Playwright-turned-novelist Kirk Lynn on Joe Brainard, James Thurber, and other influences on Rules for Werewolves

Rules for Werewolves
by Kirk Lynn
(Melville House, 2015)

Our series of guest posts by contemporary writers discussing their influences continues with a contribution from Austin-based playwright Kirk Lynn, whose debut novel, Rules for Werewolves, relates the exploits of a group of teenage squatters entirely through dialogue. Critic Greil Marcus is already a fan of the book, stating: “You get caught up with these people. You take sides. And then Kirk Lynn confounds your expectations at every turn.”

Joe Brainard taught me everything I know. I Remember is the greatest American novel that isn’t one. Brainard writes hundreds of sentences over the years that begin, “I remember . . .” and then tells the truth about growing up queer in Oklahoma, becoming an avant-garde painter in New York, and everything in between. It is a litany that wakes you up in its repetition. I keep it on my desk. It’s better than the Internet for browsing.

The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson is another novel that isn’t. It asks the reader to do a lot of the work along with it, which gives me a feeling of companionship. All of Anne Carson’s books are radical, but the narrative in this one was very personal and close to me, so I keep it near. How does love work? And when it stops working, what then?

David Markson is an assassin. He killed the American novel, that vampire that gets up again and again, thank god. But read Vanishing Point, or This is Not a Novel, and it’s hard to find a better companion book. Little histories of literature and art, complete in themselves, and totally different from one another. Read Wittgenstein’s Mistress, the book that seems to have taught the author how to write in his own voice. These are all novels told in the connection of ideas, one sentence urging the reader to think about its connection to the next. If there are composers who know how to use silence, David Markson is a writer who knows how to use his reader’s consciousness.

The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas
by Gertrude Stein
(Harcourt, Brace,
and Company, 1933)

Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is one of the books that helped the future arrive. As with so much of the literature I adore, Gertrude Stein sees no reason to abandon humor in order to find intelligence. She sees no reason to abandon fact to write fiction. She sees no reason to let anyone else write Alice B. Toklas’s autobiography. You can go as deep as your tolerance for strangeness and meditation will allow into Gertrude Stein’s oeuvre and always be rewarded, but you can’t go very deep into literature if you won’t dive into this autobiography.

Conversations with Beethoven by Sanford Friedman is the standard of avant-garde elegance. Fact: Unable to hear a lick, Beethoven had to be addressed in writing for the last year of his life. The novel takes the form of the notebooks the composer carried in which people wrote their questions and requests. The maestro spoke his answers, so his responses are not recorded in the novel. It’s a one-sided conversation between the world and a silent Beethoven, but the composer’s passion and outsize personality dominate the narrative and echo in your mind for a good while after you’ve finished the book.

Imago by Octavia E. Butler is all about transformation and becoming something you’re not, both inside and out. I think the book changed me. I don’t read a lot of sci-fi, but if you can get your hands on one or two real gems a year, it’s good for your full mental range—and Butler is one of the perfect mixologists, balancing deep thought and a ripping yarn.

The Girl Who Owned a City by O. T. Nelson is a weird little wonder that fell into my hands when my middle school teacher, Mrs. Bathke, either assigned it or smuggled it into my life. A strange virus kills off everyone on earth older than twelve and the kids have to figure out how to feed and care for themselves, including how to defend themselves from other terrible twelve-year-olds. Dystopian fiction before it was all the rage. And the author never wrote another book and no one seems to know if he’s alive or dead.

Carpenter's Gothic
by William Gaddis
(Viking, 1985)

Carpenter’s Gothic could also be subtitled, for me, “the William Gaddis book I could read.” Another novel in dialogue, this one digging into the underbelly of American capitalism and colonialism. I remember falling into a trance and reading quickly. I remember reading bits of it aloud with friends. I remember there’s only one sentence of description and it’s about the leaves outside.

Emily Dickinson, especially The Gorgeous Nothings, can be an angel who responds to doubt. She did her work her way and I’m not half feral enough to get as free as she was, but some corner of the idea that form is personal and the work is its own reward can protect you. And then the work itself is so revelatory and prophetic!

And if there is one book that inspired me after I was done with Rules and made me want to get back to the prose, it’s Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill. Told in short, aphoristic bursts that find some middle ground between David Markson and Anton Chekhov, this book broke my heart and made want to be a better dad and husband in addition to driving me wild with envy as a writer.

And Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write! Short, sharp, human, hilarious thinking about dialogue and umbrellas and penises. I don’t read a lot of nonfiction or essays, either, but like sci-fi if you get the right one or two a year your brain will thank you. Because these are one hundred essays all jammed into one little book, it can count for a couple years’ worth of essay reading.

James Thurber:
Writings and Drawings
(Library of America, 1996)

You can convince yourself that James Thurber is totally legit because he was all over the New Yorker. But you know who might have a problem with that is the ghost of James Thurber. He didn’t have a high opinion of people who had too high an opinion of themselves. But as far as a guide for the kind of writing that doesn’t know whether it’s funny or sad, you can do no better than Thurber. And there is an openness to his formal approach to story, he captures the odd sad moment in cartoons one minute and then stretches them out to a fable and then abandons the pictures and makes short story of the captions in a sequential story like “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and then sometimes takes that same conceit and dips it in real sorrow like “The Whip-Poor-Will.” A great guide if you’re looking to get lost in the American voice.

Kirk Lynn is one of six co-producing artistic directors of Austin’s Rude Mechanicals theater collective and also the head of the Playwriting and Directing Area in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. Recent works include Your Mother’s Copy of the Kama Sutra, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons in New York City in 2014, and the 2014 Lincoln Center commission Stop Hitting Yourself.

Previous “Influences” posts:
Jabari Asim • Deborah Baker • Kate Christensen • Jennifer Gilmore
Lauren Groff • Lev Grossman • Alan Heathcock • Jane Hirschfield
Sara Jaffe • Alexandra Kleeman • Amitava Kumar • Adam Levin
Annie Liontas • Dawn McGuire • Dinaw Mengestu • Jim Moore
Manuel Muñoz • Maggie Nelson • Viet Thanh Nguyen
Geoffrey O’Brien • Arthur Phillips • Carl Phillips • Karen Russell
Timothy Schaffert • Philip Schultz • Mark Statman • Emma Straub
J. Courtney Sullivan • Ellen Ullman • Adam Wilson

Anne Lauterbach, Brad Gooch, and Edmund White on “the real thing,” Joe Brainard

Last week the McNally Jackson bookstore in New York City circulated a quite splendid email celebrating the new Library of America volume The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard. “Artist, poet, book designer, cartoonist, memoirist, and gay icon, Joe Brainard is almost uniformly celebrated by those who've read him and too-little known by those who haven't,” read its opening.

The impulse that prompted this email—the impulse to share the discovery of a writer who seems to defy easy categorization yet who makes a lasting impression in an unusually intimate way—is strikingly similar to what motivated the creation of “I Remember Joe Brainard,” a page where thirteen friends and fellow artists offer video tributes that try to recapture what made Brainard such a captivating personality and influential artist.

Here is close friend and confidante, art consultant, poet, and essayist Anne Lauterbach on the flavor of the time:

It was an interesting moment in American poetics. There was a withdrawal from confessional work, which had dominated the literary scene in the 50s, and then in the 60s there was a riot of all of those notions of importance or significance. It all got very confused, and for someone in our generation it was a real turn. The first generation of the New York School looked at a lot of things, not all of them American. So they set a new kind of constellation in motion. Barbara Guest looking at H.D., reaching back to another formulation of modernism. Of course [John] Ashbery had a deep immersion in French culture before anyone else did. And then [James] Schuyler and [Frank] O’Hara, too. That group of people made this very interesting nexus of connection among the arts, wanting poetry to be in relation to the other configurations of culture. And Joe was very conscious of that, which is why he did both writing and drawing. There was a great moment when those were not separate arenas. You didn’t have to make this kind of singularity out of your work. You didn’t have to be one thing. . . .

I think there is an irony that the main piece of writing he created was I Remember and around the period of his leaving too early there is this recuperative remembering of Joe. To me, there’s something about that that is oddly accurate, a fit that makes you conscious.

Brad Gooch recalls what it was like to be writing poetry at the same time as Brainard—and now to be teaching him:

In terms of writing poems myself, Joe was part of a world that became a kind of aesthetic. He was a hero worshiper of Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, poets I was also a worshiper of and influenced by. Both of them were very experimental, gay, and tended to write about their friends and daily life. They tried not to be conventional, academic, or corny. All of that came through Joe, and them. The interesting thing with Joe was that he was closer to my generation. Joe, from the Midwest, has a kind of American adolescent voice and casual appearance—ease—that seemed more contemporary. He could write a poem so simply out of your own memories, your own raw material, and it could be as exciting as The Wasteland.

When I teach creative writing at William Paterson University in New Jersey, students always respond to I Remember more than any other poem. It’s the greatest inspiration for their own poetry, because everyone has memory. Somehow Joe gives them permission to write what they’re actually thinking and feeling, rather than what they’re supposed to be thinking and feeling. Certainly being around Joe, he did give me that kind of permission. He was incredibly supportive. I felt sheepishly honored in a way that he was being my friend. All of these things had an influence on me. He was an encouraging kind of guy. Sometimes it was odd to realize he would beat himself up about his qualities that were making his art and poetry great. He had a side that maybe he was supposed to be Whistler or W. H. Auden. He didn’t act on that, but it was interesting that he struggled with that. That struggle made him seem more contemporary than more distant figures.

Edmund White was already an established writer when he met Brainard in the seventies, yet found the young writer affected him personally:

I don’t think his work impacted mine at all. I was quite old when I met him, so I’d already written a lot by that point. I was also a very sophisticated writer who wrote books that were infused with other works of literature. I had been a professor, a critic, everything he wasn’t. He was naïve; he was immediate in his taste. His taste reigned supreme in his world. If he liked something, that was it and he didn’t question it. I never heard him speculate about psychoanalysis or artistic theory. That wasn’t him at all. But he had a great influence on people’s lives, and their values. I think he made everyone feel slightly shoddy. He was so pure that you felt compromised around him. He was the real thing. I think that was the influence on our lives. He was calling us to something ideal.

Discover more from these reminiscences and from those by Frank Bidart, Ron Padgett, Robert Pinsky, among others at “I Remember Joe Brainard.”

Also of interest:

• Ron Padgett remembers his friend, the writer and artist Joe Brainard, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• Joe Brainard, “oddball classicist,” artist and memoirist, is back on display and more in print than ever, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• Find out more about Joe Brainard’s art and writings at the official Joe Brainard website
• Listen to Joe Brainard read from his work, including selections from I Remember, at PennSound
• Visit the new Joe Brainard Facebook page for updates about events and reviews related to his work

Joe Brainard, “oddball classicist,” artist and memoirist, is back on display and more in print than ever

In April The Library of America is publishing The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, the enigmatic and highly influential artist and writer who dazzled the New York art world of the sixties and seventies with his mastery of a stunning range of media: assemblages, collages, oil paintings, book and magazine covers, set designs, dance costumes, and his path-breaking mixing of poetry and comic strips. His one-of-a-kind autobiographical work I Remember (1970) established him as a distinctive literary voice, a writer of grace, depth, and insightful humor. As Paul Auster writes in his introduction to the volume:

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. . . 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.

This new volume, edited by Brainard’s longtime friend and biographer Ron Padgett, includes the complete text of I Remember as well as an unprecedented gathering of journals, stories, poems, travel diaries, one-liners, comic strips, and plays—including fourteen previously unpublished works.

By a magical coincidence Brainard would have appreciated, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College just opened on February 1 the exhibit Joe / Brains / Lamar, “a multi-format program addressing questions of archive, memory, and the genealogy of queer culture.” From February 1 through 26 the exhibit will be showing I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard by Matt Wolf which features audio recordings of Brainard reading from I Remember as well as recollections by Padgett and rare footage from Brainard’s personal archives. Accompanying the film is a curated display of archival materials on view in the CCS Bard Library.

The Brains component of the exhibit is graphic designer Carl Williamson’s revisiting of the single issue BRAINS: A Journal of Egghead Sexuality, published in 1990 by artists Nayland Blake and D. L. Alvarez to celebrate queer sexuality with “tongue-in-cheek intellectualism.” This runs from March 5 until April 1.

Viewable online from February 1 until April 1 is Project Lamar, a collaborative creation of CCS Bard graduate student Karly Wildenhaus and curator Nathan Lee, which reconfigures the Joe / Brains / Lamar exhibition as an interactive display space aimed at conflating “mediation and the curatorial gesture, archival operations and real-time inquiry, documentation and production.” Visit it to create your own collage of Brainard’s work.

Copies of The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard have just arrived in the LOA warehouse and are now available exclusively from the LOA Web Store for 25% off and free shipping. They will be in bookstores March 29. 

Also of interest:

• Find out more about Joe Brainard’s art and writings at the official Joe Brainard website
• Listen to Joe Brainard read from his work, including selections from I Remember, at PennSound
• Visit the new Joe Brainard Facebook page for updates about events and reviews related to his work