Entertainment
The Artist Who Remembered Everything
The New York City writer and painter Joe Brainard comes alive in a new collection of letters.
LOVE, JOE: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard. Edited by Daniel Kane.
This book review is a Trojan horse. Ostensibly it concerns a collection of letters titled “Love, Joe,” written by the downtown artist and writer Joe Brainard (1941-94) to friends including the poets John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman and James Schuyler.
Before we get to those letters, a historical wrong must be righted. Next year is the 55th anniversary of the publication of Brainard’s experimental memoir, “I Remember.” I hadn’t read it until I picked it up in preparation to write this piece. Now I consider it one of the best books I know.
This newspaper missed two opportunities to review “I Remember.” The first was when the book appeared in 1970. The second was when it anchored a 2012 omnibus called “The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard,” issued by the Library of America. So, let’s spend just a moment on it. It’s a small but real American classic.
Each sentence in Brainard’s short, stream-of-consciousness memoir begins with the same words: “I remember.” The book, which chronicles his childhood in Oklahoma in the 1940s and ’50s and his later decades in New York City, dispenses small cubes of pleasure on every page. Its cumulative effect is sly but enormous.
Some of the entries are childlike and earnest:
Others investigate culture and take a broader view of society:
Still others recall his coming-of-age as a gay man:
Despite the commonplaces, everything in the memoir somehow seems to be on the page for the first time.
I’m not alone in revering “I Remember.” Paul Auster called it “one of the few totally original books I have ever read.” The French writer Georges Perec wrote a copycat version as a homage and dedicated it to Brainard.
