This is an article I wrote that is in Kitchen Sink Magazine #13, (to order www.kitchensinkmag.com), it is slightly longer than the published version.
THICK AS THIEVES
“Art of a certain order is a murderous art.” A. Alvarez on Sylvia Plath
“We are defined by what we know, and what we refuse to know.” Kate Braverman A conversation with Kate Braverman on the 25th anniversary of the publication of her seminal novel, Lithium for Medea.
Kate Braverman is the author of eleven books that chronicle female desire and drug addiction with an intense and poetic eye. Throughout a 25-year career, she has broken down, broke boundaries and yet still needs to break through to a larger audience. Her newest book, Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir won the Graywolf prize and was published in February 2006. The book contains a tantalizing array of form and emotionally saturated poetics that covers history, hallucination, poetry, pure lyrical riffs, stand-up comedy monologues and fiction. Braverman, herself, is a character as myriad and complex as her work and comes across as half mystic/half punk rock guru. As she said in our interview, “I am my own laboratory.”
MAN AND MEMOIR
Kate Braverman is forthright about her past, yet she is also contrarian. After writing 11 works of fiction that are populated with drug addicts and other society fringe dwellers, her memoir doesn’t touch drug addiction, the cause celebre that many authors have used as the springboard for gaining fame and notoriety. When James Frey’s addiction/recovery memoir, A Million Little Pieces, was picked by Oprah Winfrey for her book club, it seemed that the memoir had come of age as the easiest way to gain mainstream acceptance. Braverman offers a biting critique against those who write memoirs at a young age, before they can truly appreciate the depths of their dissolution. “I think the memoir is the marketplace’s version of reality TV. I find it amusing because I spent almost my entire adult life as a drug addict,” when When Kate says this to me, she smiled mischievously, then continued, “Then there are memoirs about how ‘I had to graduate from Yale a year late because I was so drunk, I didn’t get a report in on time.’”
Oh, poor babies, too bad it is easier to respect those who made great art first and made their lives a source of entertainment second. This is one reason why Kate Braverman’s fiction is so powerful, and her memoir is so artful. It is the culmination of a career that is vast, multifaceted and ongoing.
The addiction/recovery memoir of James Frey is immensely popular because it speaks to the need of a coming of age ritual for men in American society. In this case, that ritual is drug use. After all, what could be more masculine than waking up covered in blood as if you just had some sort of mano a mano epic battle with your own dark soul? The same is not true for a woman: If you are a female drug addict you are dirtied, at risk, forever soiled by your own weakness. You don’t wake up in a pool of your own blood from battle, teeth missing, and find that you have become a man. As Braverman says, “ When men live lives of chaos, divorce, excess, drug addiction and alcoholism they are lionized as living the romantic artist’s myth, and when women engage in these behaviors they are called mentally ill whores.” How many people on the street know that Sylvia Plath committed suicide leaving behind young children? Now how many people can quote any of her poetry? As Braverman presciently points out, “Women are defined by their biography, and men are sacrosanct from their biography.”
THE ANARCHIST'S PARADOX VS. THE LITERARY CANNON
Sixteen years ago, in Time magazine, the following Kate Braverman quote appeared, “Male critics and men in the publishing industry want from their women writers what they want from their wives.” These are respectable, classic and non-threatening women who men can safely leave at home to raise their children. In comparison, Braverman considers herself, “a renegade and an outlaw,” who seeks to, “tropicalize language, feminize it.”
Twenty-five years have passed since the publication of her first novel, Lithium for Medea, and Braverman is focused on gaining her place in the modern literary cannon. Yet, she still wants to be an outsider—it is the classic anarchist’s paradox—wanting to be recognized by the system that you are simultaneously criticizing and attempting to change. Sixteen years ago, in Time magazine, the following Kate Braverman quote appeared: “Male critics and men in the publishing industry want from their women writers what they want from their wives.” Braverman considers herself, “ a renegade and an outlaw” who seeks to, “tropicalize language, feminize it.” Braverman considers writing to be a form of fighting, a place where, “if women are not fully able to inhabit the page with their anger and their rage, their true impulses, then women are de facto denied epic work, which is the male domain.” Ruminate on that statement for a while. Repeat it to your therapists. Tell it to your girlfriends when you go to have a cocktail after work. It is damning, true, searing and powerful. Braverman is queen in a pantheon of dangerous female mercenaries attempting to take over the world of black ink and white page. Braverman insists that “writing is an act of crime. The page allows what the image cannot. The page is a kingdom completely distinct from reality, the stage or anything else.”
Twenty-five years have passed since the publication of her first novel, Lithium for Medea, and Braverman is focused on gaining her place in the modern literary canon. Yet, she still wants to be an outsider—it is the classic anarchist’s paradox—wanting to be recognized by the system that you are simultaneously criticizing and attempting to change.
FELONIES ON THE PAGE
Braverman likes to quote Annie Dillard, "Very few people are writers after all and very little harm comes to them,””— and then expand on it by stating, “and to people who are serious writers enormous damage ensues and if you can possibly live without it, do it.”
But for writers who want to attempt the frightening and furious life of the page, Braverman suggests the philosophy of art as war. Writing this way is to, “engage the page like going into mortal combat with the mutating subtext. I feel like a trained military person, a special forces individual, locked and loaded, who has a full command of technical strategies at my disposal.”
For writers who want to attempt the frightening and furious life of the page, Braverman suggests the philosophy of art as war. Writing should, “engage the page like going into mortal combat with the mutating subtext. I feel like a trained military person, a special forces individual, locked and loaded, who has a full command of technical strategies at my disposal.” If women are going to write into their rage, passion, dirt and blood, Braverman syas, “You must commit felonies on the page. You must look for opportunity. You must break and enter. You must assume aliases, steal, ransack, confess and turn people in.” It is this passionate strategy that has fueled thousands of pages over 25 years. Each word is like a bullet, but somehow, when pulled together, each of these bullets convey a lushness and hunger that speaks towards what it means to be female, and to write.
If women are going In Frantic Transmissions to write into their rage, passion, dirt and blood, Braverman says, “You must commit felonies on the page. You must look for opportunity. You must break and enter. You must assume aliases, steal, ransack, confess and turn people in.” It is this passionate strategy that has fueled thousands of pages over twenty-five years. Each word is like a bullet, that when put together, conveys the lushness and hunger of what it is to write and to be female.
In Frantic Transmissions To and From from Los Angeles, Braverman uses her arsenal of literary weaponry, honed over a long career, to show her coming of Age. The anniversary of Lithium for Medea coincides with Braverman’s memoir publication and finds that same voice that once described the relationships of a drug addict living along the canals of Venice, California, circling back to the Los Angeles of her origins. A place she says was, “A trailer park with stucco—there was nothing glamorous about it. It was slippage in a colossus of yellow hibiscus, looking for bottles that could be redeemed for two or three cents a piece. There was no money anywhere.”
Frantic Transmissions is a memoir of immigrant mentality, poverty and fierce intelligence. It is an extended exorcism that didn’t stop at thirty-five, but instead opened up paths for other writers to follow and participate, thick as thieves. In the first essay of the book, “Frantic City” Braverman states, “We are indigenous. We believe instinctively in ambushes and guerilla actions, here where palms lean windswept and brazen. Farther inland, women stand in plazas, exposed in light mist remnants of dusks like powdered lilacs. They lean from tiny terraces, their mouths form shapes you cannot decipher, and their lips turn night pewter. It is for this vertigo that we travel.”
And if that spray of bullets didn’t just enter your body and make a heart shaped hole, I don’t know what will.
THICK AS THIEVES
“Art of a certain order is a murderous art.” A. Alvarez on Sylvia Plath
“We are defined by what we know, and what we refuse to know.” Kate Braverman A conversation with Kate Braverman on the 25th anniversary of the publication of her seminal novel, Lithium for Medea.
Kate Braverman is the author of eleven books that chronicle female desire and drug addiction with an intense and poetic eye. Throughout a 25-year career, she has broken down, broke boundaries and yet still needs to break through to a larger audience. Her newest book, Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir won the Graywolf prize and was published in February 2006. The book contains a tantalizing array of form and emotionally saturated poetics that covers history, hallucination, poetry, pure lyrical riffs, stand-up comedy monologues and fiction. Braverman, herself, is a character as myriad and complex as her work and comes across as half mystic/half punk rock guru. As she said in our interview, “I am my own laboratory.”
MAN AND MEMOIR
Kate Braverman is forthright about her past, yet she is also contrarian. After writing 11 works of fiction that are populated with drug addicts and other society fringe dwellers, her memoir doesn’t touch drug addiction, the cause celebre that many authors have used as the springboard for gaining fame and notoriety. When James Frey’s addiction/recovery memoir, A Million Little Pieces, was picked by Oprah Winfrey for her book club, it seemed that the memoir had come of age as the easiest way to gain mainstream acceptance. Braverman offers a biting critique against those who write memoirs at a young age, before they can truly appreciate the depths of their dissolution. “I think the memoir is the marketplace’s version of reality TV. I find it amusing because I spent almost my entire adult life as a drug addict,” when When Kate says this to me, she smiled mischievously, then continued, “Then there are memoirs about how ‘I had to graduate from Yale a year late because I was so drunk, I didn’t get a report in on time.’”
Oh, poor babies, too bad it is easier to respect those who made great art first and made their lives a source of entertainment second. This is one reason why Kate Braverman’s fiction is so powerful, and her memoir is so artful. It is the culmination of a career that is vast, multifaceted and ongoing.
The addiction/recovery memoir of James Frey is immensely popular because it speaks to the need of a coming of age ritual for men in American society. In this case, that ritual is drug use. After all, what could be more masculine than waking up covered in blood as if you just had some sort of mano a mano epic battle with your own dark soul? The same is not true for a woman: If you are a female drug addict you are dirtied, at risk, forever soiled by your own weakness. You don’t wake up in a pool of your own blood from battle, teeth missing, and find that you have become a man. As Braverman says, “ When men live lives of chaos, divorce, excess, drug addiction and alcoholism they are lionized as living the romantic artist’s myth, and when women engage in these behaviors they are called mentally ill whores.” How many people on the street know that Sylvia Plath committed suicide leaving behind young children? Now how many people can quote any of her poetry? As Braverman presciently points out, “Women are defined by their biography, and men are sacrosanct from their biography.”
THE ANARCHIST'S PARADOX VS. THE LITERARY CANNON
Sixteen years ago, in Time magazine, the following Kate Braverman quote appeared, “Male critics and men in the publishing industry want from their women writers what they want from their wives.” These are respectable, classic and non-threatening women who men can safely leave at home to raise their children. In comparison, Braverman considers herself, “a renegade and an outlaw,” who seeks to, “tropicalize language, feminize it.”
Twenty-five years have passed since the publication of her first novel, Lithium for Medea, and Braverman is focused on gaining her place in the modern literary cannon. Yet, she still wants to be an outsider—it is the classic anarchist’s paradox—wanting to be recognized by the system that you are simultaneously criticizing and attempting to change. Sixteen years ago, in Time magazine, the following Kate Braverman quote appeared: “Male critics and men in the publishing industry want from their women writers what they want from their wives.” Braverman considers herself, “ a renegade and an outlaw” who seeks to, “tropicalize language, feminize it.” Braverman considers writing to be a form of fighting, a place where, “if women are not fully able to inhabit the page with their anger and their rage, their true impulses, then women are de facto denied epic work, which is the male domain.” Ruminate on that statement for a while. Repeat it to your therapists. Tell it to your girlfriends when you go to have a cocktail after work. It is damning, true, searing and powerful. Braverman is queen in a pantheon of dangerous female mercenaries attempting to take over the world of black ink and white page. Braverman insists that “writing is an act of crime. The page allows what the image cannot. The page is a kingdom completely distinct from reality, the stage or anything else.”
Twenty-five years have passed since the publication of her first novel, Lithium for Medea, and Braverman is focused on gaining her place in the modern literary canon. Yet, she still wants to be an outsider—it is the classic anarchist’s paradox—wanting to be recognized by the system that you are simultaneously criticizing and attempting to change.
FELONIES ON THE PAGE
Braverman likes to quote Annie Dillard, "Very few people are writers after all and very little harm comes to them,””— and then expand on it by stating, “and to people who are serious writers enormous damage ensues and if you can possibly live without it, do it.”
But for writers who want to attempt the frightening and furious life of the page, Braverman suggests the philosophy of art as war. Writing this way is to, “engage the page like going into mortal combat with the mutating subtext. I feel like a trained military person, a special forces individual, locked and loaded, who has a full command of technical strategies at my disposal.”
For writers who want to attempt the frightening and furious life of the page, Braverman suggests the philosophy of art as war. Writing should, “engage the page like going into mortal combat with the mutating subtext. I feel like a trained military person, a special forces individual, locked and loaded, who has a full command of technical strategies at my disposal.” If women are going to write into their rage, passion, dirt and blood, Braverman syas, “You must commit felonies on the page. You must look for opportunity. You must break and enter. You must assume aliases, steal, ransack, confess and turn people in.” It is this passionate strategy that has fueled thousands of pages over 25 years. Each word is like a bullet, but somehow, when pulled together, each of these bullets convey a lushness and hunger that speaks towards what it means to be female, and to write.
If women are going In Frantic Transmissions to write into their rage, passion, dirt and blood, Braverman says, “You must commit felonies on the page. You must look for opportunity. You must break and enter. You must assume aliases, steal, ransack, confess and turn people in.” It is this passionate strategy that has fueled thousands of pages over twenty-five years. Each word is like a bullet, that when put together, conveys the lushness and hunger of what it is to write and to be female.
In Frantic Transmissions To and From from Los Angeles, Braverman uses her arsenal of literary weaponry, honed over a long career, to show her coming of Age. The anniversary of Lithium for Medea coincides with Braverman’s memoir publication and finds that same voice that once described the relationships of a drug addict living along the canals of Venice, California, circling back to the Los Angeles of her origins. A place she says was, “A trailer park with stucco—there was nothing glamorous about it. It was slippage in a colossus of yellow hibiscus, looking for bottles that could be redeemed for two or three cents a piece. There was no money anywhere.”
Frantic Transmissions is a memoir of immigrant mentality, poverty and fierce intelligence. It is an extended exorcism that didn’t stop at thirty-five, but instead opened up paths for other writers to follow and participate, thick as thieves. In the first essay of the book, “Frantic City” Braverman states, “We are indigenous. We believe instinctively in ambushes and guerilla actions, here where palms lean windswept and brazen. Farther inland, women stand in plazas, exposed in light mist remnants of dusks like powdered lilacs. They lean from tiny terraces, their mouths form shapes you cannot decipher, and their lips turn night pewter. It is for this vertigo that we travel.”
And if that spray of bullets didn’t just enter your body and make a heart shaped hole, I don’t know what will.
Erin Jourdan is a writer based in San Francisco. Her last article was in KS 11 about artist Albert Reyes.
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