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Kathy Acker, My Mother
By Peter Acker (Peer Press; 617 pages; $45.00) |
Kathy Acker's been trashing her poor father for almost
half a century now, so it's only fitting that a bastard
son should turn up to carry on the family tradition and
trash the fuck out of his mother.
And Peter Acker, doesn't waste any time, beginning the
preface with "My whining, career-obsessed, cunt of a
mother..." and continuing on with tales of abuse and
abandonment, exploitation and psychological
manipulation.
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cker describes, in excruciating detail, the perverse
sexual acts his mother made him perform for the
entertainment and amusement of the endless stream of
lowlife strangers she picked up daily on the street.
Of course, those are just the stories. But what's more telling is Acker's exposure of the underlying architecture of a reality his mother was only a symptom of. In the epilogue, Acker talks about trying to understand a short stretch of continuum defined by Gore Vidal at one end, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec at the other. This piece of continuum is part of a much greater parameter, and exhibits difference along only a few restrictive sub-continuua -- so, overall, the similarities are more striking than the differences, which in turn makes the differences harder to study. In the end, of course, the real subject of this book is reincarnation, and cognitive performance before, during and after reincarnation.
Kathy Acker, My Mother, among other things, will
therefore answer the age-old question about whether,
during astral projection, everything suddenly appears in
wireframe.
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ut the reader should be forewarned -- about halfway
into the book, Acker suddenly forgets his mother and
confesses that both she and he were lying and are really
just nice upper middle class kids from Westchester that
just happened to luck into lots of trust fund money they
could rail against the source of. After that, the
remaining 250 pages of the book are blank.
Despite that, or maybe because of it, suddenly you can't escape the notion that there has to be terrorism and there has to be genetic defects of all kinds, otherwise the species would die out.
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