Review: PERIPATET by Grant Maierhofer

Major self-loathing, doubt, guilt. Portrait of the artist as an open bleeding conduit of influences attempting to cauterize via oblation. Diary of critiques, search histories, and borrowed texts. Excavation of a bottomless malady.

I'm trying to make my review more coherent and sequential, but I find that that betrays the substance of the object. This is an intimate version of the author's reality as he tries to wrestle with writing the thing you're reading, as you're reading it. He includes samples of literature, criticisms, and whatnot written by other people. This method is apparently called "ambient nonfiction," a term I had not come across before reading this book. It is interesting, like receiving spurts of oxygen while being drowned. When it works, it nicely breaks up the torrent of intensity that is Maierhofer's id. There are large portions of quoted passages from Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, which I have not read. Maierhofer points to this book as his aspirational ideal for Peripatet.

"If there's a literary work I'd most like to live within it might be Pierre..." 

Throughout this exploration of life as a teacher, writer, husband, father, we are mostly with Maierhofer in the Now. Walking side-by-side with his neurosis as he sometimes flashes back to show us the ills of his childhood. The death of his father, which haunts him. His current state screams with malaise and guilt. He's:

"...moneyless and fucked...depressed and anxious and certain you're an evil person."

Maierhofer writes almost pleadingly about the struggle of the writer to want to feel what his idols and inspirations felt. To writhe in blood with Yukio Mishima, or crunch needles under boot in the Cabrini Green projects. He is also a goddamn great crafter of sentences.

"I don't know the extent of the mistakes I've made but they are likely the mistakes you've made and maybe worse I'm not exactly sure. I don't know what to make of them and I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do about mistakes. I want to confess. It's a part of my disorder." 

"The process of generating nonfiction is like peeling back a phantom wound." 

Maierhofer is an English teacher, I believe, and Peripatet does occasionally feel like reading through articles on the Craft & Criticism section of a literary website (albeit all written by the same self-hating graphomaniac). It offers only questions though, no answers, which opens up possibilities. You can take what you want from his struggles. You can take nothing and simply bask in the miasma.
He tells us numerous times what the work is trying to do, with a different goal each time. He claims the book is about literary praxis here, his own death there... to my mind he never hits any of these scattered targets, but that's probably, definitely, the point. He even acknowledges this (directly after stating yet again what the work is here to do):

"An author's intentions become irrelevant when spread as thin as this." 

Then on the next page

"I do not seek or hope to put forth anything like an answer." 

I thoroughly enjoyed most of Peripatet, and I think it will mainly appeal to other artists. It is a long book, even though the font changes and pictures make it a much quicker read than the size suggests. I think that some of the perfunctory padding (ambient sampling) could have been cut out. I get the feeling that this is Grant spilling the last of his guts, with the remains not quite filling the hole. But this is the end, he wants to write himself empty. It's a recurring motif:

"I want my next work to be final and then I'll go off and fish with my kids. I want to go to sleep for the next thirty years. I want to spend the days with lifers."

It has the contradictions and pains and manic confusion of most grown artists who still simmer with forms of preteen angst. Being one of them myself, Peripatet often made me feel better and worse from sentence to sentence. This is affecting in a significant way.


Very minor reservations aside, Peripatet is one of the better dives into privileged misery. I have a feeling that anyone under a certain age, or with artistic ambitions, will connect with and appreciate the majority of what's here. Some other's might find it painfully entropic. The deft prose, however, is unquestionable.

http://www.insidethecastle.org/peripatet/

Review: BABY KILLER - Frank Cassese

It's rare to come across a work of fiction that is as surprising as it is, on afterthought, inevitable. Generally a book like that would be about a standard subject written in an unusual style, or a book about an atypical subject written in a plain or straightforward style. Baby Killer is definitely the latter.

Written from the point of view of an overeducated observer and harsh critic of modern culture, as we've seen throughout the certified echelons of Literature, we hang out and sink slowly with the Killer of Babies in this first-person confessional.

To tell you the truth, for a book about a killer of infants, the story starts off rather slow. In fact, I became a bit bored until things picked up after about fifty pages of living with yet another well off homebody.

The protagonist carries a bit of the "Stupid pleb's and their alcohol and loud music and sex." A missionary here to stop the Idiocratization of our world. He loves to be alone, and long walks. He loves to read and proselytize. He listens to Radiohead, Leonard Cohen, and bebop jazz. He is, in a deeper vein, the perpetual man-child that is jealous of the effortless attention and love bestowed upon newborns. He is what many grown men fear of becoming, or simply are (and in denial of).

The Killer of Babes, safe in his cocoon, hates society's urge to change:

"They brag about how lightly they can pick up and create new beginnings, a new life for themselves, a new self for their lives."

But the big Butt is that this guy kills little babies. This does happen. He slaughters them with occasional remorse and well-articulated (some might say convincing) rationale. This is a problem that  ends up being the most interesting aspect of his soporific personality. Because outside of some light family trauma, the Babe Killer is quite mundane.

"I would rather do nothing than have any sort of stricture imposed on my time, and most days I did quite a bit of nothing."

I won't expound on the actual depictions of his extracurriculars except to say that each instance is unique, vivid, heart-wrenching, and often hilarious.

But this is, when it comes down to it, a character study. The Baby Killer is outwardly pathetic and inwardly God's Gift. He is as much a mirror on our cultural moment as Patrick Bateman was in the 80's. Whereas Bateman went out everyday and overachieved in order to be seen and noticed, the Baby Killer avoids people, jobs, and social interactions at all costs. He's rich (you'll have to read it to know how), so he can do that, but even if he didn't have his golden cushion of wealth, I could see him figuratively being that 30-year-old that still lives in mama's basement, antagonizing true achievers through his digital curtain of anonymity. There is even a hilarious section involving a katana that reads like a neckbeard's wet dream, and the narrator actually says, "It's nothing personal."

This book is such a binary for me that it's hard to judge. If you took out the specific acts it would be as tame as some Austen, but we must include the acts. This isn't Sotos on a diet or anything. Those familiar with transgressive fiction will have nary a feather ruffled (though maybe I'm a deathly numb sociopath). But it is a work of thrilleresque appeal. A work of the moment that I don't think could have been written at any other time. It probably says something about consumer culture and apathy. It definitely holds a mirror to doughy rich mama's boys that are afraid of commitment. It held my attention in the way that a horror movie by Wes Anderson might. An oddly comforting read that I bet you'd enjoy.

*I realize that this review comes off a bit negative and vague, and the novel did in fact go down slightly lukewarm, but I want to state that I do highly recommend it to readers of transgressive (for lack of a better term) literature. It is an important book.*

Vidya

Far into my 30' s and I recently bought a used Nintendo 3DSXL with the personal excuse that it would be a quit-smoking-aid, give my hands something to do during those quiet moments when a cig feels like the perfect coma. I have a PS4 but only use it for streaming movies and shows, as most of the games are too involved to play in short bursts.

So for the past three days most every idle hour I've been killing and collecting demons in Shin Megami Tensei IV. I've never played Pokemon but apparently this game is kind of like that game but for adults. It is a decidedly twisted narrative set in post-apocalyptic Japan. It's fun to hold that world in my hands, to occupy it.

There's probably a bit of warranted escapism seeing as I recently returned home from Thailand and really don't want to be back in this town, at this job, living this timeline (though I did miss the cats something awful). That said, I haven't written a word other than on this blog or in a journal since stepping stateside. I told myself that the novel would be like a siren beckoning seductively, but it seems absence does not always make the heart grow fonder.

Vidya games.

Anyways, I'm still reading at least.

That's my current pile. I am now an unabashed  Amphetamine Sulphate and Nine-Banded Books fanboy since reading stuff by New Juche (reviewed here and here), Ann Sterzinger, Anita Dalton, Peter Sotos, and others. Baby Killer is very intriguing and the longest of the bunch. Excited for what all of this does to my brain.

Bluescape

On a nomadic slice of Rawai Beach 14-year-old Ning is arguing with her mother in their shack home that also serves as a restaurant. She's extolling virtues upon the next throb she plans to run off with, why he's different from all the others. The new guy, Ning says, doesn't care that she's occasionally a prostitute.


Her mother laughs and rotates her dense torso away. She seems to float atop her tree-trunk thighs. She eats sticky rice and every time she bends her neck a bit more of the mural tattoo on her back is revealed. She lords over the space like a Hun as twitchy young men arrive on motorbikes to deliver bags of ice and cases of water. She doesn't move from her seat and directs them with curt, barked commands.

Ning looks up from her phone, thumbs frozen mid-text, and stares blankly at the boys. They don't reveal their eyes. She speaks louder about her farang prince, hoping to provoke a glance.
Her mother counts money and laughs.


Her first English was "Bingo Was His Name-O". Her uncle Bing showed her her first brown cock.


Young prostitutes shop in groups in well lit stalls, hanging off each other like spider monkeys dressed in faux leather shorts. Ning has perfected seduction through simple fashion options and repetition. Her tricks are not the pioneers they believe themselves to be. They land on the island of youth to find that it has already been invaded. Yet they march through the salivating packs with machetes primed to slaughter tonight's Golden Ox, who's one visible eye is iced over with fear. They try to take pleasure in the thrusts, and she turns her head because she knows they will weep if they see her eyes.


A blown out pocket. A freshly abandoned nest. Her workmanlike demeanor is challenged by dimples and baby fat. Defiant cures for held over trauma.
She watches a cat swallow mosquito eggs out of a potted plant filled with stagnant water.


Feral cats and dogs practice incest and eat their young outside of Ning's home. Her mother has boiled a few.


When Ning is seventeen she realizes that all the men are the same. Her farang prince doesn't exist. She still falls in love once a week.


Her mother and brother die in motorbike accident. She learns this via text just before sucking a sweaty Indian dick in a Patong bathroom.


Ning inherits the restaurant and immediately sells it for $200 USD.


She burns incense at a roadside shrine on her way to Bangla road to pole dance. Her palms sweat profusely over the pole as an Australian octogenarian stares at her with hungry, bloated-red eyes.


She develops a terrible itch, accompanied by unyielding rot odor. She is bitten by a feral dog while sleeping on the street. The dog does not have rabies, it wants to eat her because she smells like food.


She has seven teeth left, these days.


At 22












She wishes the mountain was a volcano