just take me to your critical apparatus
Kate Braverman made a very public break with Graywolf Press, continuing her increasingly nutty behavior and proclamations:
In fact, [Robert Polito] says, the only case of censorship associated with Transmissions is Braverman's insistence that he refrain from introducing her at a New School reading by reading from the foreword he wrote for the memoir, as she was offended by a list of Southern Californian artists and scholars he admires and to whom she was compared in a laudatory way. Braverman unhesitatingly expresses her disdain for his pantheon, dismissing them as obscure "people who have to be Googled" (and, in one case, as a "mud wrestler"). "Polito doesn't possess enough critical apparatus to say, well, if eighteen of my twenty examples are male, does that mean Braverman is writing as no woman has before?" she adds in her email. "And that her writing needs to be examined in this context? No, he can't put that 2 + 2 together." This leads to an even broader complaint: that her talents are simply misunderstood by contemporary literary culture. "No one of importance has read [my] work," she says. "It just gets referenced as great and legendary, which doesn't bring me to the attention of the people who need to put 2 + 2 together... The simple truth is that until a critical examination is done of my work, everything is irrelevant and all publishers will deal with me as Graywolf has, an accidental aberration to be dispatched with haste."
