Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard by Ron Padgett

Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard Reviews

• 
  Guttersnipe Das

  A year or two ago, I sat with my teacher, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, as she spoke of her friend, Joe Brainard. So much love and tenderness came into her face and her voice as she spoke. “You two would have loved each other,” she said, with real frustration, as if he’d stepped out of the room just before I arrived. She spoke of his kindness, humor, generosity and directness -- all qualities found abundantly in this book.
  
  Bless Ron Padgett for recognizing he had to write this book. This is a book that had to happen -- and did. How perfectly appropriate that the book is direct, soft-spoken, a little curmudgeonly, even occasionally awkward -- it’s the real thing, a life of Joe Brainard from the perspective of his straight best friend. Brainard is well on his way to being canonized -- thanks in great part to the Library of America “The Collected Writings” -- also masterminded by Ron Padgett. If you love the work of Joe Brainard, get this book, and save it for a day when you are running low on hope for love and hope and art.
  
  One more thing: as your bookish pal from the wrong side of the tracks, a word of explanation might be useful about Brainard’s “diet pills”. Desoxyn. Whoa. Not only is not the usual diet pill, even the word “speed” feels a little too innocent. Desoxyn is something hard to fathom: it’s meth by prescription. Having seen this stuff in action, I can well imagine how it might rocketize creative life -- and bring it to a halt. That Brainard was able to use Desoxyn long-term, have a multi-faceted creative life, and preserve his good and loving heart -- is more evidence of his truly extraordinary nature. Do NOT try this at home.
  
• 
  Roberto

  I find it rare in a biography to get much of a sense of the person you're reading abouts personality, and I really felt like I did get that from this tender, intimate portrait of Joe Brainard. The kind only a friend could've written. I loved it and have come to love Brainard, as well as Ron Padgett, even though maybe at times it was a little repetitive with all the dinners and moving around etc it felt like a proper tribute to a gentle, generous man and artist.
• 
  Jeff Buddle

  My first brush with Joe Brainard was through his little book, "I Remember." I'd borrowed a friend's copy and read it through in one sitting. My second brush with Joe Brainard was when an artist friend of mine gave me a copy of "I Remember." And again, I read it through in one sitting. I had next to no knowledge of Joe as a visual artist until I encountered a gallery show of his Nancy drawings. I loved them. They were simultaneously ironic, sweet and sincere...just like "I Remember." Apparently, this was Joe Brainard, at least as depicted by his childhood chum, poet Ron Padgett.
  
  Since my initial brush, I've learned a lot about Joe Brainard: his drawings and collages, paintings, comics. Padgett puts this all in context. But don't call this a biography, it ain't that. It's a memoir, Padgett's recollection of the Joe he knew. This is the kind of document that will feed a future biography, a scholarly inquiry into the life of Joe Brainard. But for now, it seems it's all we have.
  
  Padgett, of course, is able and willing to document the life of his friend. He has unparalleled insight into the life of a private man who had lots of friends, but who disguised himself and hid from them. Padgett portrays a man who tried his best to be honest, but in that trying revealed that any such attempt is folly. We're are all dissembling.
  
  I love Joe Brainard's art. Whether it's visual or textual, Joe is preternaturally honest. He writes without a filter. Sure, there's something of Frank O'Hara in his work. These are the circles in which Joe ran. Padgett embraces and contextualizes all of this. This book gives us one man's version of Joe Brainard, but given his closeness to the subject, it's essential.
• 
  Eddie Watkins

  A remarkably lifeless, though breezy enough, memoir of the remarkable visual/verbal artist Joe Brainard. He and the poet Ron Padgett were something like best friends from high school until Brainard's premature death in 1994, and all that shared experience and subsequent memories do add up to lots of details about their lives, but in the end it just feels like a lot of details with very little insight. For instance, there's a moment in the book when Padgett's discussing one of Joe's periodic bouts with depression, as narrated by some of Joe's letters to others, and Padgett admits in retrospect that he had no idea that Joe was depressed. I know it can be hard to tell when even close friends are "going through something", but this is just one detail among many that told me that Padgett couldn't see the depths of personality within Joe, possibly because of Padgett's admitted "sunny disposition". I guess I just expect more insight from writers.
  
  I know all biographies and memoirs don't need to delve into psychology, but this one could've used a dose of it to break through the surface treatment, especially as many of the artist characters populating this book (primarily New York School and Second New York School figures) come across as grown-up children living social butterfly lives flitting from this opening to that book release party to that idyllic vacation house in Vermont (okay, maybe some spiteful envy on my part regarding the vacation house). I actually enjoyed these parts of the book to a conditional degree, as I'm very familiar with nearly all of them through their works (even to the extent that I consider many of them imaginary friends), but it did get dry after a while and led to something I very rarely do - skimming.
  
  I did like how the book was broken up into many nearly self-contained chapters, which added an appropriate airiness to the text; and there were some standout gems of chapters, such as the short one entitled "Joe's Hand" in which Padgett describes the pleasures of simply watching Joe draw:
  
  "His draftsmanship had a magical effect on me. Watching him draw always elicited a pleasant tingling in the back of my head and down my neck, as if someone were gently tickling me, and I would start to feel drowsy, like a child drifting off into an afternoon nap."
  
  which is fantastic and kind of contagious (I actually experienced vicarious tingling), and demonstrates Padgett's own remarkable ability to see and describe responses very clearly and effectively; but I would've liked for him to apply the same skills to discussing Brainard's egocentric oddities and perversions (sexual and otherwise). Padgett proved incapable of that (and I admire his integrity and honesty in not even trying, for tacitly admitting his shortcomings). This memoir does, however, become very touching at the end as Brainard is diagnosed HIV positive and increasingly gets sicker and sicker. Very sad.
  
  Yes this is a personal memoir by a close friend, and doesn't try to be anything else, but maybe the subject was just too close to the observer/writer leading to a paradoxical limiting of scope and perspective. I still love Joe and his works, and because of that I'm still waiting for a meatier bio by someone who's capable of plumbing his perverse depths. I know the 1st and 2nd generation New York schools were mostly all about exciting surfaces, but everyone also has depths and bios should attempt to reveal them.
• 
  nero wolfe

  Five stars because it's Joe.