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Avant-garde novelist Kathy Acker hung out in New York with the FLUXUS group and underground filmmakers in the '60s; studied under radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse and was part of the early punk rock scene which gave way to her involvement with Robert Mapplethorpe - who photographed her memorably - in the early eighties. She worked as a dancer and stripper and self-published her work until she achieved fame and notoriety with the 1984 publication in the UK of Blood and Guts in High School. Recently she lived mainly in London and Paris, travelling with her extensive collection of literature and motorbikes.
Acker wrote about sex and death, power and perversion, psychology and scatology. Over the past two decades she has produced a dense, illuminating and challenging body of work, whose sexually explicit language, multiple personas, plagiarism and sheer linguistic inventiveness embody a subversive sensibility. She channelled William Burroughs, Bataille and the Marquis de Sade; jacked into the viscera of Lacan, Cixous, Foucault and Delueze, and made sport with the goblets of blood, guts, sweat, shit and come that she found hanging from the clean lines of argument. Perhaps more than anything else, Kathy was a true sexual libertine, both as a writer and in bed. She viewed sex as a fundamental expression of everyday life and took it entirely for granted. Her body became a work of art in itself, through weight training and adornment with tattoos and piercings. After being diagnosed with breast cancer she refused chemotherapy and underwent a double masectomy.
Kathy Acker died of cancer aged 53 in November of 1997. Read her worlc and taste her dreams.
"I won't kiss but I get off on sucking the prick of a man whom I detest. Because I'm penetrating myself. When I was sucking the click's prick, I was able to go beyond myself. At the same time, I was frightened: I would lose control and bite the cock too hard, which wouldn't be a bad thing, but, on the other hand, cops are human. Sucking this hot cock made my own despair and nothingness or my death apparent to me."
