The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker by Jack Skelley, Semiotex(e)
Introduction by Amy Gerstler and Afterword by Sabrina Tarasoff
I have known Jack Skelley’s Fear of Kathy Acker for decades but never read it until Semiotext(e) published The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker, primarily due to bad timing that I could never find the original Illuminati Press edition. I have seen it over people’s houses, and once in a while, I would see it in a bookshop, but it seems the customer in front of me picked it up. So it took me 38 years to finally obtain this literary beast and to read it. I’m very much a citizen of Los Angeles, and I know this city well, especially in the early 1980s, and this book captures the location of Angels and its cultural high (and low) spots. If nothing else, it’s an incredible and reliable snapshot of Los Angeles, being its most Los Angeles. And it is also one of the better books that take place in Los Angeles because it is indeed written by the Son of the Desert.
Jack’s prose reads like a jingle for a Denny’s Restaurant on Sunset Blvd, with its long sentences that can go on forever because it is both hysterical and beautiful at the same time. Ironically I’m reading the entire seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and there is a Proustian touch Skelley has, especially when he writes about Tower Records, nightclubs, and for some odd reason, girls I used to adore in the 1980s. It was a horny era, and Jack captures that sense of youth-love at the height of its blossoming power. It’s nasty and fits aesthetically in that poetic rock n’ roll drinkin’ and getting stoned landscape.
The book also reminds me of Andre Breton’s Nadja, one of my all-time favorite books regarding Paris, and I think The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker is now my favorite Los Angeles book. Nadja deals with Paris seen through the eyes of Breton, including his friends at the time, fellow Surrealists. Like that book, Skelley put his friends in the book and known figures in Los Angeles like Dennis Wilson and the beloved local Baseball figure Vince Scully.
Also, Jack captures the horror of the local DMV office. Anyone here can identify with that hesitancy in going to such a place. This is also, in spirit, very much the world of Beyond Baroque Literary Art Center in Venice. The organization is still rocking, and one of the highlight decades is when Jack, Dennis Cooper, Amy Gerstler, Benjamin Weissman, and Bob Flanagan/Sheree Rose helped contribute a literary vision in Los Angeles at the time. But even that, the city was (and still is) full of poetic energy, which goes with the territory. And along comes this book which, in its feverish prose, brings Jack’s world, which is very much the nature of Los Angeles. An excellent book.
I never fail to learn about something I need to read, see, listen to. Thanks for helping me up my game.
Can’t wait to finally read this book!