Gary Indiana

“Despite his overthroaty, mangled diction and general clunkiness, he has won the heart of every American male suffering from testosterone psychosis – a sizeable portion of the electorate. It certainly helped that Schwarzenegger movies started playing non-stop on television, often in competing time spots, and that professional sycophants such as Larry King and Oprah Winfrey featured Schwarzenegger on their chat shows, which, being ‘non-political’, were exempt from equal-time strictures.”

Kathy Acker approached writing as a technical challenge, setting stringent rules for the writing of her novels. She treated every new project as a game, deciding in advance which ingredients, and in what proportion, each book would contain. Her core subjects and themes never varied: they sprang from an immutable set of personal traumas and fixations. However playful her methods, and whatever Perec-like constraints she imposed on herself, Acker’s unassuageable anger at her victimisation as a woman poured into her fractured narratives. Her first writings – quirky, stream-of-consciousness, deceptively confessional – are whimsically strewn with pornography, violence, black humour and incongruous cultural references.

Events of a distant nature have an abstract, even occult quality in Cuba, as of things glimpsed through a scrim of fog. Last June, Granma, the country’s only newspaper, reported the death of Whitney Houston four months after the fact, like a suddenly declassified state secret, in an edition otherwise devoid of anything resembling news. (Granma features plenty of statistics, state and...

Depending​ where you look, the William Burroughs centenary has either occasioned an outpouring of variously celebratory and carping prose, or a trickle of grudging acknowledgment in outlets thought to speak for the literary establishment. Writing on anything of passing public interest triggers an online avalanche of ad hominem posturing which quickly renders the original topic, whatever it...