Jenny Turner

Atwood​ fans, does it matter that The Handmaid’s Tale is at bottom ‘a deraced slave narrative’, as Sophie Lewis calls it in Full Surrogacy Now? In the novel, as Lewis says, people of colour – ‘Children of Ham’, in Gilead language – are resettled in ‘Homeland One’, somewhere in North Dakota. In The Testaments, a sequel set 15 years later,...

The name came from Debbie Harry’s experience of being shouted at by men on the street: ‘Hey, Blondie!’ It was ironic, and to do with voyeurism and harassment, from the start. ‘My Blondie character was an inflatable doll but with a dark, provocative, aggressive side,’ as Harry put it. ‘A lot of my drag-queen friends have said to me, Oh, you were definitely a drag queen … Girl drag, not boy drag, [which] was then an act of transgression.’ She was, she writes, ‘furious’ when the band’s record label advertised ‘In the Flesh’ with a picture of her without the others, the focus very much on her ‘little nipples’: ‘Sex sells, that’s what they say, and I’m not stupid, I know that, but on my terms, not some executive’s.’ The band’s next single, ‘Rip Her to Shreds’ was advertised with a poster inviting the viewer to rip Harry to shreds if they liked.

On music as on art and culture in general, Fisher’s standards were strict. ‘Music that acknowledged and accelerated what was new’ in the world around it was a force for good, but music (and art and literature, e.g. Sebald) that looked backwards in a spirit of pastiche and/or nostalgia was bad. So Kraftwerk, dub, funk and punk, disco and post-punk, techno and hip hop, were good, because they embraced and furthered technological, cultural and generic innovation. Exemplars of badness would be Amy Winehouse as produced by Mark Ronson, and ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’ by the Arctic Monkeys, both of which used supremely up-to-date technology to make music (and videos) that sounded (and looked) fake-old.

What matters most, as Chris Kraus said recently, is ‘how history speaks to the present’. So what is it that Kathy Acker is saying, to us, right now? When I first read I Love Dick, it gave me the strangest sullen feeling, as if it had thrust me straight back to school: yes, yes, the feeling said, I know you’re thinking it’s all going on a bit, but actually, it’s performative philosophy. It’s rigorously crafted and precise. It was tracing that feeling back, to my younger self as a reader in the 1980s, that made me realise how much Acker there is curled up inside that book. Tedious mess or rigorous experiment? Art or ranting? What if the really great thing Acker’s work is saying is that it can be both?

The word​ ‘Anthropocene’, defined as ‘the era of geological time during which human activity is considered to be the dominant influence on the environment, climate and ecology of the earth’, only made it into the OED in 2014. But doesn’t it feel like it was a billion years ago already? Benjamin Kunkel, writing in the LRB of 5 March, found the term all over...