Regarding the Publication of Two Crude Books– Grant Maierhofer
What I’ve attempted here is an explanation of sorts. A Charles Foster Kane, so to speak, scrawling what I hoped for on the front of what I’ve done in case something’s lost between those spaces. I’m not sure. In short, two things were published this year for which I will be held responsible. I’m not sure about these things, and so I write in perhaps a circuitous manner to become more sure, though I doubt that’s anywhere close to happening. I live of late in a Beckettian sink and I’ve tended to just let the proverbial chips fall and observe their spins and gestures. That is all.
They both began as frustrated growths on the back of my first novel. Marcel, the story collection, written as an attempt to bend the form a bit and shed the autobiographical; and Postures, a last ditch and last nod to personal concerns before contending with something like history, perhaps. I wrote one over years and revised as each story took shape and found hospice before its last scribbles. I wrote the other in a stretch of months after reading Cèline and Exley in close consort and needing to respond in turn.
Marcel was published by a nascent press with broad ambition and small press élan. Their comforts are complete and human, and with that book’s release I’ve committed needed parricide against the parental First Novel and spread my guts that much clearer across the workshop floor.
Postures is the eighth in Publication Studio’s Fellow Travelers Series and I find myself in the company of past heroes like Marlow and Killian, Jeppesen et al, as my second novel is wrapped up with independent means and given to the coffee’d hands of whomsoever.
A process, if there’s been one, has been abject failure through and through. What I like is to focus on some absence, some missed note from the canon that lets me revel a bit in my ineptitude before scrawling indiscernible static through some pages. I think of writing and writers as a largely precious bunch from whom I’ve run, and the writing I’ve managed seems more for the janitorial staff of any clinic than it is the grand haughty reams of history.
I am a ghoul and a failure, and these are what’s offered through my ramblings, little else. I think of Vito Acconci’s lived admonition that we leave the printed word for the performative and eventually architectural, but miss the memo entirely. I want to fail amid the pages and ambitious louts for all time. I love the writer as loser, the Kate Zambreno notion of writers past as an army of possible heroines to prattle at when the television won’t wash out all things contemporary. I love the Beckettian dog in the digital world without a clue. I wrote these texts for them. I lived within the texts because I couldn’t breathe at readings where all seemed satisfied to talk and talk. All I could manage were boyish mumbles and bratty chants from back where nobody could look.
It’s an unfortunately particular stance to take, and yet it matters: the book in its perpetual last breaths continues to snivel at mattering and so I stick with it, half pulled to the grave and half pulling the dying Novel for one last round of bowls of cereal and television. I do these things and say them what’s more and nothing much will come of it. I feel the failure of history to live up to its father’s bloated goad, and therein find the pages I need to write.
I consider the Lish school and the advent of the sentence and his consecution and it helps; but even still a hero sought is another lost year when it comes to this piddling avocation. Heroes and idols must be strung up in so many words inside the mind and rules and regulations duly dashed. I’d advocate for the simultaneous digitization and destruction of every great artwork until the Louvre’s masterpieces were replaced with middle schoolers’ bored empty lines. I’m into movement, and sought it in the writing I guess. I’m into moving forward, but accelerationism also bores me—I cannot stand the hashtag. I think the future of something can’t necessarily be found in the previous incarnations of said something. I’m not sure.
So failure bubbled up and I trusted it and wrote these books. One filled with short hometowny rambling and attempted experimentation; the other a longer narrative toward the end of required narrativizing of mine own lived lives. They are corny and weak, ambling and occasionally flexible, and they exist for your perusal.
Intermittently the bits from the novel became available online as various Erasure(s). My goal I guess was to publish the whole thing through simple freeing streams and thus avoid the papered book, but this was foolish. Marcel‘s fragments were available here and there more toward the shipments to the printer as half-assed tries at personal enrichment or something. When I sat and wrote I was talking and not listening, trying to pin down a self-within-a-self that might talk back and tell me where I’d hid my keys or the remote or my better nature. Any of this is just as true as not—I just wrote and ruined it and let all appear as it was.
I don’t think of writers, or their ilk, when I think of writing. I think of begrimed old videos I’ve seen in dreary classrooms projected over the eyeballs of tired undergraduates. I think of all that human vying and ambition and its meeting place with every good day’s work by those who never thought to make a life of note taking. I wrote the way I wrote because I can’t do better and I’m just as flagrantly ambitious as the arm-raising finish liner. I accept my trying I guess. There’s an honesty in it maybe. Someone somewhere, a digitized Lord Crunkington III, in the annals of the Internet, once said: @postcrunk: there is no good or bad art, just honest art and insincere art, and my tendency is to agree and take my leave.
Fragments from fragments of the work
ERASURE I (BERFROIS)
You develop habits. You learn to relish your time in the shower because it’s the only place you truly feel alone. You learn to relish therapeutic techniques like writing or reading time because those are the only times you feel truly free with your ideas. You learn to enjoy the rather drab elements of evening television and movie nights because as entertainment alongside one’s kin it’s simply all you’ve got. You learn to get past the emotion in your sister’s voice when you speak over the phone about all your friends, about how they’re worried about you and they wish you would come home, about how mom and dad told them you were getting special eye surgery and were spending time with a tutor so you could learn how to write properly again. You learn to fool tutors, learn to test quickly out of subjects because you don’t want to exercise your mental faculties with them; you want to do that alone. You learn what it means to lie and to be lied to, learn just what medication is capable of. You learn from other occupants that drugs might be the ticket to a better and more interesting life. You spend hours staring out the window at one bird on top of one tree and you wonder if it’s the same bird from a day ago, from two days, from three. The bird changes its habits, some days it’s on a wiry branch taking all the risks in the world, and some days it’s on a good firm branch because the wind is causing its feathers to ruffle horribly. You learn to appreciate those black birds, and you learn from certain writers that sadness doesn’t always have to be bad, but that it does always have to be. You develop a habit of masturbating quite often and this in turn mellows you out that much more. You get good grades, invent craft projects, listen to the music on the radio and even sometimes sing along when you and the van full of kin go to the YMCA. And when you’re finally ready, when it’s finally time to leave that place, you don’t want to go, and you wind up staying another half a year because you’re too scared to see what the outside will look like. You’re too scared to see the movies or what your friends will now have in their lives. You’re too scared to eventually be honest with the friends that matter about your misery because you think they’ll think you a freak. You’re beginning to obsess over little, trivial things like what color your mother’s car was before you came in. You’re wondering what a Frosty from Wendy’s would taste like on a hot summer day, wondering what your father’s voice would sound like when he calls from the living room that something interesting is on TV, and all of this slowly plucks, and plucks, and plucks at you until finally your parents tell you it’s time to leave, and you do, and nothing in your life can ever remain as it was before you stepped into that cafeteria—blood dripping from your leg—and keeled over in awful submission to the spectacle of the world.
Erasure II (VOL. 1 BROOKLYN)
He walked to his room after that, changing into this holed-up denim shirt he always wore, looking over at the shelves of books he’d yet to read. The sad truth is that buying books is almost as addicting for the aspiring young scribe as reading them is in your late teen years. When X was younger it was all about going to the library and picking up Hemingway, or Hesse, or Hunter S. Thompson, and taking them home to devour them, and write notes, and read about the figures behind them online and really inhale the literature in vacant rooms at his father’s house. Now he probably read a book a week, and bought three or four. He’d go to bookstores around the city and see names he’d never heard of, or books he’d never heard of from names he’d known full-well his entire youth.
Once he found The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas, and because he’d heard so much about his Musketeers, and Monte Cristo, he simply had to pick that one up out of sheer ignorance and the bliss that followed. He still has it sitting on his shelf and has yet to read it, has yet to even make a guess as to what it’s about, but the fact that it’s on the shelf does provide a certain comfort he cannot deny. Some people collect furniture; some collect sexual partners; some collect nights and nights of drinking and losing their minds in public. X happens to collect books.
He’d managed to pare the list down to mostly books he had at least the slightest interest in reading, and thus was slowly knocking them off one by one—upon finishing another book he’d place it on a shelf across from the room, which he referred to as his ‘Kill List,’ the place where, should he have been a hunter, he imagined his taxidermied deer would sit. He was currently reading Opium, and Past Tense, both essentially journals of Jean Cocteau. Cocteau was recently taking the place of his favorite author, and the more he read him—or read of him—the more X fell in love. Although he thought Opium a largely minor book, and his illustrations at the end serve as the most interesting content printed between its covers, his journaling in Past Tense, a diary he released intentionally at the end of his life as a sort of mea culpa, farewell to it all; X thought these superb.
His notes on Past Tense read:
“No man living or dead has written more logical dissertations on the pangs and tumult of the theater, nor of the drawling and incomprehensible language of Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time,’ and every night, after I go out walking, after I slow my mind enough to sit comfortably in bed and allow my thoughts to focus on one particular thing, I read him and become enamored with the world he enacts.”
Erasure III (EVERYDAY GENIUS)
X thinks frequently of writing little things about men watching the women they’re required to clean the rooms of in mental institutions, but nothing ever comes of it. X hurts feelings quite a lot. This is something he’s adept at, so to speak. He doesn’t like to watch sporting events and so he does not do this unless they are on where he happens to be doing something that he likes at least a bit more. Do you understand what he’s saying.
Today he’ll meet somebody, just before it becomes tonight he’ll meet somebody. He’ll send himself email copies of the sonnets he’s written and something will result. Just what it is remains to be seen.
X has never purported to be a good person. At least he doesn’t think this is the case. X would not desire to purport this to you, or to anybody. X hopes this makes sense. He’s not necessarily evil or amoral, but X does not have a prominent moral compass and he thinks a lot of it comes from his middle class upbringing. X hopes this is OK.
“You should get a cat.” Someone will say this to X at some point in his life not knowing that he already owns a cat and loves him very much. They will detect a sadness in X that they’ve decided is directly related to the paucity of felines in his life and they will thus suggest that X should get a cat. He’ll walk away from them and the whole friendship fully aware that he’s going home to pet his cat and watch Repo Man.
Repo Man is a film that makes X feel good. Paris, Texas is a film that makes X feel good while feeling bad. Harry Dean Stanton figures prominently in both of these films. Harry Dean Stanton could potentially provide X with all possible human emotion in just these two films if he decided the hermetic life was for him and gave it all up.
ERASURE IV (QUEEN MOBS TEAHOUSE)
X’s time in high school was like yours, and he was miserable. Like you he remained separated from everybody as much as possible, only coming along for nights in the country when there were enough weird drugs, or booze for him to forget just how painfully normal they all were. And like you he obsessively began to watch movies about punk rock, and alternative cultures, trying to find exactly how he fit into the gigantic melee of confusion that was the United States. Like you he made it a point to damn his parents and everything they believed in, and living in St. Paul he spent a good deal of time driving around on Highway 94 to the surrounding suburbs with his sister and their friends getting high and drunk and being careless, maybe free. X enjoyed danger, enjoyed the sensation of being on that edge he’d heard described by men like Hunter S. Thompson, wishing he’d been born years earlier so he could’ve been a Hell’s Angel or something. He tried most of his drugs in those days, and has slowed down since out of sheer boredom with that world. He drank enough in high school to satiate the bibulous desires of any fifty-year-old war veteran. He’d to go punk shows in Minneapolis and wind up passed out on some couch next to some twenty-three year old girl with tattoos of bands like Joy Division and Black Flag and he’d playfully suck on her neck when four in the morning got too lonely. He cut myself a little more but was taking anti-depressants and thus didn’t get too down on himself for those slip-ups. On occasion he got in trouble for drinking and received various admonitions from police and parents by the time he was eighteen. He spent one night in jail on his nineteenth birthday and that night was one of his final bouts of real drinking; all indirectly related to a mood-shifting breakup with his high school sweetheart. He enjoyed the hell out of himself, much like you, but remained convinced all along that this was probably the worst place in the world to grow up. He went to see Garrison Keillor’s show with his father and his rebound girlfriend and had an OK time, went to see his mother after that and spent the evening watching Audrey Hepburn movies on her couch with his rebound girlfriend, Ella, and his sister. He spent many nights alone in his room listening to Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, and Elliott Smith. Somehow the two seem to signify his youth better than any description could do. Smith’s work has always connected X with that miserable core all possess. Misery is humanity to X, and out of that misery came a profound change that he kept running back to time and time again with his rendition of ‘Figure 8,’ and songs like ‘Needle in the Hay,’ that described pain better than everything else. With Iggy Pop he felt connected to the weirdness all possess at the very core, and on that record in particular Iggy Pop had accessed something that goes largely unnoticed by the rest of the world. David Bowie, in X’s eyes, won all the credit that Iggy Pop deserved, and X couldn’t help but feel cheated every time Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy period was mentioned without even the acknowledgment of Pop’s Idiot. Those were the first times he felt connected with music.
FROM SEAN KILPATRICK’S INTRODUCTION (INCLUDED IN THE BOOK/BERFROIS)
“Nobody seems ready to let anyone else love something for the hell of it.”
We place restrictions on love because it never existed. Likewise art regimented by currency does nothing but trend. All creative output has been demoted to the same reliant lung work of some pettier currency. That’s where we stand as conglomerate peoples: likewise and not worth being. We nametag portions of our quality flaked against time like a drive-by shooting (they won’t allow us to romanticize or revel in anything selfish these days precisely because everything is selfish) and say something was achieved. Labor for the tap dancing void. We dug our crimes a hole and the climate took a snifter of us with it. At least our measles have a niche, cave wall slash that cries fuck procession. No, in no way will we muster a blip. There’s too many of us. There were too many of us before we were mammals. Let’s die sentence one, scratch out our legacy either with minor voices, innovation, or general meanness. A message to this book is: if you want to write, begin by sucking an avalanche.
You can’t call someone immature just because they’re living out their abortion. A somnolent amount of Victorian adulthood stacks the novel. Maierhofer has committed a great atrocity against homeownership by displaying affection for shit you can’t truly buy. Meaning a book, not the humdrum commerce of infants being had. A book is only ever in a container until it rots your thought. A baby is a thing that suffers land. The worst part isn’t everybody bows to money. I’m Irish enough to be practically half awake. It’s that they’ve fashioned money into a couth plasmatic akin with manhood. Age or status are not abstract nouns to be enforced. You have to smile in the meantime, have to take pride or they lock you up. You have to stone your medium life across the less productive or you’re not a citizen. Orphan others by the bank account or be stuck in a teenhood caste will smite. Then you can stand refined by the self-aware futility of your gameplay and create pariahs on the phone, the poses you can’t fess up to, sneering in each profile.
FROM GERMÁN SIERRA’S ‘A WORLD BURIED IN STRUCTURES’ REGARDING THE WORK
Postures is a coming-of-age novel that reads perfectly as meta-satire about the lit scene—the growing and confusing internet-driven ecosystem that serves as a last refuge of intellectual pride for an underemployed, hyper-entertained generation comprised of people of all ages and social extractions after the general cultural and economic collapse of the so called middle class—. People who have arguably nothing else to do except for buying a pre-fabricated version of corporate-produced rebellious aesthetics for devoting themselves to the necrotic social network of the arts. Freedom means commodification. Commodified punk aesthetics became the modern version of romantic ennui, allowing bearers such as X to regularly go into quasi-Bernhardian rants against American (now global) pop culture: a paradoxical set of beliefs and aesthetic values promoting, at the same time, extreme individuation and absolute social integration—being celebrity the highest representation of this irresolute tension, the maximum level of individuation and solitude combined with universal recognition of the reflection of one’s self. At its peak, networking the social has resulted in the universalization of judgmental attitudes: Judgment— writes Mohaghegh— is now everywhere, witness to the strategic use of finality to achieve a self-regulating, self-monitoring subjectivity, itself a guarantor of allegiance to the collective trance. It targets consciousness with arresting despair and impermanence, trying to extract a desire for reabsorption, confirmation, and vicious self-dejection, exerting its gestures of negation and reclaiming from all sides. [7]
KEVIN KILLIAN REGARDING THE WORK
“X, a young Midwestern novelist of uncertain talent, attends a Chicago-based writing program and relapses, after a few years of relative, Celexa-fueled relief from depression and self-harm. Though his world grows dark and cold, and he moves away from society with the unerring sincerity of the pilgrim, we never lose faith in X, due to Maierhofer’s impressive storytelling. He’s good both at the level of detail (and sentence), and in the larger picture (and for what might still be called “plot,” even in a novel so postmodern and affectless). Postures establishes itself early on as a guide to young America, but if I’d read the French translation, I would be thinking of Baudelaire, his poetry and fury and contempt and his sadness and his call for a transfixing fire.” – Kevin Killian, author of Spreadeagle.
SOME TEXTS WITH WHICH POSTURES ATTEMPTS TO COMMUNICATE
“Why’s Céline a great writer? Because he pisses on everything.” -- W.T. Vollmann
LINKS
Buy 'Postures'
Forthcoming: SL0XX - PX138 3100-2686 'User’s Manual' - Grant Maierhofer
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p.s. Hey. Today the blog has the great privilege of doing its small part to help open the eyes of the internet-connected portion of the world to the nearly brand spanking new novel by the superb writer and d.l. Mr. Grant Maierhofer. And you guys get to have the pleasure of having your eyes opened by it. Kind of a total win-win situation. So, enjoy! And thank you kindly, Grant, for letting the blog have a piece of your pie! ** Jonathan, Yay! About your healthy, devoted response to the post, and about today having ended up being THE DAY! Interesting, interesting. Yes, I think more than one is going to be the deal. Well, definitely. The first decision re: the buches, which will be shared by Kiddiepunk, Oscar B, Zac, and myself, was made collectively yesterday. And it is ... Hôtel Plazza Athenee! My guess is that two more of those suckers will be scored to. Zac and I are both super into the Park Hyatt Paris-Vendôme one, so I think that's a for-sure buy. And I don't see how I can resist La Maison Lenotre's buche, unless it looks a lot less cool in person, and, since La Maison Lenotre is literally a twenty second walk from my front door, I will know as soon as they put it in their window, meaning probably on Monday. That's funny: when we were in Montreal for the film festival, I ate breakfast with a breakfasting Wim Wenders sitting at the next table too. What are the odds? We saw his new film at the festival too, and it was a big blah. Things are calm-ish and pretty good here. Not as calm as where you are, I imagine, mind you. Love, me. ** Tomkendall, Hi, Tom. The Enfer one seems to have been pretty popular, interesting. I like it, but its conventional basic form might leave it among the after runs. Not sure. Need to see it for real. Will do. Post your wipeouts! Trujillo: I stayed at these super rich people's house on the main plaza. I was mostly out in the surrounding area working because I was there to indulge my then-dream of becoming an archaeologist. Which was killed by that trip when I realized how incredibly tedious it is being an archeologist. There are some really cool, huge rotting temples and ancient ruins around there. I remember the city being cozy, but my main memory is of the extreme poverty of a lot of people there. That was the first time I had even been out of the US, and I was really shocked by what real poverty looked like. I don't remember Chicha Morado. Huh. I do remember that the family I was staying with poured sugar on top of their steaks before they ate them, which totally freaked me out. I'll write to you today. ** Sypha, Hi. Yeah, that's a nice buche. I need to see what it looks like in person, but yeah. ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, RIP indeed to the sublime Setsuko Hara. I just heard about that last night. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. The Picard is cool. It's ice cream. And it's cheap. So it might get a buy too. Oh, the diet thing, yeah, I get you. So, basically they want you to go vegan? A vegan diet is pretty hot once you get used to it. Yeah, wait and see. Almost always the best policy. Interesting. ** Bill, We do seem to. Lenotre is pretty definite. I mean, I feel like I'd kick myself if I missed it. I too thought the Chaussard was/is obscene, now that you mention it. Editing is the best! Enjoy every snip! ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Thank you. Yeah, Perpetua is a real possibility. It was a virtual guarantee until we saw the Park Hyatt Paris-Vendôme one. If we get a log one, I think it'll be that one. Anyway, when the decisions are made, I'l report back and probably do slideshows. I'm a big fan of Codeine. My very, very favorite of theirs is the 'Barely Real' EP. And 'Jr' is one of my all-time favorite songs. But yeah, I love them. 'The White Birch' is my favorite of their albums. I know Bedhead a little, but not enough to have a fully formed opinion. You a fan? Should I dive in? ** S., Nice story, man, I liked it a lot. Hm, interesting smell, it seems. Huh. Long ago, I had an affair or whatever you want to call it with a guy who had epilepsy. He smelled very distinct. Astral. Never been there. When I was a teen, a friend told me he was always astral projecting into my bedroom. I didn't like him. Oh, shit it's Thanksgiving today, isn't it? I only just now remembered. I guess I'll wish you a Happy Thanksgiving even though it would be my pick for the worst holiday ever. Or I mean the holiday with the worst merch and ephemera ever. ** Etc etc etc, Zero Books ... I don't think so? I'll investigate. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T. Them being amazing is the key thing. I will listen to Gary and Michael talk. Maybe today. Maybe. I think some of the big French patisseries that have outlets in the UK sell their buches there? No one fave. The Lenotre, the Hôtel Plazza Athenee, the Park Hyatt Paris-Vendôme, ... others. The Mandarin Oriental one is kind of a dark horse. Need to see it 'in the flesh', though. ** Chris Dankland, Hi, Chris. I really, really liked your reading and what you read! I think I said this before, but I really like your voice. You should definitely meet up (and read) with xTx. I had the great pleasure of hanging out with her once. She's awesome. I think there's a new Frank Hinton novel coming out soon? I love FH's work. One of the weird things that seemed to come with the death of the term 'Alt Lit' is that certain writers who had a big presence and were posting and doing things a lot seemed to become reclusive. I hardly ever see anything of/from FH around anymore. Or, like, Walter Mackey. I really liked his stuff, and now I wouldn't know where to find him if he's still doing stuff. And Beach Sloth hardly writes about books anymore. And Tao and the writers in his scene seem much more quiet. Etc. I kind of miss that whole very wide, visible scene. But evolution is good. Ha, yeah, Gary and I did a US book tour together for my 'Frisk' and his 'Horse Crazy'. It was, as you read, a wild tour. Oh, late March for AWP, hm. That might be possible. It would be a lot of fun. There are so many writers I really like whom I would love to meet. You top among them. If you're doing Thanksgiving, may it rock you! ** Steevee, Ha ha, that is a funny thing to imagine. How much did they squirm? ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Happy T-Spot/Day. I have yet to see anyone who was described as 'ruggedly handsome' who warranted the second word in that phrase, but I'm weird. ** Mark Gluth, Hi, Mark. Park Hyatt, yes! Zac and I are really into that one I'm glad somebody here shared our taste. Praline noisette is/are as delicious as they/it sound, trust me. Oh, dude, I'm a junkie for your talking about your novel thinking. I'm a fiction process junkie in general. Then, since you know you will enjoy the holiday today, I wish you an especially great one buddy. ** Right. Fight off whatever there is fight off about Thanksgiving, which I personally imagine would be most of it, by retreating into the mysterious, unimpeachable talent of Grant Maierhofer. Okay? Deal? Good. See you tomorrow.