Day 15: Joe and Shane | 28 x 20

Eating apricot pie and trying to cut up a coconut with a knife

Joe Brainard was an artist of many mediums, writer, and poet who explored themes of memory, identity, and pop culture. In the 1960s he became a preeminent creative in the downtown New York art scene. In 1970, Brainard wrote I Remember, an experimental memoir of 1,000 concise memories, each one beginning with "I remember".

To lift a description by David S. Wallace in The New Yorker:

[I Remember is] a mixture of sense memory, adolescent embarrassment, nostalgic fashions and foods, daydreams, and anything else that falls through the sieve of Brainard’s disarmingly casual syntax. Some are whimsical. Many are sexual, looking back ruefully on the desires Brainard felt before he understood himself as a gay man. Many entries strike a delicate balance between naïve and philosophical (“I remember wishing I knew then what I know now”).

Wallace adds:

I Remember is both a portrait of a period — mid-century America, outwardly self-confident but roiling with sexual misgivings and racial tensions — and a self-portrait, and it’s Brainard’s receptivity that creates an open channel between the two.

Brainard's memoir sparked a generative tradition, “I remembers” penned by other authors emerged. The New Yorker calls them imitations, but I think I Remember is a living form, a conversation (it makes me think of The Golden Shovel, a form of poetry created by Terence Hayes in honor of Gwendolyn Brooks).

“You have to decide how honest you want to be in your writing. Start with a toe, then a foot, then a leg, and before you know it, you are swimming.” -Shane Allison

Enter Shane Allison, born three decades after Brainard (who died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1994). He is also a poet and visual artist, and a black gay man enamored with Brainard’s body of work. Allison wrote an unflinching I Remember in 2012, followed by a chapbook called Remember Men, which follows the same structure except each memory begins with “him” or “his.”

Here’s some Brainard and some Allison for you. I bet you can guess what comes after that.