileu
Empire of the Senseless is schizogenic because the reality it is dealing with, and our own mileu is schizogenic. Acker comes from the cut and paste school, via Burroughs and the Fluxus experiments and interprets reality through a greasy sometimes opaque, sometimes lewd, sometimes amazingly transcendental lens.

This is a "language" author and as well Acker is committed to art movements, including the art world's move towards "appropriation." To one "unititiated" in the parallel visual and dramatic (as well as musical arts) this book may seem more obscure than it is.

Yet I fully believe that if my sixteen year old sister can read and enjoy "Empire" without any formal introductions and indoctrinations then the "misunderstandings" imply those of one who has come to "expect" certain things from a book.

May your expectations be shattered!

Let's stop condoning the banal, boring, domesticated read.

Now. A must read.

1999-04-03 | Helpful Votes: 11 | Rating: 5

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A schizoid ballet through the ashes of civilization
Kathy Acker has more vision than talent. If you read "Empire of the Senseless," you're subjected to a seemingly endless series of images that range from the squalid to the nightmarish, composed with all the skill of a schizophrenic dictating her scattershot memoirs. By turns she is banal, scatological, grimly humorous, declamatory, and poetic.

However, for all its excesses, this book is frequently amazing. Acker puts her characters Abhor and Thivai in a post-apocalyptic world where abuse and defeat are par for the course, and shows their desperate search for a semblance of peace in a surprisingly humane light.

Kathy Acker does not write for the weak of heart, but "Empire of the Senseless" is brave in the face of futility and compassionate toward history's most helpless souls.

1999-01-03 (Boston, Massachusetts) | Helpful Votes: 21 | Rating: 3

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Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker (Acker, Kathy)

Description

Kathy Acker pushed literary boundaries with a vigor and creative fire that made her one of America's preeminent experimental writers and her books cult classics. Now Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper have distilled the incredible variety of Acker's body of work into a single volume that reads like a communique from the front lines of late-twentieth-century America. Acker was a literary pirate whose prodigious output drew promiscuously from popular culture, the classics of Western civilization, current events, and the raw material of her own life. Her vision questions everything we take for granted -- the authority of parents, government, and the law; sexuality and the policing of desire -- and puts in its place a universe of polymorphous perversity and shameless, playful freakery. Spanning Acker's '70s punk interventions through more than a dozen major novels, Essential Acker is an indispensable overview of the work of this distinctive American writer and a reminder of her challenge to and influence on writers of the future. "Scarified sensibility, subversive intellect, and predatory wit make her a writer like no other I know." -- Tom LeClair, The New York Times Book Review

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Pussy, King of the Pirates (Acker, Kathy)

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• Notes: Characterize New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• ISBN13: 9780802134844
• Fitness: NEW

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Customer Reviews

Could not get into it.
Normally I am a huge fan of Kathy Acker, not this. Her style is there but it's jumbled and incoherent.

2008-01-07 (Grain Valley, Mo. USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Terrible waste of paper...neo-dadaist crap.
Kathy Acker has struck a new low for novels. This was singuatly the worst example of slaughtering trees needlessly. The plot is not worth discussing(I couldn't really follow it anyway), the book is mainly a screed against men and its readers. Inane dialogue and no feeling of setting. Calling this anything but a waste of paper would be a travesty

By the way, the neo-Dadaist reference is to an art movement in the '20s to "destroy" art by flouting conventions, and that is an apt analogy for this book.

2004-05-07 (worcester ma) | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 1

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the best Acker
Kathy Acker is, in my opinion, the best avant-garde author who ever existed, and "Pussy King of Pirates" is her greatest work--topping even "Empire of the Senseless"--which is too bad that it was her last.
following the exploits of girls seeking treasure, Pirate girls, and surreal avatars of writers like Antonin Artaud, "Pussy King of Pirates" goes farther than Acker has ever gone with the conventions of literature. ...the book is like a jazz riff, replayed and improvised at numerous times.
i cannot rave enough.
furthermore, "Pussy King of Pirates" has a soundtrack, that Acker recorded with the Mekons, which is also phenomenal.

2002-10-17 (London, ON Canada) | Helpful Votes: 9 | Rating: 5

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I did want to like it though
Using a style a bit like that of William Burroughs, Acker weaves a tale of various girls struggling against (society, men, each other, etc.). There are moments of crisp clarity where Acker conveys aspects of the story she's telling with the potent voices she uses, but these are not often enough to bring the story together except for the dedicated transgressive reader. This is the type of book that relies more on voice and atmosphere than on linear storylines, and Acker does succeed in giving us fascinating characters, but I was still left bewildered and numb by the end, as well as left wondering what this book was meant to convey.

2002-06-30 | blissengine (Norfolk, VA USA) | Helpful Votes: 9 | Rating: 2

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Brilliant!
Kathy Acker is probably one of the most talented authors of the latter half of the 20th century. This album is an excellent expose for her book of the same title.

Acker and the Mekons do an excellent job of finding different styles of music to fit with the different moods of the book. Acker's literature is reknowned for its avant-garde method of "plagiarism" (she blatantly steals from other authors and restructures their ideas to fit her own); this album is no different. Many songs sound like other songs--of various genres--that you might have heard before.

Songs on this album range from industrial to trance-esque electronica to disco to reggae-ish folk to post-modern sea shanty. Interspersed between every song is Acker's spoken word.

A must have for anyone who loves Acker's works.

2001-03-05 (London, ON Canada) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 5

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Blood and Guts in High School: A Novel (Acker, Kathy)

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• ISBN13: 9780802131935
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Customer Reviews

Quick, witty, and widely varying in quality
Pros: Like most of the books I've been reading lately (Gulliver's Travels, The Gallic Wars, Gardens of the Moon) this book contains some brilliant prose. The parts where Acker deconstructs the Scarlet Letter, comments on capitalist language, and provides the philosophy of the slave trader are particularly good. Even in less coherent passages, it is at least vivid. It is also short.

Cons: Its brevity is a good thing because also like most of the books I've been reading lately, over half the novel is pointless. In this case, the narrative gets so abstract that you can just skip over anything that begins to repeat itself or that makes no sense. Also in this case, the answer as to why the author chose to do this is in the novel - its a rebellion against capitalist interest. The language is intentionally bad to deny the very people it is criticizing. If you bought the book, as I did, you are the scum she is talking about. Most people won't like this sort of criticism, and even if they do, as I did, it was still a pretty big waste of time. In a way, I love that this novel is pulling down every reader that picks it up. I can respect that kind of spite.

Summary: If you read this novel, you are its victim. If you are interested in that, then by all means read it. It wont be a pleasant journey, but you maybe satisfied anyway.

2009-10-23 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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It started to be good, but got worse.
I've always been a bookworm, thirsty to read almost anything that wasn't crappy formula fiction, but I hated this book. It teases with the beginnings of a story, and with sexually-themed illustrations that appear to be meant to shock (personally, though, I am difficult to offend, so for me, they were just an interesting addition). I thought I was going to like the story, I really did. After awhile, though, it degenerates into hard-to-follow nonsense.

The second half of the book was almost unbearable for me, with its fragmented, barely-existent plot and its jumping around to different formats. I like to get sucked into a story, to feel compelled by it, but the dissonance between the different parts and formats kept jerking me out of the story's world to the point where I could barely keep track of what was happening. After awhile, I gave up, and just skipped the last few pages.

I would throw it in the recycling bin, but seeing the good reviews on here, some people seem to like it, so maybe I'll just drop it off at the thrift store where someone who knows they like it can by it, and someone taking a chance won't waste more that 50 cents.

2009-10-11 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 1

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Not Impressed
I am either too literal, too linear, too unimaginative, too normal, or some combination therein, to find anything remotely advantageous about reading this book, other than being prepared for class (it's required reading). I was not shocked, disgusted, horrified, entertained, touched, enthused, enraged, or enraptured. Maybe a little frustrated.

I will definitely be keeping this one in the bathroom. Not for reading, but in case I run out of T.P.

Guess I'm just not progressive enough to "get it."

Here's the one I couldn't put down: Shock & Awe (Macmillan New Wrting)

2008-10-04 | pvlgize | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 1

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Finished it on an airplane...really cool! (Actually "in")
Excellent book. While my perfect rating (not that it matters) may drop over time, this was a jarringly satisfying read, one where the slipstream sexual complexity of all the smattered nonsense makes the cliches within (esp. at the end) all the more simple, profound, and resonant. It's something of an immature work perhaps, but I sort of think of it as the author really burying herself within the main character and speaking and thinking and expressing as she would, not that I think the novel should be understood merely as the record or diary of the protagonist. The book's language speaks in fits and starts, in diatribes and metaphors and irritating aphorisms. And tangential stories. And movie script. Poetry. Lessons. Pictograms. And jokes. It's stark. It's naked. It's pissed off. It's juvenile. And it's really refreshing. It's hardly perfect and I'm anxious to get into some of the author's other work in hopes of a more "fully realized" (whatever that means) novel. But to say that the lack of linearity or the somewhat prevalent vulgarity are liabilities of this book is to miss the point ENTIRELY. And the experience. I'd like to say that I read a lot but I don't. I'm a big music and film nerd and I generally take to the experimental or violent within each. So this book was right up my "alley". The only thing I could think to compare it to is Naked Lunch which is great. Anyway, it did touch a nerve in me and spoke to some kind of inner abused adolescent girl even if that makes me a fake bourgeois tourist. So what. The world is effed up and it was in 1977 and it is now. There's so much fake snobbery and indifference and condescending solutions. I think that's what the book decries and is ABOUT more than anything else. That and the fact that we desperately, foolishly, tirelessly make for ourselves our own embittering prisons. If you're a big prude don't read this stuff. Or rent horror movies. I'm sick of seeing people whine online about how offensive some piece of literature or film is. Yeah, thanks for the informed and creative warning, buddy! I didn't find this particular book to be all that offensive or vulgar anyway. It's no American Psycho, which really did churn my stomach and though I liked it, I certainly think Acker reveals a much greater and more perceptive moral sensibility in this book than does Ellis in his. What's the big deal with an old penis here and there? Anyway, don't read it if you're a whiny prude because we don't need to hear your complaining. But yes, very excellent. A real page-turner!!!!!!

2007-04-06 (Colorado Springs) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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Acker's most accessible book
The previous reviews have said that smart people like it and dumb people don't; I don't think that's true. Someone else said that it should be thrown on the floor because it's filth. I don't think that's true either.

I think that Acker had a gift for writing, but she let her obsession with sex and her need to shock get in the way of it. Several parts in this book shine with something that seems very real and honest - the part about getting an abortion ("I love it when men take care of me"); her detailed interpretation of The Scarlet Letter; the sections where she discusses the fact that women writers are plagiarists, because they can only use the words that men have written before them, for centuries.

But in between all of these flashes of brilliance is a lot of monotonous c-words and f-words and endless repetition of sexual humiliation. It's my opinion that if she had left most of that out, she could have been a great and major writer. Not because I'm morally opposed to the vulgarity, but because it's really boring after awhile. So it's ironic that the extreme vulgarity of her work is probably what made her famous - she attracted attention with shock value, but her work is ultimately, in my view, weakened by the shocking aspect of it.

I thought one quote of Janey's, where she's talking to Jean Genet, explains pretty well why Acker persisted in writing obscene scenes:
"I know where we're travelling, Genet, and I know why we're travelling there. It's not just to travel, but it's so those others who kicked me out have a chance of being at peace, having a chance of knowing the land of the monster without going there.
Genet: Do you think that's possible?"

I think Genet's question is the central one to ask of all of Acker's works. Does she succeed in taking the reader to a place of degradation and filthy, raw, animal-like sex scenes, as she intends to? And if she succeeds at that, does the reader really want to go there, to the land of the monster? I suppose my opinion of the book is biased because I only want to peek into the land of the monster, and then I wish Acker to move on and tell an engrossing story with her unique and honest observations instead.

Overall, I think this is her most accessible book because the sex is not as nonstop as it is in Great Expectations or some of her others. But to me, it's frustrating to read Blood and Guts in High School because of the passages that make it so clear that she was capable of writing a much better, concise, and more focused book.

2007-02-05 (Las Angelos California) | Helpful Votes: 10 | Rating: 3

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Don Quixote: A Novel (Acker, Kathy)

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Customer Reviews

Don Quixote wanders through a Hieronymus Bosch painting...
At the core of this novel Kathy Acker states the dilemma succinctly thus: "It can't be mistaken to need someone else to love and yet only human solitariness allows human survival." On every level--the personal, the social, the psychological, the political, the cosmic--this paradox is replayed in Acker's hallucinogenic deconstruction of Cervantes' classic. Of course, there's very little resemblance to the original *Don Quixote* in this postmodern remake--the knight is a woman, the country is America, Sancho Panza is a dog, Nixon is president, and if the Apocalypse hasn't already come it can't be worst than what's already here.

But, in spite of it all, wandering haphazardly through this wasteland, Acker's Quixote is still searching for love, communication, and freedom--each and all of which seem to be impossible given human nature and the repressive political, social, and sexual relationships that arise naturally out of our survival-oriented hardwiring for power and domination over others. Patriarchy is to blame for how things are now, but Acker doesn't seem to hold out much hope for how they might be under a matriarchy. Her knight has given up on men, but can't feel the transcendent union she seeks, the transformative love-experience, with women, even if they are safer (safer because she can't truly love them.) Is love a lie, an illusion? Are we condemned to loneliness, silence, despair? Is a retreat into ourselves rather than a quest into the world the only viable road for the seeker now that all roads have been traveled, all leading to the same dead end?

Acker paints a grim--if darkly comic--picture in this anti-classic--a sustained nightmare of violence, perversion, sexuality, and criminality written in the style of assemblage: part dream, part journal, part political rant, all Acker. Like all her texts, *Don Quixote* will offend the morally, sexually, and politically sensitive of every stripe. Acker belongs to no party--she's fiercely and defiantly individualistic. Those dependent on a straightforward narrative will likewise be disappointed. Acker's idea of a novel doesn't include characters with only one identity or events which follow logically in sequence, or even one style of writing. The reader comes across plays, poems, mini-history lessons, rewrites of DeSade and more--it's as if her Don Quixote had put together a scrapbook of all he'd seen and experienced on his quest through Hell.

And yet, while *experimental* literature can all-too-often be clinical and coldly detached in its ironic and metafictional self-consciousness, Acker writes with real heart and a deep, almost willfully naïve, conviction in her own pursuit of the ideals of love, freedom, and art. Acker's despair at not being loved or understood by anyone may indeed be justified by the facts of her (and our collective human) existence, but in *Don Quixote* she has at least communicated the despair shared by all of us fellow quixotes who've suffered the realization of the nature of how things are.

In an earlier review, I claimed *my mother, a demonology* to be Acker's masterpiece, but *Don Quixote* surpasses it as an example of Acker at her best. Disguised as an outrageous parody of a classic, it's a classic in its own right.

2008-07-02 | Literary Outlaw, author *Hardcore Romeo* and *61 Bang* (New York City) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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Postmodern bliss
Kathy Acker is a truly unique writer. She blends classics, politics, surrealism, autobiographical elements, raw emotion, graphic, "pornographic" scenes, humor and much more into strange, memorable and sometimes confusing postmodern literature. Beacause the author often doesn't follow the laws of a linear plot her works can be difficult to get into. But it's worth the effort. There's nothing like Acker's writing.

2005-05-25 (Perth, WA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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Great!
If you're on the lookout for a for an unconventional, surreal, thoughtful, shocking, hilarious, crude, sensitive, and generally disconcerting novel/literary analysis/ treatise/social commentary, check out Acker's _Don Quixote_ and you won't be disappointed.

Reading and digesting Acker's work can occassionally feel strenuous...this is due to the sheer unconventionality of the novel, but the end result yeilds (often hilarious) new insight and is always worth the effort. The piece is a unique blend of politics and fantasy that is highly entertaining and never mainstream. Highly reccomended.

1998-12-29 | Helpful Votes: 11 | Rating: 4

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Literal Madness: Three Novels: Kathy Goes to Haiti; My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini; Florida (Acker, Kathy)

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Customer Reviews

Kathy goes to Haiti.
Kathy goes to Haiti. Every man wants her to be his wife. A man takes her home. She is his wife. She cries. Little kids laugh at her. She goes somewhere else. Different men want Kathy as their wife. She doesn't let the first one take her home. Kathy is learning.

2000-04-28 (san francisco) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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Early Feminist Hyperreal Novels: Best of a New Genre in Fict
Kathy Acker has become known as the queen of punk feminist fiction. With Literal Madness she solidified that position. Three short texts unrelated to each other but connected by the quest metaphor. Of the three, Kath Goes to Haiti -- a pseudo-biographical piece -- calls for the most sustained interest. It is ostensibly a travel book adventure in the third world, but ultimately its quest is the undermining of linear narrative. Acker is a storyteller of the postmodern, disjuctive type. She short-circuits the narrative line in order to call the reader's attention to the discontinuous nature of our lives in/as fiction. She creates a hyperreality in Haiti, transforms place into text, and thereby questions the so-called reality principle. When her alter-ego "Kathy" discovers that Haiti is more a state of mind than a Caribbean island, the disjuncture in the text becomes sensible and senseless at the same time. The effect is surreal; but hyperreality (Jean Baudrillard's term) and surreality have in common elments of discontinuity and therfore serve to disorient the reader. Anyone looking for a 'good, old-fashion story' will have to look elsewhere because Acker's book satisfies none of the traditional reader's desires for linear regularity and certain expectability as to what stories do. Labeled pseudo-pornography, Kathy Goes to Haiti and other texts by Acker certainly do contain pornographic elements. But it soon becomes clear to the careful reader that what is at work in her fiction is the question of what pornography "means," especially for women. Can it be a tool to deconstruct itself? Can women themselves use it -- as Acker does -- to undermine its negative effects for women? Literal Madness is a great introduction to these questions for those willing to suspend their need for normal narrative development and to follow Acker through an acrobatics of word and scene, an at times insane juxtaposition of seemingly disparate materials that echo the disparity of our everyday lives and of our dreams. R. L. Mazzola, Robercind@aol.co

1997-07-10 | Helpful Votes: 10 | Rating: 5

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