Grant Maierhofer - switches between a romance, a bizarre comedy, and something that pulls from most of Woody Allen’s early work. It is an exploration of loneliness, addiction, the construction/obliteration of love (or at least a reasonable facsimile), and disconnection

Grant Maierhofer, The Persistence of Crows, Tiny TOE Press, 2013.
mammal excerpt from tPoC
Vol. 1 Brooklyn excerpt from tPoC
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Henry Alfi is feeling lost. With relationships imploding and dissatisfaction on the rise, escaping his native Midwest could set everything right in his life.
Along with fellow journalists from his college newspaper, Alfi travels to New York City. There he embarks on an emotional odyssey through Manhattan and back home, desperate to alleviate the pervading sense of indifference and misery on the horizon.
In his search he meets a girl who is also confused and desperate to find a better life. The two lovebirds thrive off the pulse of the big city and share their troubled pasts

Another fantastic offering thanks to signing up with the guys at The Kindle Book Review and a novel by an author who I can genuinely say is a really great guy worth having a chat to, but anyway, the review is a bit more important than my ramblings, so here it is.

The Persistence of Crows is a strange novel, but I don't mean this in a negative or derogatory way, it's this strangeness which made me enjoy it so much and feel like I really got to know the protagonist and narrator, Henry Alfi.

Henry's life has been less than ordinary, finding himself outside society and his childhood packed out with visits to psychiatrists, treatment for depression and then later, addictions. Henry doesn't see many positives in life yet despite this, his aims in life are very simple, become a writer and have a family/fall in love. When we meet him, Henry is sober and working his way through college, in a school he hates but he does have the chance to write for the school newspaper. It's through this that he gets the chance to visit New York City for a journalism conference.

I think Henry was written in a sensitive and beautiful way, even at his lowest moments, including stretches of the novel where the reader seems to slip into Henry's consciousness and I found it really refreshing to be drawn into his mindset in an attempt to figure him out. Henry's time in New York is fantastically written too and made me want to follow him there and enjoy all the experiences he enjoyed. I found the ending of the novel absolutely perfect, cannot be faulted.

One of the shining glories of this novel is the ease at which Henry comes across fantastic characters whilst in New York. From the old guy on the subway who he has a proper deep heart to heart with to the musician earning her bucks in Central Park, each of these people is instantly memorable and perfectly drawn.

Maierhofer's novel is about someone trying to grow up and reach their goals and the people they encounter along their way. However, it is much deeper than this too, dealing with the inner turmoil experienced by someone who yearns to write and find their way in the world. A fantastic read. - Bethan Townsend

Coming of age narratives are usually as riddled with tropes as low-budget horror films. Sure, there are a few outstanding novels in the genre like Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero and Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, but the list of must-reads grows at the speed of stalactites. Grant Maierhofer’s The Persistence of Crows, from Tiny TOE Press, has joined that short list with a story full of depression, too-beautiful moments, and kind of soul crushing realness.

Henry Alfi is a young man who’s recently stopped using drugs and alcohol. Sadly, his new unaltered state of consciousness has him feeling bored, lonely, and profoundly disenchanted by the people and institutions that surround his life in the Midwest: AA, friends, college, family, the women he dates, etc. One of the few things Henry enjoys is writing, so a trip to New York with his college newspaper seems like the perfect opportunity to get away from everything for a while and ponder the future. Surprisingly, the trip turns out to be more than an escape and Henry finds himself ready to move, eager to discover the world, sure that he wants to pursue a career in writing, and falling quickly in love with a woman who shares his view of the world.

The Persistence of Crows starts out as an unimpressive narrative about a young man about to embark on a trip to NYC. Despite the lack of an exciting start, Maierhofer manages to set the hooks in via his use of language and character development. The strategy is risky, but he pulls it off. The prose has a unique, somewhat offbeat rhythm and the dialogue is sharp. Also, he establishes early on that his main character is deeply flawed but also thought-provoking and the kind of individual you want to learn more about: 

“It felt better to be walking by myself. I didn’t feel unsafe when I was alone. I didn’t care if some bum crept up to me. I would fight and what would happen would happen. It was when I was with others that I got nervous. It’s far easier for me to imagine defending myself than it is protecting the life of somebody else. Their life can be completely abstract even if they’re standing right next to you.”

Henry is the poster child for the broken/dissatisfied/irritated/Google generation. He feels alienated, gloomy, and deracinated despite being home. His life on drugs and alcohol was bad, but his life without them isn’t better. The story seems to be a character study for a few chapters because the dark past, recent troubles, and disturbed state of mind are all in place, but it changes drastically once Henry lands in New York. A bit of dark humor and pervasive dreariness quickly switch to a beautiful homage to the Big Apple in which Maierhofer’s knack for language and imagery take center stage: 

“The rain beat down on all of us. These youthful faces soaked in the same Hudson River breeze as the old folks arm in arm enjoying the bright lights of the city. I was surprised to see that even in the afternoon the lights shone as brightly as all of the photographs I’d seen of the city at night. When I turned the corner, all breath was taken out of me. Any worry I had ever felt in my entire life up until that point turned into a sense of power as I stood there staring at the gray and red and silver world encircling me.”

The homage to NYC saturates the narrative for most of the middle third of the novel, which contains a few odd encounters between Henry and locals that deserve to be in film, and eventually bleeds into the brief but magical time Henry spends with Sara Lee Poe, a fellow journalist he meets at a panel. The duo allows the city to filter everything they experience together and they weave a cocoon of shared ideas and passion that blinds them from their imperfections. As soon as their time together is over, reality comes crashing in and Maierhofer uses it to destroy both everything Henry built and readers’ emotions.

The Persistence of Crows switches between a romance, a bizarre comedy, and something that pulls from most of Woody Allen’s early work. It is an exploration of loneliness, addiction, the construction/obliteration of love (or at least a reasonable facsimile), and disconnection. Maierhofer’s Henry thinks trying to pay attention to what others have to say can only lead to suicide, but he ends up contemplating suicide because of things that were left unsaid. Stories about falling in love in oh-so-magical New York are as old as the city itself, but Maierhofer has updated the premise to offer the honesty and ugliness that fans of authors like Tao Lin, Ana Carrete, and Sam Pink demand, and the result is worth a read. - Gabino Iglesias

Another fantastic offering thanks to signing up with the guys at The Kindle Book Review and a novel by an author who I can genuinely say is a really great guy worth having a chat to, but anyway, the review is a bit more important than my ramblings, so here it is.

The Persistence of Crows is a strange novel, but I don’t mean this in a negative or derogatory way, it’s this strangeness which made me enjoy it so much and feel like I really got to know the protagonist and narrator, Henry Alfi.
Henry’s life has been less than ordinary, finding himself outside society and his childhood packed out with visits to psychiatrists, treatment for depression and then later, addictions. Henry doesn’t see many positives in life yet despite this, his aims in life are very simple, become a writer and have a family/fall in love. When we meet him, Henry is sober and working his way through college, in a school he hates but he does have the chance to write for the school newspaper. It’s through this that he gets the chance to visit New York City for a journalism conference.
I think Henry was written in a sensitive and beautiful way, even at his lowest moments, including stretches of the novel where the reader seems to slip into Henry’s consciousness and I found it really refreshing to be drawn into his mindset in an attempt to figure him out. Henry’s time in New York is fantastically written too and made me want to follow him there and enjoy all the experiences he enjoyed. I found the ending of the novel absolutely perfect, cannot be faulted.
One of the shining glories of this novel is the ease at which Henry comes across fantastic characters whilst in New York. From the old guy on the subway who he has a proper deep heart to heart with to the musician earning her bucks in Central Park, each of these people is instantly memorable and perfectly drawn.
Maierhofer’s novel is about someone trying to grow up and reach their goals and the people they encounter along their way. However, it is much deeper than this too, dealing with the inner turmoil experienced by someone who yearns to write and find their way in the world. A fantastic read.

- plasticrosaries.com/review-the-persistence-of-crows-by-grant-maierhofer/

The notion of an art world devoid of dark subjects is dangerous: it would construct a dishonestly escapist field. To attempt isolating sinister themes would be disastrous, because art needs them to continue being a catalyst for meaningful discourse. The tediousness of depression is perhaps inherent in the creative force of artists who have struggled with it.

Yayoi Kusama’s work provides a strong example of the sort of creativity that is dealing with some of the dark themes of mental illness, but does so in a triumphantly creative way. In an interview for BOMB, Kusama states: “My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings. All my works in pastels are the products of obsessional neurosis and are therefore inextricably connected to my disease. I create pieces even when I don’t see hallucinations, though.” Obviously, mental illness itself does not suffice, as a subject, to create art. Still, as Kusama’s case illustrates, it is commonplace for artists who are dealing with mental illness to address the confrontation of these issues in their work. This confrontation may even shape their creative individuality and strengthen their uniqueness, artistically.

I first noticed Maierhofer after reading his piece “Some Unscientific Thoughts on Depression.” The brief essay begins by stating his belief that “precedents” offer comfort. By “precedents,” the writer refers to figures of the past that serve a paradigmatic purpose similar to that of idols.  The essay then moves on to the realization that such precedents, as he has defined them, in the realm of depression are fairly limited due to the relatively recent chronology of the illness. He then presents two examples of individuals whose work he admires who function as precedents in the realm of depression: David Foster Wallace and Lars Von Trier. The writer points at the individuality of depression, and scoffs at past oversimplifications of the disease within the public sphere. The ways in which depression is manifested in the work of his two chosen precedents differs, conveying the complexity of the disease.

Based on this essay, we can assume that Maierhofer’s fictional writing exists as a means to deal with his depression. His writing is not first produced with the intention of providing readers with entertainment. Rather, it is his attempt to make sense of his experiences through prose. For example, he examines his experiences in pursuit of romantic intimacy and how they played out. Of course, the writer’s intent behind writing does not necessarily conflict with the reader’s experience. Luckily, this holds true for The Persistence of Crows. Maierhofer constructs a simple and strong Bildungsroman, dealing with the familiar tropes of drug & alcohol abuse, self-doubt, young love and finding one’s place in the world. Maierhofer chronicles experiences that seem familiar in their depressive notes thematically, yet different due to his simple and comic tone.

The Persistence of Crows follows Henry Alfi, who finds himself on a brief trip away from the Midwest to New York, a trip he is attending with his college journal. His story is a subcategory of the depressed person. He is often unsatisfied, often for obscure or unclear reasons. This constant sense of dissatisfaction leads him into addiction:

It got so bad after a while that I was going to the gas station every morning before school to buy a box of Nyquil or Benadryl and I would take the entire box just to feel something, and needless to say after too long I couldn’t take it, and my family knew because some people had seen how bad I was getting and told my sister that I called them looking for shit, so I went to rehab.

Like his author, Henry writes through his depression. He confesses that it was while he found himself in rehab that he learned how to write passionately, how to put his thoughts and observations on paper, how to question his surroundings and how to try to understand.

If at times Henry tends towards the solipsistic, he is also endearingly romantic in a way so genuine he invites our sympathy. Around the mid-point of the narrative, the story evolves into a romantic one, when Henry meets Sara. Henry and Sara share their vulnerabilities without hesitating to reveal their many imperfections, trusting and confiding in each other with relentless vigour.

Henry is very much a softie with good intentions, a romantic at heart who feels helpless at times, but still wants. Wanting is foremost important; it is what Tao Lin’s Paul was missing in Taipei. If Henry is ever capable of causing harm, his own self is the primary receiver of the potential pain. The stark antithesis between Henry and Paul as characters is particularly fascinating if we consider their creators different approaches to their exogenous circumstances: it is ultimately a difference about how they navigate their lives. Maierhofer tries to mediate a protagonist who is prone to fall to extremes, while Lin dopes a nonchalant protagonist to maybe perhaps feel something. As a reader, I prefer encountering the highs and lows Maierhofer presents to the painful anhedonia Lin put me through, even if I highly respect his stylistic devotion.

The dialogue, which constitutes the largest segment of the prose, is very strong, because it is not scared to be dramatic. The words spoken are ones coming from people being vulnerable, theatrical and maybe even cheesy, but never contrived. The friendly and casual tone is refreshing, and balances out the character’s capacity to be a little much, calling his love interests things like “sweetheart,” “doll,” and “lovebird.” It seems that the impressive readability comes from the combination of the vibrant dialogue and the esoteric narrative detail enabled through first-person narration Maierhofer employs.

“What do we do now, Henry?”

“Absolutely every single thing there is… lovebird.”

“What if we don’t have time?”

“Doesn’t exist tonight.”

“Are you a murderer or something . . .  perhaps going to take me through the city? Show me  the world of my dreams, then cut me up into little bits while I sleep in your arms?”

“Oh heavens no, why do you ask?”

“Because you seem a bit too right, boy from Wisconsin, just a little too perfect.”

“Well, you’ll just have to wait and see, that is if you’re brave enough.”

“Oh, I’ve dated far worse than murderers.”

“As have I.” We walked. We walked the other way down Fifth Avenue, slowly heading toward Central Park and Rockefeller Center and all of it, not knowing at all how to get there, but knowing exactly where to go.

I find the descriptions of New York incredible, because of their capacity to be refreshingly saccharine in their wanting. Maierhofer manages to create characters who find enthusiasm in the banality of a city so tourist-intensive it almost appears like a triumph. The New York described is one I have never seen, and I have lived here for a while.

Ultimately, the proximity of Maierhofer’s writing to his own life births both the biggest strengths and the biggest weaknesses of his novel. To me, the novel’s title reflects the writer’s reprehensibly self-defeating attitude: it indicates the writer’s view that to create something meaningful one has to be an outcast.During an intimate moment between him and Sara, they briefly exchange thoughts on Bukowski. Both of them seem to like the writer and admire his work. Henry then calls him “a crow,” by which he means Bukowski was an outcast or an outsider. Henry speaks highly of both Bukowski’s poetry and his novels,  stating that “the humanity” of his work appealed to him. Yet this humanity Henry speaks of makes Bukowski an addition to the “precedents” for Maierhofer discussed in “Some Unscientific Thoughts on Depression.” By framing his work as such, it seems clear that he sees a binary that is not necessarily reflective of a broader truth: one needs not be an outcast to create meaningful art. As a narrative exploration of the writer’s depression, one which conveys the complexity of the disease, The Persistence of Crows is a meaningful addition to the literature on this—a priori—depressing subject. Then again, it might be this very attitude that is responsible for all the merits of the novel. - Elias Tezapsidis

this novel is PASSIONATE

Grant Maierhofer has produced Henry Alfi, a most passionate person.

Henry feels, he experiences reality very passionately

(are you picking up on a theme here? hope so, bc this will be ‘harped’ upon

[also: spoiler alerts {sorta}])

//

Nutshell Synopsis:

Henry joins his fellow college-newspaper/journalist students on a trip to NYC

to attend a journalism conference/symposium.

Before that, he becomes disillusioned with a girl (but still makes out with her);

after that, he wanders around NYC and expresses beautiful/poetic insights.

He mainly stays alone until he meets Sara,

another attendee of the conference/symposium;

shortly thereafter, the two fall in love, become inseparable,

and tearfully part when the conference/symposium ends.

//

Henry self-isolates bc he has been isolated;

he experiences reality as an individual

in the midst of a great ocean of Others: a Society of ppl who don’t ‘get it’.

Henry’s angst against life manifests itself in observations he makes

re: his fellow journalist-students, his current life situation, his geographical location,

his attempt at making a meaningful existence for himself away from the ties of alcohol, etc.

High & mighty though Henry can be,

he is capable of some beautifully eloquent inner monologues of precious insight;

Henry can be damn near poetic at these points.

These insights reach their peak immediately following Henry’s arrival in NYC,

a place he has epitomized as The Place To Be (for him and others like him who ‘get it’).

For Henry, NYC is magical, movie-like;

though he holds just about everyone he knows from his college in contempt to some degree,

his love for NYC is evident bc he interacts/speaks/mentally connects with NYC strangers:

a Starbucks employee, an old man on the subway, an attractive girl on the subway,

a woman playing guitar in Central Park,

an old guard on top of the NBC building, a female tourist on top of the NBC building, etc.

Some of the most enjoyable passages occur

while Henry walks around NYC, thinking abstractly:

“I rubbed my hands over my face and eyes. Something in [the rain] was magical, powerful, connecting to me and I was connecting to it, this place, the water wanted to be a part of me, wanted me for all of the neglect I’d felt in my childhood, wanted somebody with a capacity for pain to appreciate her streets, someone who wouldn’t throw her away at the first chance of sadness or misery, that person was me, the momentary mayor that none of these people know for a long time and likely forever, but it didn’t matter” (94)

&:

“a gigantic rat must have died there at some point during the day … it lay there, belly up, all puffy and disgusting, staring at me, with these dead black eyes that depressed me terribly. … Creatures like the rat don’t have families … They have gutters and sewers, beautiful underground rooms to do nothing in but hunt, and feast, and play, and hunt. They are the leaders of the free world and above the cockroaches, above the madness and disarray that is Planet Earth, in the land of disgust and beauty and serenity and hatred and love and lords and suicides and homicides and ugliness and glory and freedom and flags and patriotism and terrorism and illusion and presidency and warehouses, the rat is king of all” (105).

//

Maierhofer’s creation is an angry and embittered cynic.

Henry is a Holden Caulfield of the millennial generation:

voicing his opinions about how much better/smarter/more ‘aware’ he is than others.

Which is part of what made it difficult to take Henry seriously

when he literally told NYC strangers that he doesn’t want to be viewed as a ‘tourist’,

yet goes and does The Most Tourist-y Things:

tries to see The Statue of Liberty, walks around Times Square,

walks through Central Park, goes to the top of the NBC building,

literally goes on a horse-drawn carriage ride!

Found it hard to take Henry seriously when he suggested the horse-drawn carriage ride—

a romantic activity truly deserving of the phrase “done to death”,

and which is just as clichéd as the phrase “done to death” is itself.

Near the novel’s end, Henry is described as “skipping” around NYC.

But (after reflection) that is, i believe, the point:

Henry, a Holden Caulfield archetype, is literally transformed by the magic of NYC into a person

who finds love, who “skips,” who becomes a romantic tourist with his lovebird Sara.

//

The irony of the romantic horse-drawn carriage ride

meant Sara could sincerely confess her troubled, identity-defining past

(which involved a desire to be a ballerina and, subsequently, anorexia).

Felt extreme disgust with Henry/the novel when,

immediately following Sara’s confession, Henry’s mouth serves as a vehicle for his ego:

He trivializes Sara’s life experience by referring to her past as “beautiful”

and labeling her “the Broken Ballerina” to her face.

Felt nothing but disgust towards Henry when he did this, particularly considering

he totally mindfucked a girl named Nicole within the novel’s first 20 pages

for the exact same reason:  Henry perceived that Nicole had trivialized his troubled past

(re: alcohol/drug addiction) and, as punishment, he angrily shouted at her over the phone,

then invited her to come over to his place under the guise of possible sexual activities,

brought her outside his door, passionately kissed her, and then promptly dismissed her.

Two pages after Henry trivializes Sara’s past,

he thinks to himself “Smile again, broken ballerina” (181),

which is meant to convey sweetness, cuteness, the idea that Henry has really fallen for her, etc.;

but, given the trivializing effects previously discussed,

Henry’s mental command sounds cold, mean, mocking, ironic, sarcastic, sadistic, etc.

//

Again: how is a person like Henry to be believed?

Again: NYC and the passionate nature of Henry himself.

NYC is constantly being described as magical, movie-like, transformative.

And the place certainly seems to have transformed Henry,

from a sack of sarcastic shit to someone who joyfully and willingly

suggests riding in a horse-drawn carriage with someone he has fallen in love with: Sara.

But perhaps NYC would not be as transformative by itself, except for one fact:

Henry feels; Henry is Passionate; Henry delights the reader

with beautiful, reflective passages on NYC, love, the connectedness of all living things

(see: dead rat in the subway), and when he kisses Sara atop Rockefeller Center.

However much I may dislike and, perhaps, loath Henry’s way of thinking

and some of the know-it-all conclusions he reaches re: others/situations/reality,

I still find myself lulled by the lovely, poetic ways he describes

NYC, Times Square, love, the dead rat,

and the oneness he experiences with NYC and Sara while he kisses the latter:

“Finally, our lips met, I pressed hard when they did, feeling the city and all of the lights closing in around us, the entire world reduced to the center of her cold nose rubbing against my cheek as she responded and pushed her lips into mine, letting loose a small moan but restraining herself as she squeezed my back and lightly pulled away, not too far, just enough to open those big brown eyes and look up at me” (188).

//

At one point during his back story monologue, Henry says,

“I learned to write passionately” (193)

—this, truly, is the compelling element of TPoC: PASSION.

Whatever flaws I perceived there to be in Henry/his perspective,

I admired his ability to feel strongly, passionately.

And this is a passionate novel.

Henry’s perspective/way of thinking certainly isn’t logical or multifaceted, but

(and perhaps because) it is undeniably passionate, so devoted to the expression of the self,

Henry’s journey throughout the novel is compelling and

(if this word may be used regardless of his broken past) addictive.

Henry’s thoughts/writing may be so passionate that

there is little room for logic or the consideration of others and their perspectives,

but this serves as his coping mechanism

for having endured years of loneliness and isolation,

imposed by both himself and others

(though certainly not in that chronological order).

//

Felt as though The Persistence of Crows had

—structurally, thematically, atmospherically—

a lot in common with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground

in that it begins dark, sarcastic, cynical,

and then works it’s way towards romance and sentimentalism: bright, hopeful, happy.

The change is due to Henry’s passion for NYC and Sara.

But unlike Notes from Underground,

which is chronologically reversed to convey the idea of a happy ending,

The Persistence of Crows, which is chronological, does near an ending of happiness.

While happiness cannot be achieved for Dostoevsky’s unnamed narrator,

Maierhofer’s narrator, who descends into extreme darkness by the novel’s end

(caused by having to leave both NYC and Sara),

does receive a glimmer of hope, even if it is but the slightest of glimmers.

//

There are flaws, yes; but

the novel has many ‘spot-on’ elements as well:

Henry’s passion, his voice, his journey,

his blooming and eventual withering persist and stick with the reader.

Henry (and probably Maierhofer, too) is a Crow—

A loner who cares not whether folks ‘get it’ or not.

Felt that, seen in this light, the people who would most enjoy TPoC

would be those who truly enjoy Charles Bukowski, who is himself another Crow.

My take-away feeling is:

Should he maximize his triumphant writing elements,

and pay especially corrective attention to his pitfalls,

Maierhofer will achieve [something approximating literary success]. - dom schwab

A DREAM FROM ‘THE PERSISTENCE OF CROWS’
by Grant Maierhofer

My mother. She was in New York in the 60s, she looked exactly like Mary Tyler Moore. Dressed in a black dress. Everyone was standing around looking at her spin, with a big cigarette in her mouth. She just smiled and threw her hat into the air as she ran, frantic, through the city. Nobody could intrude on her day. She went to Fifth Avenue and bought all the things she could never afford. She smiled at homeless women as she threw them bags from Tiffany's, and Bloomingdale's, and Macy's, knowing she wouldn't need them because that smile and that black dress was all a woman truly needed. She stood in awe at the foot of the Empire State Building, enamored by the couples walking out hand-in-hand, dreaming of George Pappard and Audrey Hepburn. She always wanted to be Audrey in Breakfast at Tiffany’s She liked to fly and smoke and drink and manipulate as much as she wanted to trust love in all of the world, and that was her paradox as She flew down Broadway, a simple purse in her hand, her cigarette clenched between California Red lipstick. She stopped at the Hudson River, smiling back at me, knowing that I was her boy, her perfect little jewel, and that someday I would bring her back here, and it would be as good as the 60s fashion she so loved. And she was a nurse, and she was blatant poetry and could take care of all of her little brothers and sisters, even as she ran down the streets of Manhattan, with such vigor to find the remnants of the old time Cotton Club in Harlem to hear the voice of Billie Holiday and the piano of Duke Ellington and the Count and even though she ran through streets of Civil Protest she did it with such grace and with such a particular smile and look in her eyes that no one questioned her. She was the American woman, Hank Williams playing calmly from the same stage as the Rolling Stones, or Jefferson Airplane, at Altamont, and the Hell's Angels didn't fight but moved with the entire crowd and said FUCK YOU to war and FUCK YOU to the man and Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe and Mark Twain wrote about the whole thing while a fire burned in the hearth out in Woody Creek or Bunker Hill. My mother was all of it. The mother to the entire generation; she was the caretaker to the ships full of wounded spirits and confused teens, feeding us smiles and happy thoughts. She held out her hands in front of Madison Square Garden, screaming at the top of her lungs that she didn't care who won or lost but that she would be at CBGB's through the 80s and that seeing Iggy Pop meant just as much to her as seeing Gloria Steinem burn the bras of a thousand lost little girls. And eventually it was just her face, in the glow of Times Square and all of the lights, and it's Christmas in Central Park, and Autumn in New York, and New Year’s in the Sea of People, and she's smiling through all of it, blissful as she spins in frantic circles in her black dress. My smiling mother, the veritable face of immortality and meaning.

Small Mania

The rain beat down on all of us. These youthful faces soaked in the same Hudson River breeze as the old folks arm in arm enjoying the bright lights of the city. I was surprised to see that even in the afternoon the lights shone as brightly as all of the photographs I’d seen of the city at night. When I turned the corner, all breath taken out of me. Any worry I had ever felt in my entire life up until that point turned into a sense of power as I stood there staring at the gray and red and silver world encircling me. I took a deep breath of it, feeling the rain seep into my clothes and touch my skin. I had finally arrived at a place completely my own, a place that made me feel like I belonged. I moved in a daze, staring up at the gigantic signs, the two towers on the left and right of gigantic advertisement screens, holding us all in the same place, trapped in this trance of money, and greed, and beauty, all of it created by men and women for men and women. I thought of Ayn Rand, how the world seemed to misunderstand her as someone completely hateful and resentful. At that moment I understood few things, but that was one of them, she wasn’t hateful or resentful, she just loved the potential she saw in gigantic obelisks, created by man for man, and she loved to see people passionate about things so much that she refused to accept a form of control that took that away and made something collective. But as I stared at the brilliant strip of Broadway for the first time in New York, where so many wild minds had come together in their own love and appreciation for beauty, I understood that there was a collectivity even in selfishness, that the minds who had created these humungous buildings and signs to the cold and windy left and right of me loved the world more than those people who sat in shacks meditating, Away from it all. They were separated from the world entirely, these people were a part of it. All of these tourists were the geniuses of the world, the pathetic fools with cell phones anchored high toward the sky and the first glimpse at beauty any of us had ever felt, they were the carriers of hope for society, not the preachers or priests, but the people in the street that felt a connectedness to the beautiful lights of Times Square. I was shocked at the amount of deep breaths I was taking, as though each time I was pumping the air and blood straight into my fingertips, completely reverent to the rest of my body like never before. I went with the crowds toward a pathway that led to a bright glowing set of red stairs. I took my time staring up at all the businesses, advertisements for fast food, for operas, for clothing, for movies, for cell phones, for plays, for cameras, all of it making up this veritable birthday party of the mind, a parade of love and joy set up just for me. I wasn’t walking toward the subway station. Technically, I was heading toward Central Park, but I didn’t know it then. I was simply lost in this feeling of exaltation, smiling up at the buildings as they blocked the clouds from sight, completely captivated in this manmade festival of lights.

As I walked past droves of businessmen and aggravated natives I was overcome with a pleasurable notion. New York gave me this terrific feeling that I may be stabbed at any moment; however each of these people surrounding me, the workers, the tourists, the men and women and children, the families, the losers, the punks, the crows and the depressed, the happy and the nonchalant, all of them were protecting me from it happening. It gave me a feeling of walking on lava, or rather skipping on it, because of some grand innovation that left me unable to be harmed by the burning liquid of criminals and filth in any city. I felt more free in those minutes in the rain than I’ve felt in my entire life. I skipped about, imagining myself as Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, before he commits his crimes, jumping around singing, I’m singing in the rain! What a brilliant depiction of the madness of the earth, the imbalance that dictates how close any of us are at any minute to complete and utter insanity, and yet he skips, yet the wet-haired boy skips through Times Square in total silence, smiling at the blondes, the brunettes, the redheads, embracing the moment as one of total serenity, things like that are seldom in life, and this place, the city, seemed to have it completely sewn up and distributable to any and all humans that required it. I thought of Bob Dylan, the boy from Northern Minnesota that slowly made his way to the Village in Manhattan, and thus went on to change the face of music and political rebellion for Americans and all worldly inhabitants. There is something magical about the place, something inaccessible to those that would see it as a means to some end, or a service station along the way to a better life. This place was an end in itself, a masterpiece painted over hundreds of years by people and environmental circumstances that would forge this metropolis out of steel, and rain, and pain, and the tears of thousands of immigrants that cried to paint the glass of the Empire State Building, or Rockefeller Center, and the angst in the intestines of thousands of workers that forged the outlines of the subway systems to take the children to work, and school, and to the plays and productions that make it here and go on to make the world shudder in its perception of things.Nothing exists like the old lust you can find in this place, and only few have seemed to truly appreciate it, yet millions burrow in her nest, awaiting the sweet winter breeze in front of the tree in the Rockefeller ice rink, or that perfect stroll through Central Park that inspires you so much you propose to your lover right then and there. It may seem like madness, or lies, the two seldom lay apart, but I felt all of those things in that instance, a flying feeling inside that let my brain happily think all of these thoughts of wonderment. I stared up at the skyscrapers, walking behind the large red steps to notice more of the streets and more of the people that make the dreaming so much more vivid. I looked up and noticed the signs proclaiming the stocks for that day, and it looked exactly how it was in the movies. I stood there feeling it melt into my eyelids in complete ecstasy knowing that yes, this is real. I watched the numbers for more than ten minutes, lost and in love with every single one.

I rubbed my hands over my face and eyes. Something in it was magical, powerful, connecting to me and I was connecting to it, this place, the water wanted to be a part of me, wanted me for all of the neglect I’d felt in my childhood, wanted somebody with a capacity for pain to appreciate her streets, someone who wouldn’t throw her away at the first chance of sadness or misery, that person was me, the momentary mayor that none of these people would know for a long time and likely forever, but it didn’t matter. I skipped toward 42^nd street and the subway station in the rain, through the walkways of Manhattan and the rows of people chasing dreams of TV dinners and cereal, Coca Cola and famous children. They were what mattered, not my family or my friends anymore, I was connected to some small piece of my destiny and that was that, home would never be home again, because the only reality left and the only desire for comfort was now buried inside of my heart, in a place, a cave, where none of them could reach. I embraced myself, grabbed my coat tightly and pulled it around my midsection, this place was changing me and I embraced it.

I saw the subway station, a few blocks up. It was amazing, even the building for the subway, a rudimentary form of transportation, looked better and more thoughtful than any building in Wisconsin.

Inside the subway station it was chaos. Transit cops with blue windbreakers organized herds of people into small entryways, through the turnstiles that always hurt your hip a little too much. Gangs of workers were trying to make it from downtown to the outskirts, the boroughs of less money and cheaper housing. Some were probably making their way out to New Jersey, the result of having all that monetary brilliance packed so tightly into one section of town.

I got in line for a pass; the slow moving wet single file snake seemed too long to be real. I was standing behind a white couple that looked like they may be tourists; they were certainly dressed for comfort on a day that screamed for practicality. They were talking about the date they’d planned that night.

“So yeah… it might be ruined…” he said.

“No baby, don’t say that… it’ll be fine,” she said.

“Sure, sure, whatever you say.”

Everybody’s so in love, I thought. Every single person and animal on this planet seems to be in love, except for me.

After about ten minutes it was my turn to purchase my pass. I was able to afford a two-ride pass at four dollars, so I bought one and thankfully the wet dollar bills I had worked just fine in this gigantic industrial machine. The ticket came out and it was solid cardboard, as opposed to the flimsy piece of tissue paper I’d received for the plane ride over. I approached the metal teeth, manned by brutes in blue uniforms, and made my way through, showing them my pass.

I put my hands into the pockets of my coat as I descended the stairs, perhaps bracing against whatever reality awaited me. The stairs were tiled, I noticed, and looked extremely old-fashioned. It was quite comforting, and the warm air blowing down there was equally as serene. I followed the gangs of fools soaked to the bone and made my way past the first platform. It was a sort of halfway point between the ground and the trains. A pan flute band was playing a rendition of Scarborough Fair, with a large group of people standing around watching them and smiling, pointing, and taking pictures. Some people can get so happy about the smallest things; it just made me feel like a stranger.

Into the low-lit tunnel accompanied by an air of sheer terror, my boots clacking against the pavement; I thought for a moment about looking like an outsider. I hoped I didn’t, not out of some fear of robbery or something, but of not being accepted by these people I so envied. I wanted all of them to know that I hated the stupid tourists just like they did, that I was a member of the struggle in this glorious place, that I was a love-starved youth in the tunnels just like all of them. I looked at a large map to ensure I would be heading toward Staten Island on whichever train I boarded, and proceeded to sit down on a mildly soaked bench next to an old black man. We were waiting for the train on the right side of the tracks, heading South from there I supposed, toward the river and the brilliant statue. I was overcome with an extreme excitement about finally riding the subway. As far as I could remember into my childhood I had never been on a train. There is some memory of being overwhelmed by the size of a seat in a nice train with a mother and a father that do not however look like mine. I’m dressed in a small suit for a small boy and I’m smiling at everything around me, but perhaps it’s some illusion, something from a movie I saw once that I’ve stolen away into my head.

When the train finally came I was sick of waiting. My excitement had become something bothered; that was the problem with traveling, moments of excitement, then moments of arduous waiting, then excitement, then waiting, and waiting.

Grant Maierhofer, Ode to a Vincent Gallo Nightingale. Drunk Uncle/Black Coffee Press, 2013.

Grant Maierhofer stole Glenn Gould’s eyes and brain. Theft of a dead person’s physical assets is frowned upon in society. What’s worse Grant isn’t even Canadian. He’s American. Canadians should get dibs on Glenn Gould’s brain. Poor Canada has far fewer pianists than the United States. Honestly Grant must avoid stealing one of Canada’s greatest dead legends. A better idea would be for Grant to take one of many Canadian geese and teach them piano. Nobody in Canada would miss a Canadian goose; they’ve got quite a surplus. Besides Canadian geese come to the United State en masse anyway. 

                Nose hairs are natural air filters. Storing the smells of the surroundings, nose hairs have a serious role to play in any person’s life. One moment there are the beautiful smells the next the sense of smell is gone. What’s stranger is how the sense of smell works as a form of memory. Besides knowing the simple taste there’s the whole ‘I was at that moment doing that exact thing’. Many experience this sort of moment with teacakes which brings back a whole flood of memory. Right on the tips of the nose hairs is where the memory is kept forever. 

                Scientifically speaking a lot could be classified as sex. The definition is open. Honestly Grant has a good idea of what constitutes sex. Millions go through life without a thorough examination of sex. Plenty fail to ever encounter the almighty ‘it’. For sex is a team sport. Plenty of people ought to be involved. With Grant at least he’s able to be relatively strong. After having sex he goes out for a nice casual dinner with his family. Grant’s family approves of his sex life. Without a sex life, heck, even Grant would fail to exist. Sex keeps the world spinning around. Having sex is a great way to continue the circle of life, as one rather optimistic movie put it. 

                Life exists in a movie theater. Despite the stench it is a place where millions can become inspired. The dreams belong there. On screen there’s even more dreams, though those have been carefully edited until the creativity is sucked out leaving a hallowed out shell of a story. Poor movie plot barely understands how often it has been done, over and over again. Yet viewers eat it up. Execution is more important. Ambition rarely gets rewarded in that sort of place. Rather it all begins to stink like stale popcorn and spilled soda. - Beach Sloth

Artists Utilizing Pain in Various Forms by Grant Maierhofer





(With regard to Grant Maierhofer’s “Marcel” and “Postures”)

Electronic globalization has turned us into relentless postdigital flaneurs; something quite different from the Baudelaires, the Prousts or the Benjamins of early modern times. For Leslie Scalapino, the flaneur, the detached stroller, no longer exists. Instead, individuals on all economic and class levels at once are both seeing and creating the ‘conceptual’ interaction that is them: whicch is then exterior, is ‘society’ (that is, the illusion of simultaneity)  [1] . The classical flaneur was typically a big city dweller astonished by the perception of witnessing the birth of a new world and, at the same time, a romantic outsider digging into the nostalgia of a fictional inheritance through which modern subjectivity was initially constituted. The contemporary contra-flaneur, however, is a solitary individual wandering beyond the edge of the city in a quiet region completely isolated and around which lie ruins, as an exaltation of abandonment turning toward annihilation [2], abandoning all hope while jammed in Hell’s enter or exit lanes—Any narrator for the arts is already deleted, writes Sean Kilpatrick in the introduction to Grant Maierhofer’s Postures [3].

Maierhofer plays the Big Brother game to find a kaleidoscopic fuckscreen of bad cameras angles that make mankind look like half a speck of civilization when you pick it apart for just a moment”, realizing that “the way the world is changing, and will change, is far more dire, far more obscene, far more anti-Human [4]. The contra-flaneur is already deleted—already dead and having no clue to decide if the apparently one way road he’s stuck into is leading in or out of Hell. In his immediate previous work Marcel, a collection of wonderfully carved stories about ways of coping with loneliness and despair, Maierhofer introduces us to a handful of contra-flaneurs trapped in places where it’s almost impossible for them, no matter how fucked up their minds might be, to ignore the tragicomic aspects of the collapse of conventional human relationships (Friends came as unwelcome scars [5])—yet they’re burdened by the anxiety their awareness of the fact that whatever her/his activity accounts for, it means acknowledging the decomposition of the present. Imagine a lonesome, sick or depressed person, languishing under the dim light of the TV, suddenly discovering the reality that surrounds him when illuminated by the instantaneous lightening of language—and then lost again, faded again in the miserable electronic twilight.

Foremost, fuck the strong—writes Kilpatrick [6].Because these are not so much stories about despair and loneliness, as of weakness. That weakness that makes us still human in a world that seems to be the most inhospitable and desolate place—until we learn that the real problem was our own, physical, biological weakness. The author might no be dead, but he’s positively sick.

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] .

Art became free while being commodified, so the once rebel and avangardist creators are now sold in colleges from all around the world. Current writers, no matter how alternative they might feel, are very conscious of having being born as products.

In this environment, X plays the Quixote: suffering the current version of a melancholic madness—depression—he’s had too much cultural exposure leading him to believe being a writer —which is something so unlikely and comic now as being a knight was in Cervantes’ time. So, as Don Quixote, X plays the human role in this comedy.

Playing the human role while becoming part of an increasingly anti-human landscape, contra-flaneurs don’t see the world as made up of paintings done by individuals; they see the structures [8]. Maierhofer’s extraordinary poetic intuition goes on fictionalizing the collusion between these two perceptions: the “world as made up of paintings done by individuals” —degraded nowadays into a re-enactment of subjectivity in the form of the “selfie”—and the world as a threatening collection of “structures”—so we see the environments represented in each of Marcel’s stories both as blurred photographic shots, interfered, glitched or “action-overpainted” by the precise performance of the text—, and, as the same time, in the form of a structural matrix imposed by the landscape. In that dialectics,—a thickening pseudo-social matrix versus a thinning and increasingly laughable pseudo-human subjectivity—is where contemporary art grows its weird creatures. No place for nostalgia—as failure, like in Beckett, is the only accomplishment that could be properly accounted for and, besides, emergent literature remains an insinuation that cannot be traced backward—one that owes nothing to what came before [9]. Thus, it’s not a surprise that Postures’ X and the narrators of several stories in Marcel—Watertown Bodily and Speedboat, for instance— openly present themselves in a satirically self-deprecative mood as “failed” artists: “If you sit and state and convince yourself of hidden inexplicable genius…” [10] “I’d love to be this generation’s Passolini, Acker, Sade, or even Gary Indiana if given the opportunity” [11] .

“Failed artists” —the “already deleted” in Kilpatrick’s words— play with loneliness and despair as an uncanny joke. Loneliness and failure, after all, are themselves fictions impossed by the crowd. “Our” memories are not just historical or biographical anymore, but “abstracted”  and technical: X learned to do what he now does through the process of negation. His desire to write came from the crishing non-desire to paint [12].

Memory has become a property of the system—of the structure—and, similarly to any prospective exit path, it needs to be constructed from “memories” that do not belong in our self (even in our “collective self”) but are swarming somewhere out of reach: the annihilation of future by innocence must be fortified by a synchronized annihilation of past by forgetting [13]. Forgetting allows imagination, but this is not a way out because art is dead and the much talked about lit scene is full of bullshit. Masturbation is not just a therapy always at hand, but a refusal to summon a body immediately after seen an absence —and, after all, the only sexual practice you never do alone.

“Proustian almost but the TV never turns off […] and a sea of memories bears down on him like death” [14]. Is MARCEL, (here the name of a fictional Midwestern town or a Chicago college), a twisted homage to the Proustian endeavor (in fact, recounting his desire and will to write), or a reminder of the contemporary evanescence and banality of all lived memories and records? Or maybe, as stated in Maierhofer’s foreword, the stories collected here are slim fictive etchings toward an erasure of their author being the method used what Mohaghegh defines as “piracy”?: Against the frozen, static entrapment of identity and against the entrenchment of pseudo-discourses of locality, this piracy strikes at the walls of such enclosed concepts, traversing their systems of incarceration and thereafter leaving the text stranded, amid disturbed waters, in the existential no-man’s-land [15]. Pirates are nomads, those who’ve abandoned buildings for ships. Dwellers, however, see an absence in the air and already construct a building to take its place [16]. They see an absence in the air and already construct a life (in any of its virtual versions) to take its place. They drown the world in the horrendous light of Celebrity, and Fame, and Murder, and True Love, and Art, and whatever other rubbish they cared to fill up the hivemind with [17]. But there’s something hellish about the city, the world it buries in structures. Pirates sail through absence with no regrets, but there’s no salvation in piracy as there’s neither in “art” nor in “life”. We can just go ahead with our weirdness and our pain (You endure, is about the long and short of it [18]), and lucidity consists in being aware that there’s nothing wrong with fooling ourselves with ridiculous dreams.  I speak only of utopias I know could never happen [19], writes Maierhofer, and maybe this is the wisest thing a writer can do now.  - German Sierra