Joe Brainard’s I Remember

I remember Saturday night baths and Sunday morning comics.

Joe Brainard’s I Remember is a 150-page memoir in which every sentence begins with “I remember…” Here’s a recording of him reading from it:

It seems like I Remember would make a great Twitter feed, but unlike something Moby-Dick, I think the sentences lose some of their power out of context. There’s a propulsive force to the book that runs on repetition and accumulation: little mundane bits and pieces adding up to something sublime.

(The book is reproduced in full in this lovely Library of Congress edition of his collected writings.)

Here’s the first page:

Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more favorite books, check out my reading years.

If you’re lucky, the overlap in the Venn diagram of books you love to read and books your kids love to read is more than a sliver.

Blexbolex’s Ballad is a mysterious little book. Starting with a simple, 3-page chapter about a child who walks home from school (“The school, the road, home.”) the second chapter adds a page in between each previous page (“The school, the street, the road, the forest, home.”) and the author continues that pattern for 7 chapters, eventually culminating in a story of over 50 pages.

There’s a wonderful post over at Picturebook Makers where Blexbolex talks about his process:

The trigger of the form was firstly my stay with a group of artists working on comics in an unconventional way: OuBaPo. One of the exercises captured my imagination. It involved inserting one square of a comic strip between two existing squares, thereby diverting the narrative ellipsis towards another one. Then a meeting with a group of children gave me the real key to the book. They were playing a game where whatever path they took, they always got to arrive home.

a diagram of the book’s structure by Blexbolex

The OuLiPo-inspired hijinx would be impressive on their own, but what’s truly amazing to me is that for a book that feels so analog and textured, almost all of the artwork was done digitally:

The images for the book are purely digital. Only three backgrounds on paper (two with pencil and one with ink wash painting) were scanned in to allow me to add substance to the shapes drawn on the computer.

This process makes the book something that feels both ancient and futuristic, or rather, simply out-of-time.