Free Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker

hard, much harder than the black boy or the white boy had hit her, across her nipples. Then he left the room and locked the door. . . .
    The mysterious Mr Linker
    'Most of all,' Mr Linker told some of his young hoodlums, 'I admire healthy young people. You can buy anything but health. If a person isn't healthy, even if he is very famous and rich, he has nothing.' Mr Linker was fond of teaching.
    ' "A healthy body in a healthy mind." There is nothing more beautiful than a voluptuous healthy young girl. When I see a beautiful young girl, when I see someone who is young and voluptuous walking with a man who isn't her equal - you know what I'm talking about - a man who wears glasses or is deformed, I tell you it disgusts me. I think such people ought to be shot.'
    'Yeah,' one of the hoodlums mumbled.
    ' "A healthy mind in a healthy body." ' He returned to what he had been saying. 'You probably can't understand this. That was a saying of the Athenian state, the first great state in history. All of our culture comes from ancient Greece. Did you know that?
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    GIRLS WILL DO ANYTHING FOR LOVE

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    ODE TO A GRECIAN URN
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    'What makes a healthy state?' he asked his boys.
    The hoodlums didn't say anything.
    'It will surprise you. Disease and mental instability cause health. The men who have taken the most extreme risks, who have done what may have disgusted other people or what other people have condemned are the men who have advanced our civilization.'
    Mr Linker had seen evidence of disease and mental instability before he was able to speak. Born on the Iranian streets, poverty had made him envy all those who had money. He had to do anything to get money.
    Poverty is bad for humans because it makes them perpetuate all that is oppressing them and good for humans because it helps them to be willing to do anything - the weirdest acts possible, suicidal - to stop the poverty. Mr Linker, having been a beggar's child, saw how society worked. He made himself clever and relentless, relentlessly determined to get rich. If he had remained poverty-stricken, he might have turned this glimmering of intelligence on himself and become a saint. As it turned out, Allah be praised, at age seven he escaped with a travelling magician, stopped off in Vienna and, at fifteen years of age, talked his way into the University to study with Carl Jung. His cleverness and his interest in the mechanics of human social behaviour led him into the new science - philosophy of psychology. Then into neurology, for he was above all a materialist. And so Mr Linker became a lobotomist.
    In his later life his cleverness which he called intelligence grew to enormous proportions. The more people turned to him for help and the more he indulged in his own eccentricities, the more he believed he was God. By his middle age there was no longer any chance he could ever be intelligent, i.e. adaptable. He had become a real image, a fake.
    'The only thing we have,' Mr Linker continued telling his hoodlums, 'which separates us from the beasts is Culture. Culture is our highest form of life. And it is literature more than any other art which enables us to grasp this higher life, for literature is the most abstract of the arts. It is the only art which is not sensual. You know most people do not read. These days they read only trash. They do not SEE. They do not appreciate nature. They do not have the artist's eye and they know nothing:
    Out, out, brief candle.
    Life's but a walking shadow,
    A poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
    And then is heard no more . . .
    Shakespeare said that in Hamlet. He said we are nothing without our culture.
    'Where does culture come from? I will tell you. It comes from disease. All the great artists, Goethe, Schiller, and Jean-Paul Sartre - you must
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    read Nausea in the French, in English it is nothing - have said this. They are aware how evil they are. They are aware this life is truly evil; due to this awareness, they are