Peripatet
Grant Maierhofer
Inside the Castle, 2019
Reviewed by Mike Corrao
Grant Maierhofer’s Peripatet (Inside the Castle, 2019) is an explorative work. At its core, the book is non-fiction, with passages flowing between autobiographical examinations, aesthetic analyses, and re-appropriated text. It is a small dense book with a photograph of a painted brick laid across its exterior, a design choice foreshadowing the work’s strong presence in the physical world.
The text here is a confined object. Its dimensions are 4.2 by 1.2 by 7 inches. When opened, the dimensions change, but only within the limits of the book’s base shape. Like a muscle, they expand and contract. The text cannot extend beyond these constraints. Its volume is static.
All books are subject to this constraint, but few other books feel so limited by their physicality. The abstract mechanisms—whatever those may be—that fuel Peripatet feel as if they desire to be larger than what can be contained in the physical space of the book object.
Early in the text, Maierhofer says that the text is an exploration into death. Reading this phrase, hidden in a wall of unbroken text, triggers something. It acts as a cipher for each new anomaly that appears in the book’s structure, informing the reader / viewer that the flow of this object, its strange interior, is guided by the free-flow of memory, excavating inward to find something that cannot be said directly.
One of Maierhofer’s methods in this process is the re-appropriation of preexisting text. Peripatet is not so much written as it is assembled, with the author excavating older texts and repurposing them for new uses.
Melville’s Pierre?, the poetry of James Purdy, and the work of Tan Lin feature prominently, along with scattered excerpts from various film scripts, essays, and online articles. Their integration is nuanced and smooth, external text denoted via italics rather than quotation marks. Changes in author do not halt the flow or shift the reader’s eyes.
The sources of borrowed text appear as URLs along the bottom of each page, separated from the text by a thick black line. Like the content itself, the links feel somewhat mysterious. The reader takes up an investigative position, scanning each link to see what additional information might be hidden within them.
Peripatet is a cohesive work. It feels as if the materials of its construction have been refurbished and made anew in the creation of this object. Their purposes / applications have expanded into a larger context.
The layout (the work of both Maierhofer, as well as Inside the Castle’s John Trefry) re-orients the expectations of the reader. They are no longer a passive observer. They are a laborer. Performing the work of reading. Engaging with the book as the object that it is.
Text carries from the edge of the page into the gutter?, sentences often ending out of sight as the reader further pries the book open, never quite reaching the final word of each line.
The gutter becomes an enigmatic zone, a nodal point, an arrangement of sacred folds that contain the knowledge that your body cannot reach. At times there is the desire to tear the book in half, to sever it down the center and unbind it. As if what has been obfuscated might contain a new kind of knowledge. The binding? is a boundary between tectonic plates where the physical constraints of the book-object become unstable and ambiguous.
Peripatet is a grimoire. There are narrative threads and recurring topics / concepts but the content never progresses. The expedition into death is exploratory and contemplative. It is a means of familiarizing the self with what is unknowable.
Epigraphs and excerpts feel as if they are tools for summoning. They connect to the base text, but never align quite right. Every passage feels as if it might have a more practical usage, as if the fluctuating discussions of trauma and aesthetics might be used to decipher the enigmatic materials of our own minds. The unknowable becomes smaller. It localizes itself into this: a singular object.
Peripatet’s user-experience is ambient insofar as you and it exist in the same place at the same time. You do not scroll along the page, but enter into a discussion, or perhaps allow for an environment to be slowly fabricated around you.
Peripatet is a beautiful book, both in its writing and its design. Grant Maierhofer has created one of the most innovative works of non-fiction that I have ever encountered. And I am happy to see it coming out through Inside the Castle, a press notable for their dedication to work in the expanded field of literature.