TRANSGRESS TRANSGRESS

I fucking LOVE Kathy Acker.

I remember saying to a friend and fellow classmate that she writes like an angry vagina after reading her book Blood and Guts in High School for my Contemporary Feminist Literature class this past spring quarter. Acker is known to write the way a pornstar-meets-postmodern-writer-meets-graphic-artist-meets-raging-sad-feminist would. She tracks mud and menstrual blood all over the pedestal of "good literature".

Now I'm reading Pussy King of the Pirates and my opinion hasn't really changed. I don't think. But perhaps I just need more thinking and a few more misinterpreted readings and more thinking to follow that. Still the same blaring neon-lit confusion of sexualities and wanting space to survive.

Interestingly enough, I could never really casually flip through the pages of Blood and Guts in High School because of the rough-sketch-cartoonish drawings of vaginas, penises, couples locked in some erotic fantasy of a pose, etc. (Who said that good literature can't have freaky random porn drawings?) THIS TIME . . . I'm a little embarrassed to be flipping through a book that has the title "Pussy King of the Pirates". "Pussy" and "Pirates" don't exactly signal "good literature" in my head. It's all Kathy Acker writing her transgressive self again.

Acker always makes me think that I have to break down my walls even more and get comfortable with the dirty stuff. Kapil makes me feel as though its ok to be a monster. Monsters can be dirty. And goddesses can be monstrous. I'll be a dirty, monstrous goddess.

I officially have a few favorite quotes from this book:

-"We wondered at our bodies."
-"I stood on the edge of a new world."
-"Finally free of johns, the whores, now alone, spewed out bits of ink, words in ink, sexual or filthy words, words that were formed by the scars and wounds, especially those of sexual abuse, those out of childhood. All the women bore their wounds as childhoods."
-"She decided that she must be a victim, though she had never before thought she was was a victim, a victim of her society's definition of women her age. These women, no longer children, according to the society were no longer sexually desirable to men, except perhaps as prostitutes; more important, according to her society they no longer possessed sexuality."
-". . . if I didn't throw away the old blood, something dreadful, like rot or disease, was going to touch my body."

Note: I secretly don't understand why the world fears (and hates) feminists. There is absolutely nothing wrong with strong women, and many people like strong women more than they'd admit. "Feminist" is just a name, an official word for strong women who love the strong part. Not all feminists are angry. Not all feminists hate all things feminine. So why all the hate? Is it just from a lack of misunderstanding and a lack of desire TO understand?