Posts tagged "memoir" - AUSTIN KLEON : TUMBLR

Just Kids by Patti Smith

Stayed up late last night finishing this. Quite simply, this is a book about wanting to become an artist, and what you do when you’re young to get there. Amazon.com puts it nicely:

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe weren’t always famous, but they always thought they would be. They found each other, adrift but determined, on the streets of New York City in the late ’60s and made a pact to keep each other afloat until they found their voices—or the world was ready to hear them.

For me, the perfect scene (and indeed the “buk-CAW!” moment) is on page 47:

One Indian summer day we dressed in our favorite things…and spent the afternoon in Washington Square…We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand.“Oh, take their picture,” said the woman to her bemused husband, “I think they’re artists.”“Oh, go on,” he shrugged. “They’re just kids.”

The reason the scene is so important is because a good part of the book is about role-playing: it’s about “playing house.” These kids want to be artists, so they act like artists. They dress like artists. They starve like artists. They haunt their heroes in the Chelsea Hotel and Max’s Kansas City. They saturate themselves in the scene. But, most importantly, they make art. And what do you know, as Kurt Vonnegut says, “We are what we pretend to be.” Playing turns into reality…

See also: Fresh Air: ‘Just Kids’: Punk Icon Patti Smith Looks Back

Filed under: My reading year, 2010

Stayed up late last night finishing this. Quite simply, this is a book about wanting to become an artist, and what you do when you’re young to get there. Amazon.com puts it nicely:

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe weren’t always famous, but they always thought they would be. They found each other, adrift but determined, on the streets of New York City in the late ’60s and made a pact to keep each other afloat until they found their voices—or the world was ready to hear them.

For me, the perfect scene (and indeed the “buk-CAW!” moment) is on page 47:

One Indian summer day we dressed in our favorite things…and spent the afternoon in Washington Square…
We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand.
“Oh, take their picture,” said the woman to her bemused husband, “I think they’re artists.”
“Oh, go on,” he shrugged. “They’re just kids.”

The reason the scene is so important is because a good part of the book is about role-playing: it’s about “playing house.” These kids want to be artists, so they act like artists. They dress like artists. They starve like artists. They haunt their heroes in the Chelsea Hotel and Max’s Kansas City. They saturate themselves in the scene. But, most importantly, they make art. And what do you know, as Kurt Vonnegut says, “We are what we pretend to be.” Playing turns into reality…

Filed under: My reading year, 2010

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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Joe Brainard reading from I Remember, a great book I wrote about in my May newsletter.

More MP3s of Brainard reading.

joe brainard
memoir
memory
poetry
lists

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“ Writers are the custodians of memory, and that’s what you must become if you want to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.

— William Zinsser, “How To Write A Memoir”

memoir
william zinsser
family
memoir
writing

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» Joe Brainard: "I Remember"

From Wikipedia:

Joe Brainard’s I Remember radically departs from the conventions of the traditional memoir. It is neither chronological nor thematic; rather, each sentence begins “I remember…” and is followed by a single memory delivered with uniform weight and declaration. His deft juxtapositions of the banal with the revelatory, the very particular with the seemingly universal accumulate into a complex portrait of his childhood in the 40s and 50s in Oklahoma as well as his life as an artist and gay man in the 60s and 70s in New York City.
I Remember has inspired many homages, none more notable than OuLiPian Georges Perec’s Je me souviens which was dedicated to Brainard.[1] Poet Kenneth Koch was the first to utilize “I remember…” in the classroom as a prompt in teaching children to write poetry. The simplicity of the form has had great appeal to both writers and teachers, and most who use it are unaware of its origins.

A child of this is Lynda Barry’s “it was a time when…” which never ceases to work for me.

From Poets.Org:

in an interview with the young Anne Waldman, Brainard said:
I don’t ever have an idea. The material does it all. You have a figure and a flower and you add a cityscape and it makes the story. You have control if you want to take it but that’s something I never wanted to do much.