Montreal novelist and art writer Peter Dube sent me a photocopy of the article Jason McBride has published about Lawrence Braithwaite in the current issue of Quill & Quire—Canada's version of Publisher's Weekly. It's great to see Lawrence's death—and his work—getting some acknowledgement in his own country.
McBride has done his homework and interviewed a number of people who knew Lawrence well and/or worked with him—Brian Lam of Arsenal Pulp Press, Alana Wilcox of Coach House Books, writers Derek McCormack and Aaron Vidaver, and most revealingly, Lawrence's older brother Jack. According to Jack Braithwaite, Lawrence was a happy teen until the death of their brother Joey in a bike accident. Lawrence never got over Joey's death, and perhaps it is significant that he died on the anniversary of his brother's death—July 14. The facts about Joey complicate the murky picture of Lawrence's last days, which Aaron Vidaver has done to much to shed light on. The best part of the article is McBride's description of Lawrence's writing as an "ecstatic, deliberately confounding fusion of street slang, porn, typographical trickery, and song lyrics" that account for the resulting "speed and disorientation."
Sorry these scans aren't very good. I highly recommend chasing down the original article.
5 comments:
Alana Wilcox seems like a real bitch. She had a cushy job and couldn't deal with him being a bit difficult? I mean really, he was brilliant and stuck in poverty. Obviously he is gonna be angry. It is sad that the write up ends with his failure to be able to successfully interact with people and its sadder that the powers at be do not take any responsibility for the failure. But the beginning is nice and I'm glad that its out there and I'm glad I got to discover his work through your blog cause it really is interesting and under-rated.
Stephen--
I understand your sentiments, but when people say Lawrence was "difficult," they're often using that as a code word for abusive. I've been thinking about public abusiveness lately, as there's another writer—without Lawrence's genius—who's been going around being abusive with publishers, bloggers, etc.—and thinking of other poets who've made public displays of hostility (some people, if you know they're going to be at a conference, there's going to be a fight)—and at a certain point, it's all bound to come back to them. Why should people put up with that? With Lawrence, the situation was really sad, tragic even, but from what I saw, his publishers tried really hard to work with him, a lot of publishers tried really hard.
Thanks for the info about the article. I'm realizing I wouldn't have known about Lawrence without being introduced to him by you and Kevin and seeing him read at New Langton. Eventually I printed one of his pieces in two issues of Holy Titclamps.
Thanks for posting this, Dodie. I discovered Lawrence via you and Dennis. Wigger is perhaps the most exhilarating book I've read this year.
Thank you for posting all of this. A number of friends and people Lawrence knew were completely unaware of his passing.
I think the article by Quill&Quire would have pissed Lawrence off as much as he would have loved it. It's a shame he couldn't have garnered more attention while he was alive, but in many ways Lawrence could be his own worst enemy. Conversation with Lawrence, more often then not, was combat, and that's often how he was most comfortable.
Lawrence had the ability to Galvanize people through his personality unlike anyone I've met. Love or hate him, and no room for anything else. Often you'd go back and forth between the two, depending on how, and how long, you knew him. He's always certainly been his own man.
We need people like Lawrence in the world. He would provoke people in so many different ways.
What a fucking shame.
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