Nice Joe Brainard left Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he was raised, and later left a scholarship at the Dayton Art Institute, for the excitement of New York City.

Un autoritratto di un giovane uomo che si apre ai suoi lettori, anche ai curiosi come me, senza vergogna o imbarazzo, ma con verità per apprezzarlo ancora di più. Joe Brainard remembered a lot of things and will be remembered as a lot of things: foremost as a master of collage and assemblage, and so, by necessity as well as temperament, an obsessive collector of materials and appropriator of images; also as a painter; a poet; and a friend.

Found a copy in the library today after a psychedelic case of deja-vu, and boy, over a nice lunch of double-espresso and another mention from a co-worker (Mind you, a professor in Astrophysics) brought up the girl who dances with teddy bears and occupies the American mind more-so these days than the twilight of American culture, I was livid, and when I get livid, I turn off my phone and excuse myself briefly for the bathroom. Joe Brainard was een Amerikaans kunstenaar en auteur die in de jaren '60 aansluiting vond bij de New York School, met Frank O'Hara als middelpunt. La crítica coincide en afirmar que la maravillosa simpleza de este libro hace que sea incomprensible que no se le hubiera ocurrido antes a nadie.

De eerste verzamelde uitgave dateert van 1975 een laatste herpublicatie in het Engels volgde in 2012. I remember tight white T-shirts and the gather of wrinkles from under the arms… I remember regretting things I didn't do… I remember when 'beehives' really got out of hand. Unfortunately, it feels more lazy than innovative, as Brainard couldn't be troubled to shape his recollections cogently or into a narrative. He’s credited for the cover art of the first edition of Goldberg’s book: a fountain pen aimed at a tilted bottle of ink, spilling a pool of black scattered with stars and a moon.

I loved this book when I first read it over thirty years ago (the edition with the yellowy-orange French-looking cover, published by Full Court Press). Un libro original en su planteamiento y adictivo en su lectura, una autobiografía de la niñez, adolescencia y juventud del autor construida a base de recuerdos. When Swift ushers listeners through that door in the first line, the listener steps toward a perpetual present, a place where the overness of past love is never truly over, “ ’cause,” as the chorus goes, echoing Dolly Parton, “there we are again.

One thing I wish Brainard (or the people who compiled this final version of "I Remember") had done is arrange the memories, generally, from earliest to latest.I also know many of the names associated with the extended Swift universe: Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff, Liz Rose. De este libro he aprendido varias lecciones: que la infancia con sus miedos, sentidos y placeres varía muy poco de una generación a otra. In the ten-minute version of “All Too Well,” forty-nine lines are in past and forty-seven are in present.

I think he said what a big fucking deal this was, for the Library of America to be publishing Joe alongside Melville and Whitman: Joe—a skinny, queer, glasses-wearing art student from Tulsa. There's little sense of cohesion on any page (or block of ten pages), making it feel extremely vulnerable. fragments και αυτό, αποτελεί μία πρωτότυπη για την εποχή αυτοβιογραφία του συγγραφέα όπου παρουσιάζονται μονοπροτασιακά μνήμες από την παιδική του ηλικία και γενικότερα από την δεκαετία του '50 στις ΗΠΑ.Over time, a whole world emerges: a world of growing up queer in Tulsa in the 1950s, when girls wore cardigan sweaters backwards and Sunday afternoon dinner was fried chicken or pot roast. Most of the memories are only 10-20 words, but the longest reach a page (there are only two or three that long, I think. By the second, third, or fifth listen of a run, all I could think about was point of view, verb tense, and one of the few “craft” words I like: temporality, which sounds so much more well behaved than time. I wasn't surprised in the afterword to learn that Brainard first started writing his "I Remember" collection after reading a lot of Gertrude Stein. I remember daydreams of living in the past and having the advantage (and sometimes the disadvantage) of knowing what was going to happen before it happened.