To conclude our month-long excavation of radical feminist cinema and art, WRITE BRAIN TV’s ever-expanding Radical Library adds another dangerous and experimental gem to it’s collection; transgressive avant-gardist Kathy Acker’s double-novella Rip-off Red, Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America.

Born in NYC mid-to-late 1940s (birth year is disputed), Acker was raised by her overbearing mother and a series of step-father figures after her father abandoned the family prior to her birth. Her grandparents were political refugees from Germany before WW1, fleeing rising nationalism, which heavily informed Acker’s later anti-Fascist and anti-patriarchal writings.

Acker studied Classics at Brandeis and continued her education at University of California, San Diego before returning to NYC for graduate school, where she paid her way by working odd jobs that included secretary, stripper, and porn actress while starting her literary career in the underground scene in East Village. Acker married twice in this span, and carried out a series of affairs while bouncing back-and-forth between New York and California. This dissipated, fractured lifestyle would directly influence her work, even adopting William S. Burroughs cut-up technique.

A postmodern punk rooted in the Classical Western canon, Acker’s scandalous and bohemian writing style was already well-developed when she wrote these then-unpublished manuscripts in the 1970s, utilizing her patented staccato writing style to deconstruct Capitalist patriarchy and puritanical social norms. Rip-off Red is a Chandler-esque punk-noir detective story about a girl in NY intermixing lurid sex with political musings, wondrously juxtaposed with Burning of America, a visceral dystopian prose-poem with Socialist underpinnings.