Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula

Portrait of an Eye #1

by Kathy Acker

Black Tarantula is a pseudonym for Kathy Acker.

Genres: Fiction, Surreal, Novels

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Born of German-Jewish stock, Kathy Acker was brought up by her mother and stepfather (her natural father left her mother before Kathy was born) in a prosperous district of NY. At 18, she left home and worked as a stripper. Her involvement in the sex industry helped to make her a hit on the NY art scene, and she was photographed by the newly fashionable Robert Mapplethorpe. Preferring to be known simply as 'Acker' (the name she took from her first husband Robert, and which she continued to use even after a short-lived second marriage to composer Peter Gordon), she moved to London in the mid-eighties and stayed in Britain for five years.

Acker's writing is as difficult to classify into any particular genre as she herself was. She writes fluidly, operating in the borderlands and junkyards of human experience. Her work is experimental, playful, and provocative, engagingly alienating, narratively non sequitur.

Reviews

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although she wrote many fine novels I don't think Acker ever quite matched this one for raw power. This is the Iggy Pop of trangressive literature, maybe my favorite howl from the edges of what we in the Western world have been allowed to say. Nothing quite matches it for directness. It's marked by a vivid lack of style that created a whole new idea of style, what I think Beckett hoped to acheive by writing in French--to say the unsayable, the unspeakable, some truth beyond all of our cultural baggage, along the lines of Trocchi's Cain's Book or Selby's best work in content but it's still somehow less literary, less shackled to literary tradition--perversely by actually writing through other writers' texts rather than slyly incorporating them through allusion and imitation. This novel is a triumph of individuality through the utter usurpation of Western literature. It's even stronger than Henry Miller's spit in the face of literature. It's the Mongol invasion of Europe of novels. It takes no prisoners. It just is. And there's nothing you can do to stop it.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why am I only now getting around to reading Kathy Acker? I've known I needed to for ages, but it took M reading bits of Blood and Guts in Highschool aloud to nudge me into grabbing this. The point where Anne Quin and Dennis Cooper meet, sort of: cut-up stream-of-consciousness, words almost spilling off the page in urgent derangement of lit forms, post-modern elegance via porno, disorienting appropriated stories, piercing confessional vulnerability or is it. Sex and murder oozing from every pore in the binding.

That said, this is either not entirely successful, or entirely successful in form-breaking goals that don't necessarily make for the smoothest reading. I love the "some lives of murderesses" chapters at the beginning, but as this disintegrates further and further (paralleling psychological fragmentation, presumably, so I see how it works, I think, but still:) it begins to deny any attempts at reading as coherent narrative, or really as incoherent narrative, digests into simple bits: words, thoughts, sensations, each existing alone or in at most a scene. It's a pretty thrilling first-published novel, but one that is most thrilling in its eye to the future, to the further books on the horizon.

[Imogen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fuuuuuuck yes! Apparently, I bought a beat up old cheap & stainy copy of this a few years ago, but I just refound it again right before we moved across the country. I wrote a lot about it in my book reviews column for Aorta issue four, so I don't super feel like getting into it again, but the short version is that Kathy Acker's superimposition technique- here she tells the stories of some murderesses in history at the same time that she tells her own autobiographical stories, as well as a bunch of porn- is as startling and makes me feel as excited here in her early work as it is in her later/eighties work like Great Expectations, even if here it's a little more ramshackle and blunt. I cannot say enough good things about Kathy Acker. God damn.

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The psychiatrist tells me I've hearing delusions; I cut off my hair; I'm Joan of Arc. I lead soldiers in drag and kill everyone."

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read as a part of the Portrait of an Eye collection. It's like a better version of her previous novel, Rip-Off Red. Neither are astounding but they both have some good traits to them. This one elaborates on her desire to explore her own self through the mind or eye of other authors. She explores her sexuality and creative mind while simultaneously inhabiting her memories and what she imagines these authors to believe or think like. Which kind of foreshadows what I know her later output will do which is to mimic the styles and themes of other authors. This one was enjoyable, though not altogether great, but it shows the mind of someone who has a lot of potential so I'm excited to keep reading Acker.

[Manny Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trying to keep up with the logic of this work gave me an adrenaline rush. I love the use of found text combined with the authors own words. This book introduced me to the concept of performative reading which excites me as a practice. Truly remarkable.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kathy Acker's fiction is so radically vital that I cannot imagine the American literary landscape without it. The first novel of hers that I read, Blood and Guts in High School, struck me as unique, bizarre, and totally puzzling; at some point I'll definitely revisit it. Recently I read the first novel she ever published, 1975's The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula, which is currently available in the three-novel omnibus Portrait of An Eye.

Maybe BAGIHS conditioned me for a second go-round with Acker's raw, profane, deeply personal style, or maybe it was the fact that TCLOTBTBTBT features chapter headings outlining what is to follow (i.e. "i move to san franscisco. i begin to copy my favorite pornography books and become the main person in each of them.'), but either way I found myself getting sucked deeper and deeper into the text of her debut novel. There's a definite sense of vertigo as Acker jumps from one point of view/formal device/prose style/metafictional conceit to another which, if you give yourself over to it, leads way to a delirious unpredictability; it feels like anything can happen on the page. In TCLOTBTBTBT 'autobiographical' scenes merge with scenes from the point of view of, for example, Moll Cutpurse, William Blake, and the Marquis de Sade as well as scenes 'sampled' from a variety of fiction and nonfiction texts, all channeled through a free-flowing stream of consciousness. It's as if Acker crammed an entire shelf of books into one short but extremely dense text. Indeed the 'cut-up' technique used by William S. Burroughs, and his fiction in general, is one of the few clear antecedents to Acker's work. You could also say that Burroughs paved the way for her in that the publication of Naked Lunch in 1959, and the subsequent court cases surrounding the novel in the 60s, forever ended any attempts to censor literary works through obscenity laws in the United States. But even if that never happened, I have no doubt that Acker would have still been writing like this, regardless of legality. And despite her cult status I still think that she tends to be overlooked as one of the most important postmodern/metafictional innovators in American literature. She probably wouldn't have it any other way, though: her fiction is feminist, anti-authoritarian, avant-garde yet street-level, and full of filth and sex. In other words, she was an uncompromising writer.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Acker's fiction is her depiction of sexuality. You could say that she did for female sexuality what Burroughs and Henry Miller did for male sexuality, discarding grammar and 'tastefulness' and pushing language to the breaking point to capture the mental and physical sensations of sex:

"...the nerves roll in cycles in preconceived courses through my body faster and faster in hunger and hunger rolls until my flesh disintegrates and turns in on itself. Like a devouring spider."

TCLOTBTBTBT is full of great, often startling lines in a variety of styles on a variety of topics. Acker on her birth:

"She runs to the toilet because she thinks she has to shit; I come out."

Acker on the conditions in the Columbia Presbyterian clinic in New York City (presumably in the 60s or early 70s):

"...nurse wheels figure wrapped in white mummy cloth blood tube tied to one mummy cloth arm over floor person vacuuming asks if he should move vacuum "no" bump bump over vacuum cords mummy jiggles blood and needle in mummy arm jiggles almost out of arm nurse changes his mind wheels cart back again corpse jumps up and down all this done three times..."

Acker on nature:

"...thin patterns of branches and leaves placed against thinner patterns of leaves and fur, fur against wood, leaves against leaves, huge red blossoms separated by trees and stones..."

And sometimes the words just flow like a dream, or nightmare:

"I'm wandering in hell the streets stink of shit I want to be be able keep doing new and different actions I can't find how, the dogs eat the limbs of living humans and howl."

I could keep pulling rough-cut gems like these from this book all day but you're gonna have to read it on your own to feel the full impact of Kathy Acker's searing vision.

[[ashes] · Rating 3 out of 5]

It read like a fever dream and it wouldn’t surprise me if it took one to create it. This work of Acker feels uncompromised and that’s a good thing. In a way it was reminiscent of something from the Beat generation, especially bizarre works such as Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (if I remember it correctly), but Acker doesn’t follow their script. The way the author weaves the accounts together, where both fiction and reality, but also past and present play active roles demands attention, but the pay-off is worth it.

[Chrétien Breukers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schrijven, zó, dat je elk woord moet lezen, anders raak je de draad kwijt. Dat doet Kathy Acker. Ze is en blijft een voorbeeld.

[Filipe Siqueira · Rating 3 out of 5]

Agradavelmente tresloucado, mas infelizmente um pouco pulverizado demais, um exercício linguístico interessante

[Friday]

I don't think I can rate this.