Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir [Paperback]

Kate Braverman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 24, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Experimental poet and novelist Braverman (The Incantation of Frida K.) proffers a brash, witty memoir comprising a dozen bubbling, occasionally repetitive essays chronicling her 1990s move from L.A. to an upstate New York farmhouse. After the last spate of riots and a major earthquake, the 40-something Braverman decides to quit the city of her birth and head to the Allegheny Mountains to live through brutal winters with her husband, an academic scientist, and teenage daughter. In the first and funniest essay, Braverman relates how a longtime denizen of L.A. like herself manages to leave, an ordeal in itself: "Such a departure requires magical intervention." Then she is prey to advice from others, such as Uncle Irving, who gives the lowdown on their Jewish family's desperate emigration from the Old World: "They couldn't even invent a past with a single exception to impoverishment." In six "Transmission" essays, Braverman delineates her thorny new eastern habitat, where she enjoys four bathrooms, gardening and "active correspondence necessitating pens and the postal service"; with snow falling for eight consecutive months, she even craves the crass fantasyland of L.A. malls. In fact, once removed from that city's crime and materialism, Braverman finds she can draw in sharp relief its "accumulated atrocities." (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"[Braverman's] talent, uncorked, is as bold and brave and beautiful as anything we see from writers of her generation." --Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 180 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press (January 24, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555974384
• ISBN-13: 978-1555974381
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #973,040 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Braverman's New World, January 16, 2006

By 

Ted Burke "Ted Burke" (San Diego) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir (Paperback)

I lucked out two months back and acquired an uncorrected proof of "Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles", and even though I was fairly familiar with her novels (especially the dreamy and harshly poetic re-imagination of Frida Kahlo in "Incantations of Frida K"), this nominal memoir of the place knocked me out, tied me up and left me pained and pleasured in ways only the best writing can manage. As with the best writing by Don DeLillo, she does a potently condensed job of assessing, summarizing and characterizing the shapeless sprawl that constitutes the City of Angels. Addressing herself often times in collective pronouns such as "you" and "we", she taps into what might be the dry , metaphysical desolation that inhabits the
isolated communities, the neighborhoods abutting train tracks and the eroded processing plants, whole square miles of battlefield playgrounds and strip malls.

Her writing is electric, brilliant, an ongoing metaphorical chain that unfolds like a rich, spiraling improvisations. Like DeLillo, and especially Norman Mailer in his glorious accounting of the architectural grandness and contradictions of odd American urban centers in "Miami and the Siege of Chicago", Braverman compares and contrasts and confronts the difficulty of defining an identity as an artist and person with a purpose within the the crushing isolation and rootlessness that is Los Angeles' sadly exclusive domain.

Part essay, memoir, gilded satire and ecstatic tone poem, "Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angles" is the most riveting non-fiction I've read in years, and it is an unqualified joy for the lover of masterful prose writing.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars AMAZING WRITING, June 21, 2010

By 

Our Gr8 USA "I love the USA" (USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir (Paperback)

You will not be able to stop reading this book. It is fascinating! Both good fascinating and ugly fascinating like a car wreck. The beauty captured in words about the her first winter in New York is dead-on. I know because I live there and that's exactly how beautiful upstate New York is during the cold, gray months. She captured the beauty of the snow on the trees and as well as the ugliness of living in L.A. slums. You just can't put the book down! It's amazing. The writing is even better than the story. Lyrical and delightful!
A great read!