Introduction

I can't remember how many times I have read I Remember. I discovered the book soon after it was published in 1975, and in the intervening three and a half decades I have gone back to it once every few years, perhaps seven or eight times in all. The text is not long (just 138 pages in the original edition), but remarkably enough, in spite of these numerous re-readings, whenever I open Joe Brainard's little masterwork again, I have the curious sensation that I am encountering it for the first time. Except for a few indelible passages, nearly all of the memories recorded in the pages of I Remember have vanished from my own memory. There are simply too many details to hold onto over an extended period of time, too much life is packed into Brainard's shifting, swirling collage of recollections for any one person to remember it in its entirety, and therefore, even if I recognise many of the entries the instant I start to reread them, there are many others that I don't. The book remains new and strange and surprising - for, small as it is, I Remember is inexhaustible, one of those rare books that can never be used up.

A prolific visual artist and occasional writer, Brainard stumbled upon the simple but ingenious composition method of I Remember in the summer of 1969. He was just twenty-seven, but a highly developed and accomplished twenty-seven, a precocious boy artist who had started exhibiting his work and winning prizes as a grade school student in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and had landed on Manhattan's Lower East Side before he turned twenty. By 1969, he was a veteran of the New York art scene, with several one-man shows to his credit, participation in numerous group shows, cover designs for dozens of small literary magazines and books of poetry, stage decors for theater pieces by LeRoi Jones and Frank O'Hara, as well as comic strip collaborations (most of them hilarious) with a long list of poet friends. Collages, large and small assemblages, drawings, and oil paintings - his output was varied and incessant - and on top of that, he also found time to write. Before the miraculous breakthrough of 1969, Brainard had published poems, diaries, and short prose pieces in a number of downtown literary magazines associated with the New York School, and he had already developed a distinctive style of his own - charming, whimsical, unpretentious, frequently ungrammatical, and transparent. Those qualities are all present in I Remember, but now, almost by accident, he had hit upon an organizing principle, and the writing takes off and soars into an altogether different register.

With typical nonchalance and acumen, Brainard described the exhilaration he felt while working on his new project in a letter written that summer to poet Anne Waldman: 'I am way, way up these days over a piece I am still writing called I Remember. I feel very much like God writing the Bible. I mean, I feel like I am not really writing it but that it is because of me that it is being written. I also feel that it is about everybody else as much as it is about me. And that pleases me. I mean, I feel like I am everybody. And it's a nice feeling. It won't last. But I am enjoying it while I can.'

I remember . It seems so obvious now, so self-evident, so fundamental and even ancient - as if the magic formula had been known ever since the invention of written language. Write the words I remember, pause for a moment or two, give your mind a chance to open up, and inevitably you will remember, and remember with a clarity and a specificity that will astonish you. This exercise is now used wherever writing courses are taught, whether for children, college students, or the very old, and the results never fail to summon up long-forgotten particulars of lived experience. As Siri Hustvedt wrote in her recent book, The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves: 'Joe Brainard discovered a memory machine.'*

But once you discover the machine, how do you use it? How do you harness the memories that come flooding through you into a work of art, into a book that can speak to someone other than yourself? Many people have written their own versions of I Remember since 1975, but no one has come close to duplicating the spark of Brainard's original, of transcending the purely private and personal into a work that is about everybody - in the same way that all great novels are about everybody. It strikes me that Brainard's achievement is the product of several forces that operate simultaneously throughout the book: the hypnotic power of incantation; the economy of the prose; the author's courage in revealing things about himself (often sexual) that most of us would be too embarrassed to include; the painter's eye for detail; the gift for story-telling; the reluctance to judge other people; the sense of inner alertness; the lack of self-pity; the modulations of tone, ranging from blunt assertion to elaborate flights of fancy; and then, most of all (most pleasing of all), the complex musical structure of the book as a whole.

By music, I mean counterpoint, fugue, and repetition, the interweaving of several different voices throughout the nearly fifteen hundred entries of the book. A theme is picked up for a while, then dropped, then picked up again, in the same way that a horn might sound for a few moments in an orchestral piece, then give way to a violin, which in turn will give way to a cello, and then, all but forgotten now, the horn will suddenly return. I Remember is a concerto for multiple instruments, and among the various strings and woodwinds Brainard employs in his free-floating, ever-changing composition are the following:

-Family (more than seventy entries), such as 'I remember my father in a tutu. As a ballerina dancer in a variety show at church'; 'I remember when father seemed too formal, and daddy was out of the question, and dad too fake-casual. But, seeming the lesser of three evils, I chose fake-casual'; 'I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.'

-Food (a hundred entries), including butter and sugar sandwiches, salt on watermelon, chewy candy in movie theatres, and repeated allusions to ice cream, as in 'I remember how good a glass of water can taste after a dish of ice cream.'

-Clothes (roughly ninety entries), including pink dress shirts, pillbox hats, and fat ties with fish on them. (Brainard's earliest ambition was to become a fashion designer.)

-Movies, Movie Stars, T.V., and Pop Music (more than a hundred entries), including references to Perry Como, Liberace, Hopalong Cassidy, Dinah Shore, Tab Hunter, Marilyn Monroe (several times), Montgomery Clift, Elvis Presley, Judy Garland, Jane Russell, Lana Turner, the Lone Ranger, and umpteen others. 'I remember that Betty Grable's legs were insured for a million dollars'; 'I remember rumors about what Marlon Brando had to do to get his first acting job'; 'I remember Gina Lollobrigida's very tiny waist in Trapeze.'

-School and Church (roughly a hundred entries), such as 'I remember how much, in high school, I wanted to be handsome and popular'; 'I remember an American history teacher who was always threatening to jump out of the window if we didn't quiet down. (Second floor.)'; 'I remember the clock from three to three-thirty'; 'I remember two years of cheating in Spanish class by lightly penciling in the translations of words.'

-The Body (more than a hundred entries), ranging from intimate personal confessions - 'I remember examining my cock and balls very carefully once and finding them absolutely disgusting' - to observations of others: 'I remember a very big boy named Teddy and what hairy legs his mother had. (Long black ones squashed flat under nylons.)'

-Dreams, Daydreams, and Fantasies (more than seventy entries), often pertaining to sex ('I remember sexual fantasies of making it with a stranger in the woods') but just as often not, such as 'I remember daydreams of being a singer all alone on a big stage with no scenery, just one spotlight on me, singing my heart out, and moving my audience to total tears of love and affection.'

-Holidays (fifty entries), centering around Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, Halloween, and the Fourth of July. 'I remember after opening packages what an empty day Christmas is.'

-Objects and Products (more than 130 entries), including driftwood lamps, pop beads, beanbag ashtrays, pearlized plastic toilet seats, jeweled bottle openers, 'Ace' combs, roller skate keys, Aspergum, dented ping pong balls, and miniature Bibles. 'I remember the first ballpoint pens. They skipped, and deposited little balls of ink that would accumulate on the point.'

-Sex (more than fifty entries), detailing early heterosexual fumblings in high school - 'I remember the first time I got jerked off (never did discover it for myself). I didn't know what she was trying to do and so I just laid there like...