These punks and posers like to pretend they are some kind of subversives they think they are fighting the dominating hierarchy of ruthless Hollywood tycoons. Instead, Skelley uses “the self” as an experiment in falling-leaf susceptibility, deploying his terminal insignificance as a perpetual shadow of “those stupid trendy punks” and offering a rare real-time critique of what many fluff as authentic yesterdays:Īll they ever do is take drugs and put on makeup and practice their pouts in their greasy Hollywood bathroom mirrors. In 1982, transgressive godfather Dennis Cooper released Skelley’s avant-prose-poetry collection Monsters on his Little Caesar imprint, and while this cements him as Cooper’s contemporary, Skelley’s brand of transgression bespeaks the TV-fried, wide-eyed wonder of a disappointed utopian-a rock-kicking, innocent angst that sets him apart not only from Cooper but also from today’s younger Cooper devotees, some of whose debauched confessionals come across as predictable and self-indulgent.
And while his jagged, repetitive (loopy?) style seems akin to modern alt-fiction like Marston Hefner’s High School Romance (2022), FOKA is best ingested as a time-capsule document rather than as one of these “newer narrative” novellas, its inclusion of event flyers and an index of “character” bios offering an intimate scrapbook element. It was a nascent and fertile moment when Kathy, at the peak of her powers, disrupted me, erupted in me.” After hearing the chapbook discussed on the radio in the 1980s, Acker sent Skelley a postcard that would become a crowning endorsement of the work: “espite my dislike of seeing my own name I think you’re a good writer Never what’s expected,” she wrote.Ībout one-fourth of FOKA’s 135 pages consists of commentary by poet Amy Gerstler, author/critic Sabrina Tarasoff, and Skelley himself, taking the rare opportunity to fully contextualize his work. Yet Skelley pays substantial tribute to Acker in his introduction, pointing to his own literary puberty in which she was a catalyst: “er vastly funny, scary, sexy portals to expression opened at a susceptible period. One of the strangest, most audacious winks Fear of Kathy Acker bestows is the fact that its contents have little to do with her. odyssey, capturing a time and place that could never happen again through the eyes of a weirdo among weirdos, long before our gentrified dystopias attempted to preserve their endangered weirdness. Before its present suffusion into literary fiction.” Though Skelley believes autofiction “is a misnomer”-that “all fiction is rooted in autobiography”-the recent resurgence of autofiction (or what he called the “Rise of The Literary Thrill-Seeking Industrial Complex”) might owe a buried debt to Skelley’s rambling L.A. Before Chris Kraus’s stunningly fucked-up and confounding I Love Dick. “From today’s vantage I can see now that FOKA snapshot ‘autofiction’ in its genesis,” he says.
Now that he’s “approaching geezerhood,” Skelley calls the time gap “freakish,” wondering what comparisons exist for other lost-and-found novels.īut waiting is often fermenting-even four decades may prove that timing is everything. You can imagine the jolt I felt to learn that after nearly four decades this book will finally be published.
“But in 2020, there was an explosion of writing and publishing, and the resurrection of FOKA epitomizes this.
#Lil peep rare photos full#
“All my life I have never not been writing,” he says, noting years full of lower-key fiction parceling and nonfiction. AUTHOR/POET/MUSICIAN/CULTURAL CRITIC Jack Skelley “can’t explain why” The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker took so long to be properly released “except to say that nature and fate conspire against art.” Skelley recently joked that he’s been staging “THEE GREATEST COMEBACK IN THE HISTORY OF INDIE LIT!” And he’s not wrong, given the almost four-decade gap between his first book, Monsters (1982), and his recent deluge: Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (2021), Interstellar Theme Park (2022), and now The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (2023), which originally appeared in two long out-of-print chapbooks in 1984–85.
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