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Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir
Kate Braverman grew up in Los Angeles in the late 1950s at the time when glitz was just beginning to be manufactured. Her Los Angeles was made up of stucco tenements, welfare, and the marginalized. It wasn't a destination city, it was the end of the line.
Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles chronicles the trajectory of Braverman's Left Coast generation with a voice of singular power. She was an antiwar activist in Berkeley, a punk-rock poet on Sunset Strip, a single mother in the East L.A. barrio, and a woman in recovery at AA meetings in Beverly Hills. By 1990 she was married and settled into a life of writing and teaching. In her forties, Braverman did the unthinkable and moved from Beverly Hills to New York's Allegheny Mountains to a 150-year-old farmhouse.
In wide-ranging transmissions, Braverman deftly contrasts the social histories of Los Angeles with her new, timeless rural community; describes the effects of the changing seasons on her Californian, sun-drenched soul; and marvels at how a remote farmhouse can offer surprising consolations.
Library Journal calls Braverman a "literary genius"; Rolling Stone describes her as having the "power and intensity you don't see much outside of rock and roll." Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles offers an eccentric and insightful view of social and individual transformation.
Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles chronicles the trajectory of Braverman's Left Coast generation with a voice of singular power. She was an antiwar activist in Berkeley, a punk-rock poet on Sunset Strip, a single mother in the East L.A. barrio, and a woman in recovery at AA meetings in Beverly Hills. By 1990 she was married and settled into a life of writing and teaching. In her forties, Braverman did the unthinkable and moved from Beverly Hills to New York's Allegheny Mountains to a 150-year-old farmhouse.
In wide-ranging transmissions, Braverman deftly contrasts the social histories of Los Angeles with her new, timeless rural community; describes the effects of the changing seasons on her Californian, sun-drenched soul; and marvels at how a remote farmhouse can offer surprising consolations.
Library Journal calls Braverman a "literary genius"; Rolling Stone describes her as having the "power and intensity you don't see much outside of rock and roll." Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles offers an eccentric and insightful view of social and individual transformation.
180 pages, Paperback
First published January 24, 2006
About the author
Kate Braverman
31 books81 followersKate Braverman (born 1950) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet, originally from Los Angeles, California, who has garnered great acclaim for works including the novels Lithium for Medea (1979), Palm Latitudes (1988), Wonders of the West (1993), and The Incantation of Frida K (2001). Her most significant work has been in stylistic hybrid forms built upon poems and rendered as short stories. She has published two books of short stories, "Squandering the Blue" (1990) and "Small Craft Warnings" (1997). She has also published four books of poetry. She has won three Best American Short Stories awards, an O. Henry Award, Carver Short Story Award, as well as the Economist Prize and an Isherwood Fellowship. She was also the first recipient of Graywolf Press Creative Nonfiction Award for Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir, published February 2006.
Braverman has a BA in Anthropology from UC Berkeley and an MA in English from Sonoma State University. She was a founding member of the Venice Poetry Workshop, Professor of Creative Writing at CSULA, staff faculty of the UCLA Writer's Program and taught privately a workshop which included Janet Fitch, Cristina Garcia and Donald Rawley. She lived in San Francisco.
Braverman has a BA in Anthropology from UC Berkeley and an MA in English from Sonoma State University. She was a founding member of the Venice Poetry Workshop, Professor of Creative Writing at CSULA, staff faculty of the UCLA Writer's Program and taught privately a workshop which included Janet Fitch, Cristina Garcia and Donald Rawley. She lived in San Francisco.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
December 28, 2007
This was so much better than I expected. This was the first book of Braverman's I've read, and it annihilated me. Her work is as lyrical as Rikki Ducornet's, as observant and insouciant as Don DeLillo's and as chiseled as that of Joy Williams. This book is a treasure trove of ideas, of scintillating rage, of beautiful sentences. 2008 is gonna see me go on a serious Braverman binge.
March 2, 2016
If anyone is interested in a book that is a classic example of "uneven" this is it. I have been a fan since her first book and her writing, especially the imagery, is exquisite. It's the content that bothers me and made me want to throw the book across the room a couple of times.
I loved the chapters about her low-down childhood in L.A. It's the adult years I had trouble with, especially that chapter extolling the wonders of L.A. shopping malls and all the marvelous things she could buy there. I was embarrassed for her as I read about her love of trinkets and expensive junk. The writing itself was excellent -- she is so accomplished that for her I suspect it's a bit like knitting or crocheting -- completely automatic.
She writes in detail about gentrifying an old house in rural New York, and then falling out of love with it and the local community and the weather. The entitlement in her presentation was insufferable. And then there was the mention of how L.A. was lacking art in the late '60s. Bullshit. She lived in Venice at the same time that many artists had studios there. (I suspect it is NOW art deprived because of the high rents for studio spaces.)
If you want to read Braverman's best, I suggest Incantation of Frida K. -- it's an absolute masterpiece.
I loved the chapters about her low-down childhood in L.A. It's the adult years I had trouble with, especially that chapter extolling the wonders of L.A. shopping malls and all the marvelous things she could buy there. I was embarrassed for her as I read about her love of trinkets and expensive junk. The writing itself was excellent -- she is so accomplished that for her I suspect it's a bit like knitting or crocheting -- completely automatic.
She writes in detail about gentrifying an old house in rural New York, and then falling out of love with it and the local community and the weather. The entitlement in her presentation was insufferable. And then there was the mention of how L.A. was lacking art in the late '60s. Bullshit. She lived in Venice at the same time that many artists had studios there. (I suspect it is NOW art deprived because of the high rents for studio spaces.)
If you want to read Braverman's best, I suggest Incantation of Frida K. -- it's an absolute masterpiece.
Read
December 18, 2019I almost finished this book. I purchased it after Braverman died and I read her obituary in the NY Times. She seemed like a fascinating person, who was close to my age and lived through some of the same history as I. I was particularly interested in reading about a city person who moved to a rural area, which is pretty much my story. However, I was raised in San Francisco not LA and moved across the state not across country. There were some wonderful segments in the book. I enjoyed the way she wrote about her address book and also when she described how time spent with her family changed after the move to upstate New York. I also found Braverman's crazy imagery and wild wording intriguing and at times great fun. But mostly, I felt sad and unsettled reading this book. Maybe the truth lies in the word "Frenetic" in the title. I'm turning more and more from my own frenetic tendencies toward a calm and serene state. I just could not hang out on these pages all the way to the end.
September 13, 2014
More than once, Braverman and I have met beneath the jacaranda trees, near the oleander. The freeway roar is beside us at dusk. The cancer hospital, with its hidden little tragedies, masturbatory grant-getting is on the other side of a concrete ravine. My parents died there. Or perhaps it was her parents. We paid for them to die there. It was part of the deal.
The Transmissions here are closer to intromissions, and not of the ecstatic sort. Braverman's transmissions are composed by first deconstructing a bitterly ordinary reality, forged in the bright lights and Santa Ana winds of the place. But don't be fooled. This book ins't about place at all, any more than home is about a building. Despite the glitter of SoCal wealth and comfort, you're a squatter in a valley of corrupted elegance. This book will expose you to yourself and the ones you thought you loved.
Especially if you loved one of these women:
Between us we have six arms, like Shiva and Kali. We sway our multiple limbs in an instinctive sequence ancient before the Sirens. We don't need an iPod. We know this choreography. We are women of the wharves and rocks, seducing the frayed night with our flesh, telepathically commanding ships to crash.
Weren't there always witches and shamen, adepts and anomalies? Doesn't mythology demonstrate human metamorphosis as intrinsic and the forms of civilization to be in constant transition? Weren't there always treasures and portents? Women skilled with augury and clairvoyance?
This night jacaranda on bluffs behind us open like lilac mouths, promising a kiss. The ocean is a corridor of violet-tinted mirrors that lead everywhere. We understand the elements. We smell and her the moon. But we must be quick. One of us has a plane to catch, just south of the pier, in the sheered belly that cuts like a scalpel through the archive of stars.
(pp. 24-25).
The Transmissions here are closer to intromissions, and not of the ecstatic sort. Braverman's transmissions are composed by first deconstructing a bitterly ordinary reality, forged in the bright lights and Santa Ana winds of the place. But don't be fooled. This book ins't about place at all, any more than home is about a building. Despite the glitter of SoCal wealth and comfort, you're a squatter in a valley of corrupted elegance. This book will expose you to yourself and the ones you thought you loved.
Especially if you loved one of these women:
Between us we have six arms, like Shiva and Kali. We sway our multiple limbs in an instinctive sequence ancient before the Sirens. We don't need an iPod. We know this choreography. We are women of the wharves and rocks, seducing the frayed night with our flesh, telepathically commanding ships to crash.
Weren't there always witches and shamen, adepts and anomalies? Doesn't mythology demonstrate human metamorphosis as intrinsic and the forms of civilization to be in constant transition? Weren't there always treasures and portents? Women skilled with augury and clairvoyance?
This night jacaranda on bluffs behind us open like lilac mouths, promising a kiss. The ocean is a corridor of violet-tinted mirrors that lead everywhere. We understand the elements. We smell and her the moon. But we must be quick. One of us has a plane to catch, just south of the pier, in the sheered belly that cuts like a scalpel through the archive of stars.
(pp. 24-25).
July 5, 2019
I wanted to enjoy this right up until Braverman started talking about the California shopping mall experience and then I was done. I don’t understand how a book so beautifully written can be so full of absolutely nothing that needed to be said or repeated. It’s so swollen with self aggrandizement and privilege that I’m not really sure there’d be much left if you removed the content save for some pretty imagery.
December 18, 2015
This is intense, mesmerizing! Braverman has such beauty of language and blasts through her life in LA as a kid until the time she decides to move away to the Allegheny Mountains as foreign from LA as she is from it. And then finally the middle ground: San Francisco. It's Braverman! It's exceptional!
February 16, 2023
While much of the material is appropriated and reworked from Wonders of the West (which I see is listed as a novel but is clearly at the very least autofiction), this lone memoir of Kate's really stands out. The entire project of it hums and soars like a bird. Laughed out loud at sections especially the last chapter. Bravo, Braverman. We miss you.
January 17, 2020
This book taught me new things about writing.
December 22, 2021
I love the way Kate Braverman writes. So lyrical and poetic. I appreciated her descriptions of Los Angeles in the 50s and 60s — a very different place than the LA we’ve seen in movies. I also loved the way she described independent women. Such a beautiful homage.
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April 26, 2013I'm re-reading this one now and thinking back to when I ordered a review copy; the publicist protested "she left out all the good stuff!" Well, it depends on what you mean by "good stuff."
Braverman is a cult figure, already legendary at the age of 60, and I have reviewed a number of her books, often with Denis Johnson's, for I think they are the best writers of their generation Her website contains many links and fascinating interviews concerning language, consumerism, "writing as criminal behavior," but my favorite is one in which she pronounces herself to be "an unlikable person." I laughed and immediately thought most of the people I love, who would describe themselves in much the same way that Braverman does (And I hear reports that her last "criminal behavior" consists of being caught up in the notoriously corrupt Santa Fe legal system while trying to divorce a man who had been using crack and heroin for five years and seems terrifyingly well-armed.) I also thought of BITCH: IN PRAISE OF DIFFICULT WOMEN, by Elizabeth Wurtzel, which would be canonical were it not for the fact of the author's having indulged an exhibitionist streak in that book and her first, the infamous PROZAC NATION, but what author can be held responsible for the treatment--I use the word advisedly--given her words as they are run through Hollywood's mill of screenwriters, even if she has a long background in Talmudic scholarship and, like Melanie Thernstrom, a Harvard diploma?
Back to Braverman: her real crimes seem best described by the author. "'Normal person'" and ‘literary poet' cannot be indigenous to the same sentence. It cannot be made graceful. I doubt human being and literary writer are possible in the same equation. Pain tolerance and stamina. You go while you bleed from the nose. But of course, one tries.
The other question--the Academy, located on tierra firma, versus the archipelego of the stranded, the drowned, those with no harbor of their own, they float bloated in the river called perfumed and holy, float blue as delphiniums and larkspar. Into the translucent sea of the bled out failed. No flag, they changed the currency since you left, you don't know the dialect and you're broke."
And then:
"I've tropicalized and feminized the language. You must get into the fortress of words and from there subvert. Los Angeles was a border town, a languid Mexican fishing village rocked by an Okie beat. An English that flows elegant, seductive, the Santanas in her skirt. The prototypical fire is the word. All else is fashion."
Braverman is a cult figure, already legendary at the age of 60, and I have reviewed a number of her books, often with Denis Johnson's, for I think they are the best writers of their generation Her website contains many links and fascinating interviews concerning language, consumerism, "writing as criminal behavior," but my favorite is one in which she pronounces herself to be "an unlikable person." I laughed and immediately thought most of the people I love, who would describe themselves in much the same way that Braverman does (And I hear reports that her last "criminal behavior" consists of being caught up in the notoriously corrupt Santa Fe legal system while trying to divorce a man who had been using crack and heroin for five years and seems terrifyingly well-armed.) I also thought of BITCH: IN PRAISE OF DIFFICULT WOMEN, by Elizabeth Wurtzel, which would be canonical were it not for the fact of the author's having indulged an exhibitionist streak in that book and her first, the infamous PROZAC NATION, but what author can be held responsible for the treatment--I use the word advisedly--given her words as they are run through Hollywood's mill of screenwriters, even if she has a long background in Talmudic scholarship and, like Melanie Thernstrom, a Harvard diploma?
Back to Braverman: her real crimes seem best described by the author. "'Normal person'" and ‘literary poet' cannot be indigenous to the same sentence. It cannot be made graceful. I doubt human being and literary writer are possible in the same equation. Pain tolerance and stamina. You go while you bleed from the nose. But of course, one tries.
The other question--the Academy, located on tierra firma, versus the archipelego of the stranded, the drowned, those with no harbor of their own, they float bloated in the river called perfumed and holy, float blue as delphiniums and larkspar. Into the translucent sea of the bled out failed. No flag, they changed the currency since you left, you don't know the dialect and you're broke."
And then:
"I've tropicalized and feminized the language. You must get into the fortress of words and from there subvert. Los Angeles was a border town, a languid Mexican fishing village rocked by an Okie beat. An English that flows elegant, seductive, the Santanas in her skirt. The prototypical fire is the word. All else is fashion."
December 13, 2009
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.
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.
October 16, 2007
any one of these frantic transmissions is good, but all together they become somewhat of a repitition.
certain metaphors, such as the improbability of the names of boulevards in the LA basin to an east coast, or non-hispanic ear, are intersting once, but they occur several times - it seems to need closer editing.
the childhood reminiscences however are strikingly tactile - and ms braverman can definitely turn a phrase - i once heard a listener comment on her just mot and she said simply - "i know what i do for a living"
certain metaphors, such as the improbability of the names of boulevards in the LA basin to an east coast, or non-hispanic ear, are intersting once, but they occur several times - it seems to need closer editing.
the childhood reminiscences however are strikingly tactile - and ms braverman can definitely turn a phrase - i once heard a listener comment on her just mot and she said simply - "i know what i do for a living"
June 11, 2008
It was okay. A lot of it was pretentious as a swooping bat on a fallen sky. Worse. But there were some entertaining chapters in the mix.
Man, Braverman REALLY has issues with Los Angeles. It's a variety of hang-up I can't even begin to understand; as a military brat, I'm not really from anywhere. I've lived all over the place, and have some morsel of nostalgia for every one of those cities. I don't think I could even rant as fiercely against South Florida, and there is NO WAY by anyone's yardstick Los Angeles is worse than South Florida.
Man, Braverman REALLY has issues with Los Angeles. It's a variety of hang-up I can't even begin to understand; as a military brat, I'm not really from anywhere. I've lived all over the place, and have some morsel of nostalgia for every one of those cities. I don't think I could even rant as fiercely against South Florida, and there is NO WAY by anyone's yardstick Los Angeles is worse than South Florida.
January 17, 2016
This is a fantastic tome, a romp at times a diatribe, invective, and lovely, disturbing, unsettling in all the very best ways. Part story in its narrative, yet contains numerous stunning poetic lines, sections like spun gold, the pace like a locomotive train. I admired the differing points-of-view, like Aunt Sarah's, or even the Q & A with iconic star Marilyn Monroe. And how the city, Los Angeles, becomes a character like no other I've ever read. It was quirky, confessional, funny, and yet sad underneath it all, her scope and depth is profound.
December 5, 2007
Los Angeles is a difficult city to put into words. There are languages to account for, and cultures, and the millions of people. There is the anti-culture of the place, the showbusiness and sexuality and suburbanity. I always thought that Beck's album "Midnight Vultures" had the best portrayal of this mercurial place, and still do. Braverman book is a true accomplishment and rivals that succinct vision of a peculiar place that no one really loves but everyone wants to talk about.
February 11, 2011
a bit repetitive, a bit out there, but I think it's one of those things you have to live to experience and appreciate.
August 6, 2011
Not what I was expecting, but a good read even if I had to despair what she was talking about between the constant flashbacks.
November 9, 2014
well, somewhere between a 3 and a 4. I enjoyed this crazy love/hate diatribe about LA, but it probably helped to have lived there. Like all group of essays some are more fun than others.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews