Janey and her father are sleeping together but when he starts sleeping with Sally she is afraid he will leave her. She talks to Bill, who he is treating poorly, and she introduces identity crisis. Bill tells her it's because John is trying to find out who he is without her.
She talks with John and he tells her he needs a break/ aside with Mexican tradition about maleness.
John wants to sleep with Janey and yet tells her he feels very strongly for Sally. She refuses his suggestions to dine with him. Bill advises her to get out of his way because he's trying to hurt her. / divergent flashback to the ruins in Merida, where great art is done with great destruction. Father and daughter go to dinner together and they talk about Sally, which he regrets and fires her jealousy. At home, he explains to her why he hates her now and she realizes he staged the situation with Sally to break up with her.
She goes to the USA to treat her pelvic inflammatory disease and he tells her he wants her to go away. he doesn't tell her it's because she terrorizes him.
He sends her to New York because he's sick of her. But he tells her he'll still keep paying stuff for her. When Janey goes to school she sleeps with as many boys as possible to forget her loneliness and gets pregnant. she gets an abortion and is very cold about it. She is very analytical about the process and the light it sheds on modern women. She talks about how she is so desperate for love and is willing to sleep as much as she needs despite the risk of pregnancy and the pain of it. She describes drugs, pain of second illegal abortion, and how she ends up stealing and wrecking stores. She takes up residence in the hotel where her father and Sally are staying, and she lets men abuse her sexually and physically. She knows how far she's fallen. Then she works in a hippy bakery where she mentions how money is the omnipresent fact of American life/ aside of transaction in a bakery where customers are obnoxious and claim salespeople don't care for them. The salespeople seem to find their job boring. She is rebuked by a customer that she is acting like a hypocrite by not enjoying the job, and she alienates everyone around her. Her father stops sending her money and she meets Tommy who only wants to use her. She loves him though and states loving him turns her back to crime. They kidnap children, wreak havoc in every way possible, very violently. The sex gets out of control. Episode in rock club where there's pandemonium and then Sally is there, acting dirty. There is a car accident and everyone dies except for Janey and Monkey.
Aside with bear and beaver and monster. Ironically the monster is scared of the bear and he successfully avoids bear the first time. In bear's second attempt to come in, there is an interesting point mentioned by the monster when he thinks the bear is a bill collector; mentions injustice of society and profiteering people. The monster's pet Fritzy is caught by the bear and she bargains her way to freedom in exchange for the house. The ploy works, but the bear doesn't end up in the house.He turns into an elephant. The bear has visions of blackness, of people who have failed in some way in society. He makes a song about life and not caring about the world and its troubles.
Then the story goes back to Janey and the people in the area; all kinds of people and how they regard each other. Janey mentions in her diary how she is sleeping with this 80 year old writer and how their sex is violent. She wants sex yet she doesn't know what she really wants. At one point two hoods break into her apartment and beat her and carry her off to become a whore.
Mr. Linker talks about how a healthy body leads to a healthy mind; reference back to history. To him, culture comes from disease; poverty is beneficial and detrimental to the human race. He is Persian and became a lobotomist, ironic, considering he's brainwashing Janey to be a whore. Janey talks in her diary about the messed up society she lives in; she references Hawthorne's A Scarlet Letter and how wildness and non conventional women are cast away by society. Janey mentions how she wanted to be a good woman like Hester Prynne, but her father cast her off, just like Hester was cast away. Janey mentions how teaching is intellectual but terrible at the same time, and how people who scream the most at outcasts are immoral themselves.
Then we go to Persian poems Janey invents of herself and offers very interesting cut ups of her life, of the Persian city, of the prison she's in. Through vocabulary words, through verbs and adverbs she describes herself, her body, and how people see her.
Janey goes back to talking about Hester in The Scarlet Letter and her child Pearl; how the child is a social outcast because she's wild and doesn't stick to the physical and psychic roads of society. She mentions the people who keep those roads intact, how being a couple automatically make you respected, how the world is hell. The end finishes with a plea to a person she badly wants, she doesn't know how to satisfy and who left her hanging. No doubt she's talking about her father.
William Burroughs - The Cut up Method
method in which the surrealists used computer generated poems in composition; many examples through the years where authors have used different computer generating methods to produce text, then was later edited by a human hand.
Tristan Tzara first introduced the idea by proposing to do poem on the spot by pulling words from a hat (1920s)
Minutes to Go done by Brion Gysin with cut up journal articles. Argues that any art is spontaneity, and cut ups are the very symbols of spontaneity. Cut ups allow poems to be accessible to anyone. poems can be made 'alive' again with cut ups.Argues also that writing is in fact cut ups, like any art: cut ups of ideas, words...
Christina Miletti - Violent Acts, Volatile Words, Kathy Acker's Terrorist Aesthetics
culture of terrorism demonstrated by Stockhausen ; terrorism is related to art.... Acker uses terrorist prose style in her work. her power lies in the language and how it's used. she uses tactics of guerilla warfare in her language in order to change concepts in society. Acker plagiarizes and embodies the concept of literary terrorism; she considers the rational mind has caused many shockwaves in the course of history and so she wants to challenge it. the very term terrorism has changed in our culture: it used to mean analyzing the Western world with different eyes; since 9/11 it means violence and intolerance to the Western world. she uses power, language and sexuality in order to make a statement. her bombs in literature consist in spurring subjects to action. Terrorism is a term used to protect as well as disenfranchise. Acker loves exploring fluid definition of terrorism: who it used against, how it's used, what the goal is.... in her works she examines different goals. She uses society biases (particularly Arabs linked to terrorism) to twist and break them in her literary challenges. Her prose is performative. she views the reader as a desirer and her language must be visceral in order to overcome clutter of grammar, syntax, and patriarchal influence of writing. she uses concept of theater of cruelty in order to aggressively interact with the reader. "stupid writing" is a terrorist form of writing in order to connect with reader on basic level. she explores link between prohibition and power; like sex and how it's exploited through its taboo-ness. Acker plays with gender; she considers gender to be a purely biological thing; she even subverts biology by using characters as 'constructs' or cyborgs. the issue of whether the shock of Acker's texts will stop working on the reader is not an issue: it will prove that she succeeded. but due to society's prohibitive nature, it is highly unlikely Acker's works will stop disturbing on some levels.
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