Even though it was conceived in the moment of Xerox and Selectrics – long before the distribution formats for which its style is optimized – Bernadette Mayer’s Memory highlights other aspects of our current mediascape: the compulsory documentation of quotidian banality; the accumulation of massive time-stamped archives of bite-sized data; monumentalized ephemerality; distracting multimedia juxtaposition; and the sparks and flashes that make it all worthwhile.

...a treasure of a book.

In Siglio’s reprint, which joins the images and text in book form for the first time, I find a new book entirely.

Whatever memory is, Memory was an exploration of the layers of what a person thinks they remember firsthand.

Now, at last, we have the complete Memory — published in full by Siglio Press. Its cover is velvety to the touch and its size is comfortable to read at a desk, on the couch, in bed. It seems miraculous, after all the decades of longing, to be actually able to read it inside one’s own home; it’s like having a pet constellation to marvel at in fierce containment.

I surprised myself by reading Memory in an afternoon. I read it lying flat on the concrete slab that is my outdoor space, hunched over the glossy book, my legs hot against the new spring heat that bounced off the pavement. There was something I had been craving that Memory offered me in its precise record of time, its willingness to linger, its aberrant take on self-documentation.

With its barrage of run-on sentences and its collection of haphazard, often blurry, dark photographs, Memory syncopates the ebullient and the mundane to approximate the unevenness of life’s passage—that combination of major joys, minor disasters, and moments that float somewhere in between. Flitting between the intimate and the impersonal, Memory’s combination of photography and written word mimics the flashing, fleeting experience of consciousness. Within its stream of text and image are spaces of recognition between Mayer and the reader, moments of synchronicity that collapse the decades-long gap between the hot July days of 1971 and our aching present and make Memory a hallmark of American conceptualism.

I’ve seen 'plainspoken' attached to [Mayer's] style, though, like Gertrude Stein’s, Mayer’s candor still sings mysteries on the page. Memory is not strictly a diary, but it pockets the day with similar devices; the entries read like consciousness spilled, even though, after the fact, she used both journal notes and the photos to refine and complete the text. Lines fall and trip over themselves to keep pace with her thought; objects are pilfered from their verbs; words and phrases repeat so many times they end up aural refrains cleaved from ordinary meaning.

...another route to the everyday sublime.

Writing at the pace of life, sometimes through the haze of booze or hash, Mayer captures the sensibility of the early 1970s—part hippie, part intellectual, part ennui.

Who, really, can resist New York City in the 1970s — the elongated yellow taxis, shop signs and hot-dog vendors, the World Trade Center rising? Mayer captured the Big Apple before the gloss, before Starbucks and bank branches colonized the streets and artists and writers fled, first for the other boroughs, then for other cities entirely. But Memory is first and foremost a deeply personal exercise in observation, its pages filled with shopping lists, friends, interiors of diners, evidence of trips upstate, breakfasts, trees, a shaggy-haired lover. (There’s even an analog selfie.) Seen in another light, the project seems to anticipate the way we think about representing life today, whether we’re sharing snippets of our days on Instagram or unpolished fragments of thought on Twitter. Mayer...was a rebel of form who refused to see life as a continuous, unspooling narrative filled with straightforward meanings. In her thoughts and images, we find an immersion in quotidian minutiae, synecdoche for a lost era that feels almost eerily contemporary..