Hear Kate read the first chapter, Fusion City, on KQED Writer's Block.

 

San Francisco Magazine - Jonathan Kiefer

Audacious prose stylist Kate Braverman (Palm Latitudes) now calls San Francisco home, but she comes from Los Angeles, with its "minimal architecture of pragmatism, conformity, and greed, in the pseudo-tropical fashion that became the blueprint for the new slums in the sun. I was there. I was the penciled-in stick figure in the schematics." Within those slums and well beyond, Braverman has been a formidable noticer and describer, a maker of luxurious literature from formative squalor. This tough-minded, slippery rhapsody, ostensibly a memoir, defies categorization. It's a personal and social history, dense and intimate, and a jaunty dispatch from the poetic summit of new nonfiction. A

LA TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Poetic thoughts in 'Frantic' form written by: Merle Rubin

IN an interview appended to the Seven Stories Press Reading Group Edition of her 1988 novel, "Palm Latitudes," Kate Braverman delivers a trenchant and revealing statement about poetry:

"Poetry is my natural state…. Instead of publishing forty poems as poetry, as a document only several hundred people will read, I publish four hundred poems disguised as a novel that thousands read…. To be an intellectual, one used to have to know a bit of poetry. Now such knowledge is no longer expected or even tolerated. The mainstream of intellectual culture has amputated poetry from its collective repertoire. Even literary novels barely survive."

Like poems, literary novels do have a tough time in today's marketplace, where memoirs seem to enjoy a distinct edge (a situation that has even induced some writers — and publishers — to mislabel what are essentially novels as such). In our impatience with "mere" fiction, our times recall Charles Dickens' "Hard Times" and the dour pedant Mr. Gradgrind, who has no use for anything but "the facts."

Having published four collections of poetry, two volumes of poetry cunningly camouflaged as short stories and four more books of poetry masquerading as novels, Braverman has now arrived at another "disguise" for her poetry: to wit, the memoir.

Poetry and autobiography are a combination neither far-fetched nor unprecedented: What poem could be more autobiographical, and what autobiography more of a poem than William Wordsworth's "The Prelude"? But if Wordsworth's subject was the growth of a poet's mind, the chief subject of Braverman's "accidental memoir" is her ever-changing perspective on the city where she was raised: Los Angeles.

"Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles" is full of prose that's far more poetic than much of what passes for poetry these days — for example, this marvelous glimpse of Santa Monica Bay:

"Morning was a sequence of tamed waves like a legion of miniature aqua bells, turquoise castanets. The bay suggested bolts of silk you might choose for an opera gown. Clouds lift and the harbor turns vivid and bold like Bohemian crystal, glassy cobalt and charged garnet. This is why we buy vases and flowers. This is why we compose."

There's poetry of another kind in the sardonic, disenchanted voice of Braverman's Aunt Sarah, who is decidedly not thrilled at being sought out by younger family members in belated search of their "roots": "They come for information, like I'm the identified repository, a clandestine library. The old aunt and last one standing. Maybe I have scrolls in the drawers, maps, charts. They say they're gathering ethnographic data. Irving's kid, a boy so disturbed the government pays him to just stay home on the sofa, wanted to make a film, no less. A documentary."

Braverman's memoir would not pass muster as a documentary. Parts seem fanciful, exaggerated, as when she claims that all girls of her socioeconomic background in the late 1950s were shunted into secretarial and home economics courses once they reached high school. Nor by any stretch of imagination is it true that by the last part of that decade, "Los Angeles, the destination city, capital of film and media, did not yet exist." What Braverman means, evidently, is that the L.A. she knew as a girl was nothing like a glamour capital: "My Los Angeles was a second-rate southern fishing village … an enormous trailer park on sand, something anomalous storms had brought, and we were beached and stranded." This nowhere city was conspicuously lacking in culture, history, even the right kind of trees and weather, she complains, her clichéd roll call of L.A.'s defects a tired echo of Henry James' petulant plaint about America's lack of castles.

In 1995, when her scientist husband takes a job at Alfred University, Braverman is transported from all this soulless shoddiness to the wholesomely traditional rootedness of an 1849 farmhouse in upstate New York. Here, surrounded by an apple orchard, splendid autumn foliage and serious weather, she waxes lyrical about the joys of family life.

Yet from her new vantage point, she's also able to see Los Angeles with new appreciation: "After generations of gray stone cities, we were a riot of magenta bougainvillea … a sudden onslaught of purple jacaranda, rampant eruptions of renegade divas in silky petals, arias and pearls.

"In retrospect, it's inexplicable that the sheer dazzle of this city could have been so curiously and perversely misunderstood. Rather than recognizing Los Angeles as breathtaking and original, a Mae West of cities, brassy, seminal, brilliant, and boldly defiant, we were considered vulgar, common, and deficient."

Fact or fiction, diatribe or dithyramb, Braverman's poetic memoir can be irritating, even banal at times. Yet, like the metropolis that reared her and continues to engage her imagination, "Frantic Transmissions" is a colorful, multifaceted creation: alluring, elusive and often dazzling.

 

This current S.F. resident writes proudly of her L.A. roots
By Brock Keeling
(Article Published Jan 25, 2006, SF WEEKLY )

"To actually claim Los Angeles as your city of birth is a brazen admission. It puts you on the defensive, immediately and permanently," claims Kate Braverman in her new memoir. Good God, that is too true. Inaccurately dismissing Southern California as a cultural wasteland or a sprawl of stupidity is a trick used by the pretentious and dim walking among us. You've heard this socially acceptable prejudice before: It's used as an icebreaker at dinner parties -- an attempt to appear wise. L.A.-raised and San Francisco-based Braverman challenges this conceit, and mostly succeeds at proving her point. Jumping around from her impoverished childhood in West L.A. (just before the 5 freeway joined the city to San Diego) to her life as a mother to her move from California to a farm house in the Allegheny Mountains (where she experiences what people on the other coast like to call "real winters"), she writes with restrained humor and a surprisingly gorgeous stream-of-consciousness style we rarely see used effectively these days. What's revitalizing about this memoir is that it's not as plot-heavy and relentlessly wacky as so many autobiographies today. Braverman turns such bourgeois tasks as going to the mall and editing one's address book -- chores to which she devotes entire chapters -- into acts of redemption and "personal evolution." Sure, some parts get slightly bogged down: Her clear love of foliage gets repetitive ("seductive star jasmine," "wind-shredded redwood flakes," "bronzed needles," etc.), and she tries a bit too hard with the nods to her '60s-ish feminist roots ("We share the unprecedented freedom to express ourselves outside patriarchal borders," and so on). Otherwise, her appreciation of both the beauty and the crudeness of her hometown are carefully realized, and her wisdom about Los Angeles as a place of rich and important culture is an essential tool if you're ever confronted with a garden variety cocktail party snob.

ForeWord January/February 2006, v. 9 i. 1, p.59-60
by Carol Lynn Stewart

At times swift and fragile, at other times radioactive, this book tracks the author's journey through a childhood in Los Angeles, "a gulag with palm trees," and a contrasting life in a small Eastern college town. Along the edges of the author's highway is the enduring friendship ofa group of girls who knew that "Holden Caulfield did not have our sort of angst." This is not a warm and cuddly tale of the strength of women'sfriendships. Braverman takes each experience under her unique microscope, exposing its architecture down to the pipes and steel girding. At the last moment she throws a wash of acid across her lens until the image melts and transforms?just as she and her friends have done across forty years?into "women of the wharves and rocks, seducing the frayed night with our flesh, telepathically commanding ships to crash."

It isnt only the night that is seduced. The liquid voice of this memoir washes the reader into a landscape so rich that the pages demand to be dog-eared. Among these are the author's return to a Los Angeles rendered even more hostile than the terrain of her childhood, a place where gangs now cluster and "some words become scars in neural networks, swallowed land mines, exploding from within." Even a location as banal as a shopping mall is transfigured by language that steers the reader with authority and purpose.

Braverman wrings the glitz out of the American Dream in a faux interview with the film icon Marilyn Monroe. Both raw ("I eat lightbulbs that sting") and poignant, when Marilyn yearns for the studio to allow her to have a child ("I would be a mother who eats feathers and flowers") this interview claims ownership of the city where "day is the texture of aluminum."

It is no surprise that the author is a poet and novelist, who wrote the classic Lithium for Medea. Her current memoir, winner of the Graywolf prize for nonfiction, is a must-have for readers who long for the voice of the writer to transfix them. Be advised, however. The reader who delves into this book may end up sending frantic transmissions to bookstores for the author's backlist.

BOOKFORUM February/March 2006, v. 12 i. 5, p. 56-57
by Rebecca Donner

Beginning with the publication in 1979 of her startling debut, Lithium for Medea, Kate Braverman has produced a daring body of work that strips bare the myth of glitzy Los Angeles to expose its decidedly unglamorous underbelly. Like the dystopian fiction of Nathanael West and John Fante, Braverman's short stories and novels dramatize the plight of outcasts straddling fault lines, one step from ruin. What distinguishes Braverman is her emphatically feminist sensibility: She gives voice to a pre-dominantly female cast of characters?divorcées and their drug-addled daughters, Mexican émigrés and whores?who brazenly defy convention. Now, in her memoir Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles, Braverman returns to the landscape of her native city after having abandoned it more than a decade ago. Following the Rodney King riots and the 1994 Northridge earthquake, she headed for New York's Allegheny Mountains, settling into a 150-year-old farmhouse with her husband and teenage daughter. The seven-month arctic winters and forced isolation occasion her reminiscences, a lively assemblage of twelve essays that rove fitfully from topic to topic, coast to coast. Braverman bakes pies, spots deer, and observes the changing hues of autumn leaves ("wines, brandies, and clarets . . . clearly a forest for alcoholics²)" but also recalls the sun-scorched stucco tenements of her impoverished childhood and ruminates on the "architecture of consumption" found in LA shopping malls. The book's more formally experimental writings include a posthumous "interview" with Marilyn Monroe, whose frequent non sequiturs produce a perverse, poetic effect.

In the context of such narrative innovation, however, it is disappointing that Braverman revisits previously trodden terrain. In one of the most transporting essays, she fastidiously inventories the enigmatic attributes shared by women who leave Los Angeles: "They are often drawn to smoke. They are not afraid of fire. They consume two or three packages of cigarettes a day. They have red lacquers applied to their fingernails. They inhale Temple Ball opium from antique glass and cloisonné pipes once used by concubines." Here, and in a dozen other sections, she has recycled prose from her last novel, The Incantation of Frida K. ("Vanished women are drawn to smoke. They are not afraid of fire. They consume two or three packages of cigarettes a day. They wear a variety of vermillion lacquers on their fingernails. They smoke opium from antique ivory and cloisonné pipes once used by the concubines of warlords." While longtime fans may be wearies by déjà vu, readers new to her work will remain blissfully unaware of such transgressions.

The Genius of Kate Braverman by Ted Burke

For those readers who are craving an amazing and scintillating prose that will reconfigure the terrain of their memory scape, mark your calendars for February, 2006, when Graywolf Press releases novelist and poet Kate Braverman's brilliant Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles. No, this is not a paid announcement, nor have I met Kate Braverman, save through her novels like Palm Latitudes and the dreamily surreal The Incantations of Frida K. Braverman is a writer of daring and subversive intelligence, evident in the last mentioned novel wherein a dramatically re-imagined Frida Kahlo is given a voice that explores the violent and erotic nature of her life in a tone of swooning, baroque nightmares, all of which demonstrates Braverman's acutely strong talent to convey the character of Kahlo's art as not just an achieved style, but a complex way to cope with an existence that offers no salve. The book is something of a little masterpiece, not an easy recommendation for someone desiring the muzak of generic plotting, but it's a gripping portrait of a pained artist which has the principle virtue of not having an easy explanation for Kahlo's twisted and deformed self-image. The author's art gives a sense of what the inner life might have been like; the shifting between dream space and hard reality is as artfully controlled writing as I've come across.

The forthcoming Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles is a memoir, of sorts, about growing up in Los Angeles, and then the eventual moving away from that famously center-less city. Writing in a high poetic and semiotically engaged style that recalls the best writing of Don DeLillo (Mao ll) and Norman Mailer (Miami and the Seize of Chicago), Braverman deftly defines isolated Los Angeles sprawl and puts you in those cloistered, cul-de-sac'd neighborhoods that you drive by on the freeway or pass on the commuter train, those squalid, dissociated blocks of undifferentiated houses and strip malls and store front churches; the prose gets the personal struggle to escape through any means , through art and rage, and this makes Frantic Transmissions not unlike Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, wherein the prodigal son or daughter deigns to move up and away from a home that cannot keep them, with only raw nerve and the transforming elements of art to guide them. What Braverman confronts and writes about with a subtly discerning wit is the struggle of defining the place one calls home, and what roles one is obliged to assume as they continually define their space, their refuge. All through this particularly gripping memoir there is the sheer magic and engulfing power of Braverman's writing; I was fortunate to receive an uncorrected proof of Frantic Transmissions a couple of months ago, and I was knocked out by what I beheld. Sentence upon sentence, metaphor upon simile, analogy upon anecdote, this writing is rhythmic and full of stirring music. There is poetry here that does not overwhelm nor over reach; this is an amazing book, and it is one of the best books about life in Los Angeles , quite easily in the ranks of Nathaniel West, Joan Didion, and John Fante. Mark your calendar.