Tuesday 19 February 2013

Simon Turner - In the Brainyard: Notes for an abandoned review of Joe Brainard's Collected Writings


Waterstone's website tells me that Joe Brainard doesn't exist, or if he does, he's not the author of I Remember.  There is a fellow called Joe Brainyard, on the other hand.  That's such a perfect typo on their part that I refuse to believe it's unintentional.  Brainard's writing, considered in its totality as it now can be, are a kind of brainyard (if we can define something that doesn't really exist), a loose collocation of thoughts and confessions, diaries, sketches, memories, near-prose poems, and whatever else took his fancy.    


5/7/12
Reading Brainard over lunch, I found I couldn't concentrate on the text and the veggie burger I was eating at the same time, so put Brainard down a moment and concentrated on the burger instead, which was excellent: a spongily luxuriant white bun, with a perfect textural combination of give and resistance; sliced tomato, lettuce and fried onion (is there anything better than fried onion?); ketchup, obviously; and the burger itself, excellent because it wasn't trying to be meat, which is the failing of many.  A nice spicy kick to it, too.  Best lunch of the week. 

*

Bolinas Journal: what a breath of fresh air.  The prose is so clean, so without artifice (or not entirely: there are nods towards the fact that Brainard planned to publish his journal, which raises the question as to how long he knew that would be the case.  How far does knowledge of eventual publication affect the writing?  It's an archetypally post-modern work in that sense; it raises questions about it's status as a made object, its autobiographical authenticity), that it feels like a way forward to a different kind of literature.

*

Auster's introudction is great - especially the taxonomy of the kinds of memories in I Remember and his reading of the work as a kind of conversation with its readers, a memory machine whose function (at least in part) is to trigger memories in those who read it - but he misses out a word that seems totally relevant to Brainard's output: democracy.  An excellent reading of I Remember in relation to the confessional school of poetry calls attention to the fact that Brainard, unlike Plath, Sexton, Berryman and Lowell, doesn't seem racked by guilt and suicidal despondancy, isn't driven by some inner Freudian myth of origin and self-transendence, or doesn't seem to be.  He's confessing, yes, but he's confessing, mostly, relatively mundane elements of his life - what he's done, who he's friends with, places he's been, chaps he's got a crush on, what he had for breakfast.  It's a million miles away from 'Daddy'.  And that's great, the absence of heaviness.  And that's why it's democratic: it suggests a reading of confessional literature that refuses to exclude readers and writers based on their level of torturedness (horrible word, sorry) - this could, really, be anyone's intimate journal, just as I Remember's individual memories could belong to anyone of that time and space: Brainard's brilliance lies chiefly in the fact that he did it, and did it so well.     

*

6/7/12
Rain for much of the day, but the sun came through briefly but decisively around six this evening,  Walking home, everything dazzled - glittered, really, where the rain had struck - a haze across events as the water evaporated from the concrete, the air turning quietly smoky, like viewing the world through badly wiped glasses.  Thinking about Hitchcock and his pragmatic camera - I nearly wrote 'line' - which is not to say that there is no artistry involved in his films (obviously wrong, in any case) but that the artistry is subsumed in the artwork's entirety: the camera does just what it needs to at any given point to tell us the story, or to deepen our understanding of a character.  It has a job to do.  Brainard's writing is something like this - it's functional, not showy, at least at the level of the sentence or the prhase.  The atristry, the music, occurs at the level of structure, how Brainard orchestrates (Auster's term) his apparently plain material.  Plus the fact that he's so candid in his methods, in what he reveals, is beguiling, and something of an innovation in itself. 

*

Most of this review - is it that? - has been scribbled on random pieces of paper I happen to have in the house or at work, whenever a thought comes to me that might be of value to an understanding of Brainard's work.  Impossible to replicate on page or screen, really, though a simulation (illusion) of randomness might do. 

No comments: