Tag Archives: Kathy Acker

Arthur Machen’s “Meditations of a Tavern”

Posted on July 29, 2019 by Lee

In Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams, Lucian Taylor is a struggling writer prone to daydreaming. He deliberately seeks out obscure books, to learn the most useless knowledge he can find. He is sick of modern society and its day-to-day … Continue reading →

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Kathy Acker, Peter Greenaway, and Storytelling

Posted on June 10, 2019 by Lee

Hollywood films and popular novels are made with certain audience expectations in mind. They have a story to tell, and they are structured so that this story is easy to follow and understand. Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 – … Continue reading →

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Labyrinths

Posted on May 30, 2019 by Lee

A labyrinth is a structure from which you cannot escape. Kathy Acker writes about the labyrinth, and how it was built to hide away the Minotaur, the illicit offspring of King Minos’s wife. The King didn’t want people to know … Continue reading →

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Kathy Acker and Postmodernism

Posted on April 15, 2019 by Lee

Though Kathy Acker doubts her ability to write essays, she nevertheless tackles the classical questions like any other essayist. In her short essay on postmodernism, she gives an answer to the question “What is art?” Her answer is that art … Continue reading →

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“This is realism”: Lessons from Poetry

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Lee

Langdon Hammer describes the stone that Yeats’s fisherman sits on (in the poem “The Fisherman”) as “resistant” and “non-ideal, that is, real”. This equation of “non-ideal” with its common meaning of “imperfect” (as in “my new flat isn’t ideal…”), while … Continue reading →

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Kathy Acker on William Burroughs

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Lee

As I prepare to talk about William S Burroughs at the end of the month, I’ve been re-reading Kathy Acker’s essay “William Burroughs’s Realism”. You can find her essay in Bodies of Work (Serpent’s Tail, 1997). The following is a … Continue reading →

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