WORKS BY KATHY ACKER
PUBLISHED BY GROVE PRESS
Blood and Guts in High School
Don Quixote
Empire of the Senseless
Great Expectations
In Memoriam to Identity
Literal Madness
My Mother: Demonology
Portrait of an Eye
Pussy, King of the Pirates
Rip-off Red, Girl Detective
Essential Acker
Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus
BLOOD AND GUTS IN HIGH SCHOOL
Copyright © 1978 by Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus
Cover design by Becca Fox Design
Cover photograph © Michel Delsol
Introduction Copyright © 2017 by Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus
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ANNIVERSARY EDITION
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: September 1984
This Grove Atlantic edition: November 2017
ISBN 978-0-8021-2762-4
eISBN 978-0-8021-4655-7
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
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Contents
The Scorpions
How spring came to the land of snow and icicles
Janey becomes a woman
The mysterious Mr Linker
A book report
Translating
Cancer
A journey to the end of the night
Tangier
In Egypt, the end
A second of time
So the doves
The Journey
The World
Kathy Acker was the most intentional of writers, but paradoxically, while Blood and Guts propelled her mid-1980s commercial breakthrough, it was her least intended work. She composed Blood and Guts in fragments, in her notebooks and as drawings, over five years that began when she was twenty-six years old and living with the composer Peter Gordon in Solana Beach in 1973. Solana Beach was a sleepy California beach town fourteen miles north of UC San Diego in La Jolla. She’d fled New York for California after meeting Gordon on a cross-country ride share road trip in the summer of 1972. It was there, while happily ensconced in Gordon’s two-bedroom upstairs bungalow apartment near the beach, that she composed the dream maps placed among the fairy tales in the chapter titled “How spring came to the land of snow and icicles.” The fairy tales themselves were written three years later, while she and Gordon were living on E. 5th Street in New York.
Dreams cause the vision world to break loose our consciousness, Acker writes in Blood and Guts. And also: Dear dreams, you are the only thing that matter. She’d known, since beginning her long, self-willed apprenticeship as a writer when she was twenty-three years old, that dreams, and their disorder, would be central to her writing process. Working on her first serial novel, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, in Solana Beach in 1973, she attempted to regain a childhood consciousness, pushing herself towards a point of self-dissolution through sex and hallucinogenic drugs. The dream maps, which weren’t published in that book, record her dream-time forays across regions with names like The Plains, The Village, and The Childhood Land, where she discovers lions, wolves, trees, huts, and streets. “My mom,” Gordon recalls, “was a psychologist, and found them fascinating. Kathy gave her a large drawing that my mom had framed. Later, Kathy took the maps back, to include in Blood and Guts.”
Blood and Guts opens with a hilarious, hyperbolized transcription of the tormented break-up conversations between the protagonist Janey Smith and a Father who she regards as her “boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement and father.” These pages—the last to be composed—were written in the wake of her and Gordon’s separation in September 1978: “Mr. Smith was trying to get rid of Janey so he could spend all his time with Sally, a twenty-one year old