Jack Skelley's The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker

A book review

Jack Skelley is a missing link of a small but important literary scene of Los Angeles. Of the characters in the Beyond Baroque/Venice scene of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, he’s one of the few that is still active in the current Los Angeles arts world. His new collection, The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker, recently published by Semiotext(e), compiles his writing that previously appeared as small press chapbooks. But even as a book nerd and someone endlessly fascinated with the spoken word scene that inspired me to write, I didn’t know about him until recently.

The cast of Fear of Kathy Acker—the play! Image by Elle Reck.

I picked up The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker from a table at a book fair. Talking about what Kathy Acker means to me would take another entire essay, but, in short, I’m more fascinated with her life and a reader of her interviews than I am a reader of her actual work. I’ve studied and been influenced by her approach to creativity much more than I have been moved by any of her writing. So when I saw the title of the book, I picked it up right away, looking for first-hand insight about her.

Right away, we find out the book isn’t about Kathy Acker at all. In the author’s preface, Skelley states that she doesn’t appear in the text nor had he ever met her, although he did get a postcard from her. Her importance was that “her vastly funny, scary, sexy portals to expression opened at a susceptible period.” Amy Gerstler, in the introduction, talks about how Skelley took her plagiaristic crafting one step further by creating the title as a satire of one of her own titles.

The Beyond Baroque scene wasn’t big enough to be a “movement,” but it was definitely a scene. Names like Dennis Cooper, David Trinidad, Wanda Coleman, Michele T. Clinton, and Exene Cervenka are still dropped when the history of the building is discussed. But they are no longer participating nor performing. Skelley’s presence in the currently Los Angeles scene is the last connection to this special time.

The opening prose reads like the opening pages of Less Than Zero but without the self-pitying obsessiveness. The timeline doesn’t work out that one was influenced by the other, but the similarity in point-of-view is unmistakable. Skelley’s first person narrator is closer to Bukowski’s alter ego, Hank Chinaski, than Bret Easton Ellis’ Clay; his first conflict is that he can’t get into his office to go to work because Marie Osmond and William Shatner are filming a scene in it. While this is believable, Skelley bends the reality of the book so that the two actors were literally fucking on his desk and leaves without cleaning up after themselves. Immediately, the reader is thrust into a tawdry roman à clef that reminds us of Michael Tolkin’s The Player, had that novel been written in installments for Screw magazine.

It's impossible to narrow down Skelley’s approach to one school of literature, but it’s noteworthy that he is a major influence on the current school of autofiction. From the language used, it’s easy to classify it as transgressive—there’s a quick scene in which John Wayne has anal sex with pre-fame Burt Reynolds whom Wayne kept as a pet—but the other transgressive writers lack the sense of humor that is in every paragraph of Skelley’s writing; it’s all written as a joke, something to make you laugh, like a friend telling you a story that you know is either embellished or completely fabricated, but you don’t care because the story is so much fun. It’s closest in tone to some of the underground comix work of Robert Crumb, in those panels when Mr. Natural or Fritz the Cat got sexually aroused and acted out, but can we compare prose to comic storytelling? Skelley’s work is adored by the Millennial/Z literary crowd— Siena Foster-Soltis adapted this book into a play of the same name¹ which ran three nights at the Illusion Magic Lounge in Santa Monica—who thrive on autofiction.

Autofiction has become so pervasive that it’s difficult to distinguish fiction from memoir in the work of most young writers who are not writing in a genre. One has to guess that whatever’s happening to the narrator of a contemporary novel happened to the author as well—few are taking the license given to us under the guise of the word “fiction” to actually make things up. In this area, Jack stands out for giving us a world we know is real, with characters both real and created whom we know well (think Samantha Stevens from Bewitched as well as Lydia Lunch) but populating it with unreal acts. We can exist in a real Los Angeles with him, but also fantasize with him and his vivid imagination.

The difficulty in this work is imagining how it was received almost forty years ago, read at the Anti-Club on Melrose while opening for Sonic Youth. The environment in which it was first portrayed is as gone as landlines and fax machines, but yet the work remains. The writing predates the big box bookstores, which have come and gone, was birthed in the age of Waldenbooks and B. Dalton-type mall bookstores. The writing jumps off the page now, six presidents later, as kind of a Nathaniel West-meets-The Larry Sanders Show novel.

1. Check out Elle Reck’s website for an awesome animation made for the play.