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Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective and the Burning Bombing of America
Recently discovered and never before published, these two short novels were written in the early 1970s, at the beginning of Kathy Acker's writing career. Rip-off Red reads as a kind of Raymond Chandler for bad girls, as Acker's typical literary playfulness transforms the genre conventions of detective fiction into a book that is simultaneously a mystery and a personal, raunchy, and politically astute account of life in New York City. The Burning Bombing of America is a dystopian vision of the destruction of America, combining crypto-Socialist class critique with the visceral surreality of the Book of Revelation.
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First published January 1, 2002
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About the author
Kathy Acker
86 books1,166 followersBorn 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.
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.
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December 18, 2020In an interview* conducted over two years (1989-1990) with Semiotext(e) editor Sylvère Lotringer, Kathy Acker says of Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective, the first novel she wrote: 'Very luckily it has never been published.' Well, as so often happens with writers after they’ve shrugged off this mortal coil, someone unearthed Acker’s novel which she purposely did not publish during her lifetime and went ahead and published it. I’m always wary of these posthumously published works that writers intentionally did not publish during their lifetimes. Exceptions can be made for someone like Kafka who published so little during his lifetime and was self-critical to a fault, yet whose unpublished writing was famously rescued from oblivion by his friend and literary executor Max Brod. Writers like Acker—who publish a lot of work during their lives—probably have a very good reason for choosing not to publish certain of their writings. And maybe we should just respect that. Now I will step down from my soapbox...
Rip-Off Red is a work of porn-noir mystery or noir-porn mystery, depending on how you approach it. There are more intricately described sex scenes than there are scenes that advance the mystery narrative, such as it is, which is thin to say the least. The mystery is often left behind to moulder in the corner, until Acker reluctantly picks it up by the tail and drags it out into the murky light again. What is presumably going on here are the cut-ups and maybe even Acker-style 'sampling' that she became known for employing. It’s a disorienting whirlwind of prose that I found kind of frustrating to read, which was probably intentional. But it didn’t make me any more excited to pick up the book. Supposedly the stylistic elements present here prefigure the style of Acker’s later work, although I haven’t read enough of her work in general to comment much on that other than to say parts of it felt familiar based on what I’ve read before. The book is certainly transgressive and at the time she was writing this (early 1970s when in her early 20s), it would have been notable given her gender—Acker was taking up and dismantling William Burroughs’ mantle, smearing it with various bodily fluids and charging blithely forward into her own future. All contemporary writers of so-called transgressive literature are clearly indebted to her, whether they know it or not.
I’m still reading the second piece in this volume, The Burning Bombing of America, but so far I’m finding it more interesting than Rip-Off Red. It reads like a series of frenetic prose poems laced with visceral imagery. It seems like there is again also some cut-up involved, obscuring and subverting the convoluted proto-narrative.
My sense is that Acker completists will likely want to read this, but I’m skeptical of the claim on the back of the book that it’s ‘a perfect introduction to Acker’s oeuvre’ given that she herself dismissed it as not worth publishing.
*Relevant excerpt here.
Rip-Off Red is a work of porn-noir mystery or noir-porn mystery, depending on how you approach it. There are more intricately described sex scenes than there are scenes that advance the mystery narrative, such as it is, which is thin to say the least. The mystery is often left behind to moulder in the corner, until Acker reluctantly picks it up by the tail and drags it out into the murky light again. What is presumably going on here are the cut-ups and maybe even Acker-style 'sampling' that she became known for employing. It’s a disorienting whirlwind of prose that I found kind of frustrating to read, which was probably intentional. But it didn’t make me any more excited to pick up the book. Supposedly the stylistic elements present here prefigure the style of Acker’s later work, although I haven’t read enough of her work in general to comment much on that other than to say parts of it felt familiar based on what I’ve read before. The book is certainly transgressive and at the time she was writing this (early 1970s when in her early 20s), it would have been notable given her gender—Acker was taking up and dismantling William Burroughs’ mantle, smearing it with various bodily fluids and charging blithely forward into her own future. All contemporary writers of so-called transgressive literature are clearly indebted to her, whether they know it or not.
I’m still reading the second piece in this volume, The Burning Bombing of America, but so far I’m finding it more interesting than Rip-Off Red. It reads like a series of frenetic prose poems laced with visceral imagery. It seems like there is again also some cut-up involved, obscuring and subverting the convoluted proto-narrative.
My sense is that Acker completists will likely want to read this, but I’m skeptical of the claim on the back of the book that it’s ‘a perfect introduction to Acker’s oeuvre’ given that she herself dismissed it as not worth publishing.
*Relevant excerpt here.
April 20, 2019
Although I'm sad to be finishing up my re-reading of Ms. Acker's collected works (in reverse order), this was a worthy finale to the project. Here, in her first unpublished novel, are the seeds of what make Acker's later novels so alluring and powerful to me, in the more--and I laugh to say it-- standard and therefore clunky polished form of a slightly traditional format. How an author was able to throw off so much tradition, indeed most of the dead weight of all that the novel form has come to represent to us in the Occident, and actually write in an almost wholly original way--in a whole series of utterly unique novels!--is remarkable.
Here are the detailed description of female sexuality and a series of encounters from the romantic to incest, the toying with genre, the switches of identity and gender, the flashes of autobiography (at least one passage later mined and included in another novel), the dreams, and even a small bit of the political statements of the later, greater novels. Missing primarily are the actual interweaving of and commentary on other, singular works of literature, the more elongated reflections on politics and philosophical/political theory so key to discourse in the 1980s, as well as the courage to utterly disorient a reader at every turn by providing few signposts between the boundaries of these merging and intertwining territoties.
Also Rip-Off Red's relying on the mystery/secret agent formula (it's more or less a redux of the plot of Fleming's Live and Let Die, if I recall correctly) and the novel's actually holding more or less together as a continuous narrative, actually make it markedly less brilliant that Acker's later works wherein she gains the confidence to write in sections and chapters, episodic passages that often have only the barest thematic links, if any link at all. (Yes, we have to consider the possibility that it's their being stuck together by the author that links them, rather than look for the reason why the author may have felt they belonged together--in no other writer is second-guessing authorial intention more fruitless than with Kathy Acker's work, God bless her.
There's also a lot more sex in this early work--as so many reviewers here have noted (and seem a bit scandalized by). Funny, when I was first reading Acker in the mid '80s, as her middle period novels came out one by one, while I sought out and caught up with the earlier, small press gems, I remembered there being a lot of pornographic sex in her work. Reading the novels back through some thirty years on, only this one seemed to have the amount of sex I remembered. Maybe that's me--I'm a lot less curious, titillated, and ashamed about the topic in my fifties than I was in my twenties obviously. But getting over the taboo is both what Acker seems to be trying to do here and elsewhere and what her novels help the reader to do as well, I think. or maybe she just liked it as a topic. (I can't help but undercut my own opinions here, as Acker's prose always does. Point: counter point. As taboo breaking as her writing is, it's also firmly rooted in a certain kind of Socratic, Western rhetorical logic that I cannot shake as I try to express my opinions of her enterprise.)
And, while so many here dismiss this as "mere" pornography, I realize now that reading Acker's female perspective on sex certainly did no harm to this twenty-something's phallocentric sexual experience. Yeah, her work certainly changed the way I thought about sex in a very positive way. I don't think it's taboo breaking because it's pornography--there's plenty of that around--but rather because it's all about female experience and desire, a thing men are trained and very used to ignoring for the most part. Acker's novels forced me to confront the female sexual experience head on (pun, what pun?) intellectually at a time when that mattered in my human relationships. --Who says fiction doesn't help us to live better?
The Burning Bombing of America, on the other hand, is the kind of thing writers looking to create new territories sometimes feel compelled to write but wisely either burn later or put through a paper shredder, as they just look silly later. Sadly, Acker left a copy with a friend. Note to self: collect all stray manuscripts from friends before I die.
Here are the detailed description of female sexuality and a series of encounters from the romantic to incest, the toying with genre, the switches of identity and gender, the flashes of autobiography (at least one passage later mined and included in another novel), the dreams, and even a small bit of the political statements of the later, greater novels. Missing primarily are the actual interweaving of and commentary on other, singular works of literature, the more elongated reflections on politics and philosophical/political theory so key to discourse in the 1980s, as well as the courage to utterly disorient a reader at every turn by providing few signposts between the boundaries of these merging and intertwining territoties.
Also Rip-Off Red's relying on the mystery/secret agent formula (it's more or less a redux of the plot of Fleming's Live and Let Die, if I recall correctly) and the novel's actually holding more or less together as a continuous narrative, actually make it markedly less brilliant that Acker's later works wherein she gains the confidence to write in sections and chapters, episodic passages that often have only the barest thematic links, if any link at all. (Yes, we have to consider the possibility that it's their being stuck together by the author that links them, rather than look for the reason why the author may have felt they belonged together--in no other writer is second-guessing authorial intention more fruitless than with Kathy Acker's work, God bless her.
There's also a lot more sex in this early work--as so many reviewers here have noted (and seem a bit scandalized by). Funny, when I was first reading Acker in the mid '80s, as her middle period novels came out one by one, while I sought out and caught up with the earlier, small press gems, I remembered there being a lot of pornographic sex in her work. Reading the novels back through some thirty years on, only this one seemed to have the amount of sex I remembered. Maybe that's me--I'm a lot less curious, titillated, and ashamed about the topic in my fifties than I was in my twenties obviously. But getting over the taboo is both what Acker seems to be trying to do here and elsewhere and what her novels help the reader to do as well, I think. or maybe she just liked it as a topic. (I can't help but undercut my own opinions here, as Acker's prose always does. Point: counter point. As taboo breaking as her writing is, it's also firmly rooted in a certain kind of Socratic, Western rhetorical logic that I cannot shake as I try to express my opinions of her enterprise.)
And, while so many here dismiss this as "mere" pornography, I realize now that reading Acker's female perspective on sex certainly did no harm to this twenty-something's phallocentric sexual experience. Yeah, her work certainly changed the way I thought about sex in a very positive way. I don't think it's taboo breaking because it's pornography--there's plenty of that around--but rather because it's all about female experience and desire, a thing men are trained and very used to ignoring for the most part. Acker's novels forced me to confront the female sexual experience head on (pun, what pun?) intellectually at a time when that mattered in my human relationships. --Who says fiction doesn't help us to live better?
The Burning Bombing of America, on the other hand, is the kind of thing writers looking to create new territories sometimes feel compelled to write but wisely either burn later or put through a paper shredder, as they just look silly later. Sadly, Acker left a copy with a friend. Note to self: collect all stray manuscripts from friends before I die.
April 11, 2018
Rip-off Red, Girl Detective is formally/ technically interesting but isn’t exactly an easy read. Fragmented and dreamlike, it stops and starts; shifts randomly and unexpectedly, sometimes bringing beauty or shock, but mostly it feels discombobulating.
The prose is also quite clinical which enhances a sense of distance and disconnect. A friend described her writing like someone standing banging a dustbin lid with a stick, which is apt- it has a raw power and it’s crude and insistent.
The cut- up mode incorporating biographical details, current affairs and “found “ texts, including porn and crime fiction foregrounds a vivid female protagonist and world view - this is the strength of the work.
The cut- up technique of Burning Bombing of America takes a different form and is more readable...and the writing is, in places, very beautiful.
The writing is predominantly based on the personal, interspersed with the sexual, late 70’s current affairs, lists of flowers and fruit, evoking “an ideal” and science fiction, amongst others.
It is evocative, but for me there is little overall sense of story/ stories....it reminds me of Jackson Pollock’s Lavender mist....things come in and out of focus, some abstract, some recognisable, some clear, some not.
In both texts, the textual forms are interesting but the content dissolute... form dominates.
As a Post-structuralist Feminist writer (coming after William Burroughs) Acker aims to dismantle patriarchal systems (of writing and thought) to forge new identities and systems of definition.
And this she does successfully. The read rewards on conceptual levels.
The prose is also quite clinical which enhances a sense of distance and disconnect. A friend described her writing like someone standing banging a dustbin lid with a stick, which is apt- it has a raw power and it’s crude and insistent.
The cut- up mode incorporating biographical details, current affairs and “found “ texts, including porn and crime fiction foregrounds a vivid female protagonist and world view - this is the strength of the work.
The cut- up technique of Burning Bombing of America takes a different form and is more readable...and the writing is, in places, very beautiful.
The writing is predominantly based on the personal, interspersed with the sexual, late 70’s current affairs, lists of flowers and fruit, evoking “an ideal” and science fiction, amongst others.
It is evocative, but for me there is little overall sense of story/ stories....it reminds me of Jackson Pollock’s Lavender mist....things come in and out of focus, some abstract, some recognisable, some clear, some not.
In both texts, the textual forms are interesting but the content dissolute... form dominates.
As a Post-structuralist Feminist writer (coming after William Burroughs) Acker aims to dismantle patriarchal systems (of writing and thought) to forge new identities and systems of definition.
And this she does successfully. The read rewards on conceptual levels.
December 8, 2023
The Burning Bombing of America was the better of the two here. It was clearly a spin on Burroughs' style, highly reminiscent on his Nova Trilogy both aesthetically and thematically. It is part prose part poetry, telling of the destruction of America due to everything that is wrong with America in a largely fragmentary fashion. An easy 4/5.
Rip-Off Red had its moments but overall felt kinda amteurish, which Acker would admit it was. A feminist commentary on sexuality told through a semi-detective story that partially gets the job done but really not much more. It was fine, but nothing special. 2/5.
Rip-Off Red had its moments but overall felt kinda amteurish, which Acker would admit it was. A feminist commentary on sexuality told through a semi-detective story that partially gets the job done but really not much more. It was fine, but nothing special. 2/5.
May 17, 2015
A flame bursts from the belly, scarring a holy star on flesh in blood. We learn everything from the fluids (spit semen water milk). Acker nurses at the breast of Stein, Wittig, Bataille. Readers pierced in the stomach uniting triumphantly with Acker, twisting into a sexual, organic body.
"every act is political and sexual you can't live in a non-sexual community"
"every act is political and sexual you can't live in a non-sexual community"
May 29, 2016
Rip-off red is a lot of sex to dig through for the base story of gender and power, with a detective frame story to remind you to check. The real gem is the burning bombing of America, though. Free flowing cut up panic diaries of sex and life and more.
January 15, 2024
this is my favorite book by kathy i have read so far. i LOVED it. especially the second little book, the burning bombing of america, which was cool to read because it was so similar to the style of a poem i wrote called a shabbos prayer for kathy acker so it was cool that i was doing something like she did without even meaning to. i appreciated the humor and weirdness of the first section - somebody's girlfriend is named hymen hymen which i don't know why that struck me but it was not as weird as most other things in the book but yeah. it was so fun to read her version of a detective novel and how ridiculous it was but also how smart she is in her satire and i love how dumb all the names are and it was suuuuuper porny but kind of fun. i was thinking a lot when i was reading it about how all the sex happens rather than a build of relationship/conversation/intimacy. like kathy just makes the characters have sex and the way they have sex tells us what we need to know about their relationships. which is interesting. on the point of the burning bombing, i loved the use of language and how speculative and cool it was seriously so many just beautiful sections. it reminded me a lot of eileen myles's poetry. it was so good. so good. i copied so many quotes into my commonplace book
August 27, 2017
There is a lot to like about Kathy Acker. Though she's more experimental and way, way more feminist, her style is reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway for its simplicity and directness. This is never truer than in the flashback section of Rip-off Red, Girl Detective. On the surface, it's more Acker incest erotica, but it is by far the most affecting part of the novel. Here, three everyday mundaneness of her depictions of sex and sexual violence become something moving and profoundly, perversely sweet. It ends with a scene between her and her half- sister that is among the most powerful things Acker ever wrote.
For all that praise, however, there is a major caveat, a honking, festering turd called The Burning Bombing of America, a tone poem of sorts that is really just the pretentious experimental writing Acker usually avoided. It comes across as cliche in its deliberate attempt to alienate its audience, and the method it uses isn't even very interesting. Taken together, that equals out to a book that is uneven but has moments of sheer brilliance.
For all that praise, however, there is a major caveat, a honking, festering turd called The Burning Bombing of America, a tone poem of sorts that is really just the pretentious experimental writing Acker usually avoided. It comes across as cliche in its deliberate attempt to alienate its audience, and the method it uses isn't even very interesting. Taken together, that equals out to a book that is uneven but has moments of sheer brilliance.
September 23, 2017
I love love loved the form of the Burning Bombing of America. To be honest, it could be linked poems. It's all about artistic choice, right?
"This is the story about how I have kept myself from being bored." (5)
This is my second Acker work(s) after reading her essay on the language of the body. Since this was post-humous, I'm looking forward to reading something more crafted in the future. Acker's language is alive.
I struggled with Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective--too much heat. Anyone that thinks 50 Shades of Grey is dicey (does anyone truly????) should read this to get a shock to the system.
"This is the story about how I have kept myself from being bored." (5)
This is my second Acker work(s) after reading her essay on the language of the body. Since this was post-humous, I'm looking forward to reading something more crafted in the future. Acker's language is alive.
I struggled with Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective--too much heat. Anyone that thinks 50 Shades of Grey is dicey (does anyone truly????) should read this to get a shock to the system.
July 9, 2021
Wish I could 3.5 this though
March 4, 2023
Didn’t really care for the first story didn’t finish it. Second one has like explosively amazing moments
June 2, 2025
While not a favorite, no reason for me to have stopped here with K.A. — need to amend that, 2025 Drew!
December 1, 2012
Absolutely awful. Aside from commending the cover design, about the only good thing I can say about Rip-Off Red is that it was, not really “so bad it’s good” but so bad that it was somewhat interesting, if nothing else. Described as “a kind of Raymond Chandler for bad girls,” Rip-Off Red in fact spends far less time on even its perfunctory, funhouse-mirror attempt at mystery-novel elements than on mind-numbingly tedious and repetitive pornography.
If the idea of reading the words “cunt,” “clit” and “fuck” over and over and over again, page after page, sounds like it may actually appeal to you, by all means check out this book and find out if you’re right. I confess that it did little for me. The story has its moments when Acker’s free-association randomness turns up something novel, if only by chance, but reaching those moments requires wading through a lot of turgid, hopelessly bad porn. I finished the book (or rather, the title story), which doesn’t always happen, but if anyone else chooses to bother with it do at least realize what you will (and won’t) be getting.
If the idea of reading the words “cunt,” “clit” and “fuck” over and over and over again, page after page, sounds like it may actually appeal to you, by all means check out this book and find out if you’re right. I confess that it did little for me. The story has its moments when Acker’s free-association randomness turns up something novel, if only by chance, but reaching those moments requires wading through a lot of turgid, hopelessly bad porn. I finished the book (or rather, the title story), which doesn’t always happen, but if anyone else chooses to bother with it do at least realize what you will (and won’t) be getting.
May 3, 2010
I can't quite remember how I got this book, if it was just a random grab from the library shelf or an author's name hidden somewhere in the back of my mind. However I came across it I'm grateful.
Rip-Off Red kind of reminded me of some Henry Miller or Gertrude Stein, in the sense of using sex to set the mind aflame before dragging it into surreal territory. Provocative and trippy.
The Burning Bombing of America took a different course. More surreal and fragmented. Acker sort of blows up the world and arranges the fragments in this book.
I was a little surprised this is from the 70s. It feels more modern.
Rip-Off Red kind of reminded me of some Henry Miller or Gertrude Stein, in the sense of using sex to set the mind aflame before dragging it into surreal territory. Provocative and trippy.
The Burning Bombing of America took a different course. More surreal and fragmented. Acker sort of blows up the world and arranges the fragments in this book.
I was a little surprised this is from the 70s. It feels more modern.
January 23, 2016
Kathy Acker shows us with these first two early novels, some of the form she is playing with. The Burning Bombing of America is simply a semiotic burning and bombing, rearranging the parts into a purple utopia.
Rip-off Red, Girl Detective functioned as a mystery novel propelled by mystery but interacted with in terms of sex. In the end though, she is allowed to pass because as detective, she decides the meaning. The mystery isn't resolved in terms of sex however, and so in this sense, the integration of the novel as a coherency is perhaps questionable, since the trope doesn't override the narrative metaphor.
Rip-off Red, Girl Detective functioned as a mystery novel propelled by mystery but interacted with in terms of sex. In the end though, she is allowed to pass because as detective, she decides the meaning. The mystery isn't resolved in terms of sex however, and so in this sense, the integration of the novel as a coherency is perhaps questionable, since the trope doesn't override the narrative metaphor.
September 3, 2007
I'm not sure if this is the best representation of her work. I think I remember trying her long ago and it didn't click. Same thing happened - it was like reading someone's crazy dream stories with lots and lots of pornographic interludes. Interesting but exhausting. (January 30, 2006)
June 10, 2008
Eh. Kathy Acker's supposed to be the female William Burroughs, but she's too much of a hippie to pull it off. Then again, this novel was published poshumously, so maybe I shouldn't be so quick to judge.
July 28, 2012
Rip-Off Red has two of the best sentences ever written. It's surreal and full of sex but I wish there was just a little bit more detective work and a little less having sex with every single character.
Burning Bombing: Interesting, but not a style I enjoy.
Burning Bombing: Interesting, but not a style I enjoy.
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December 9, 2022This is early Acker and it's still great. Provides lots of insight into her practice and later work. Someone was saying to me the other day that reading isn't the best way to retain information but hearing is. . . I like that Acker is so literary and needs to be literally read.
July 3, 2022
Acquired 2005
Gift from Jenn
Gift from Jenn
holding-zone
July 7, 2008Read a few chapters and this is going on hold until I'm in the mood for porn stream of consciousness. Might try her other books first and come back to this later.
January 11, 2012
Pornography.
May 23, 2012
The book is split into two mini novels. The first one is more linear and easier to follow than the latter, which are jumbled phrases about the destruction of western society and communism.
January 11, 2013
I really enjoyed the first story but could not at all get into the second.
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