I’m sure there’s an avant garde universe where this makes sense but I definitely don’t live there. ( )

Blood and guts in high school is quite a little, disgusting novel, but still recognizable as outstanding. It irritates and shocks like the novels of William Burroughs.

Kathy Acker (1947 - 1997) is not exactly a new kid on the block, and while she did not belong to the Beat Generation, she was influenced by them. Her style is raucious, she writes about incest, drugs and free sexuality. Blood and guts in high school is an experimental novel that includes maps, pornographic drawings, a handwritten Persian dictionary, and irregular typography and layout.

Taken at face value, Blood and guts in high school (1984) is a novel about a girl's life at high school. Whether the novel is realistic or visionary, there are plenty of movies, books and music, such as Pink Floyd's 1979 rock opera The Wall, that depict the ugly inside of schools, and while Janey may not be the average high school kid, regretfully, there probably are kids like her, or worse. The fact that "bourgeois" readers may not like it, does not mean that Janey is a quite possible, not even very extraordinary student. Although fring, or unusual, her interests, obsessions and irritations (with teachers) is just the stuff of adolescence and life at high school. We just barely miss a white rat on her shoulder.

Although the mid-1980s are now nearly half a century behind us, no clear recognizable literary movement has been identified as typical for that period. Generally, much writing of that period is characterised as "postmodern", and so is the work of Kathy Acker.

Blood and guts in high school was banned in Germany. ( )

Often disgusting, often desolate. I appreciate just how defiant of convention this book is. Defiance is perhaps its deepest, most pervasive quality—the fast curtness and defiance of the narration, contrasted with Janey’s hopeless straits, her captivity.
Just what is this book out to prove? What do we gain from having read it? A disfiguring, faithless vision of society, men and women. There is some reality in it, something chimes with recognition despite the crazed intensity and bleakness of the plot. We gain the edge of daring insight, is it, the edge of an insight that does not look away.
The pictorial sections are refreshing and creative. I am grateful for them. ( )

The bits I understood were undeniably powerful. The bits I didn’t were wonderfully bewildering. ( )

I 1st heard about Acker thru my friend Charlie Brohawn in the 1970s. He was always a good source of info & he was excited about Acker because he'd heard that she made plagiarism a literary philosophy. When I finally got around to reading this bk many yrs later, I hated it. To make matters worse, it was published by Grove Press - one of my favorites. My recommendation? Don't waste yr time w/ this. Read the people that she rips off instead - esp Jean Genet. She's just a parasite. Then again, that's pretty harsh. Maybe someday I'll read something else by her & revise my opinion. ( )