Smearlike – S.G. Mallett
May 8, 2026
Hidden World by Grant Maierhofer through Cloak is further proof for those of us who hold that a book is neither more nor less than the sum of its parts but a function of them that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is false. A book does not have to be for to be a book. Though Hidden World may read more like the channelling copy-and-pasting is than written at first pass, a closed loop on the inside and closed loop on the outside, some thing Jane Bennett may have said about assemblage as a technical term, Hidden World is ambient in the sense that any page might be one’s best point of entry, and a novel in that distant sense that some overarcing point exists and is worth following, “Someone knocks on the door and Beckett says Come in and Joyce says to include that in the work” is in both Sentence-Making by Grant Maierhofer through Feral Dove and Peripatet by Grant Maierhofer through Inside the Castle, and Hidden World is fiction in that everything is touched by fiction, nonfiction in that the author moves around in the text, smearlike.
Hidden, blurred, veiled, and even cloaked are not synonyms for smearlike in and on Maierhofer’s writing. Blurred for Maierhofer are the facts of perception, of epistemology, of the reader, where one argues a blurry thing is blurred because of the reader’s eyes, and a hidden thing, naturally, is a fact of ontology, a state of the object itself, what someone can do to a no-parking sign, [“The ice in each observer’s eyes did seem to dance across the hazy red horizon, the flickers of the shine of anything outside the martian atmosphere oddly manipulating everything we set out eyes upon” (HW, 36) and might be more synonymous with veiled and cloaked, but the smearliked is the transject, or is it the smearlikened, the object the subject transmutes, [“Those who witnessed it described it consistently to reporters and to government agents, though each was slightly colored by their slight distance and turning from one another’s sense of the thing, such that one’s final sense of it is prismatic, leapfrogging from account to account with strange omissions or inconsistencies pocked throughout the telling, the full tapestry of it finally marred with countless holes” (HW, 23)]. The white noise machine one keeps beside one’s bed one keeps for the effect and affect one receives. As if meaning was not incidental to design. In that space of all books and ephemera and marginalia and words in online journals one is there making the soft claim that some things are like other things or the hard claim that some things are other things. In the horizontal language that ours is one may say what Gertude Stein’s Tender Buttons does or what feelings reading it conjures or could conjure: one engages in this epistemically with the ideas of the text and ontologically with the thingness of the book-object. Stick to this epistemically with the ideas of the text and ontological with the thingness of the book-object, and stick to this epistemically with the about-text and ontologically with the ink or the pixels of hyperlinks: the stickiness is the transjective.
While umbral images dutifully follow Cloak’s style guidelines like ley lines, to laminar, as the text is laminaring, semirings within and without semirings, where this without is its concurrent definitions, the moves played to dress up the book-object, a Maierhofer book-object is as much about what it means to read as it is to hear the echoes of the writer having written. This latter affect is not like a hand in the machine in Latin or what have you, nor a thing through a fourth wall, nor even a natural echo, but a syllogism: (1) Maierhofer is always in what it is he has written, even when he writes a fiction where he is not; (2) Maierhofer interrupts nonfiction where he is not via the wedge’s thin edge of a life whose author has never made much of an attempt at clarity past the purpose of whatever language is defined as; (3) a conclusion in some floaty place. See [“Carbonic-oxide acts directly upon the blood corpuscles, combining with them and rendering them unfit to sustain life: hematosis, that is, a conversion of venous into arterial blood, is arrested. In a Violent Nature kind of sucked ass. Robert Eggers is egregiously overrated. Three minutes are sufficient to produce death. The circulation of the blood ceases. The black venous blood fills the arteries as well as fills the veins. The latter, especially those of the brain, become surcharged, the substance of the brain becomes punctured, the base of the tongue, the larynx, the wind-pipe, the bronchial tubes become red with blood, and soon the entire body presents the characteristic purple appearance which results from the suspension of hematosis. John Trefry is a genius.” (HW, 312)] as the major premise. If predictability and meeting expectations are two different facets of reading, which I find doubtful, consider [“What appeared to be a radio tube was installed in the center of the top side. The contraption had a total weight of approximately 20 pounds. At the Bureau Office a series of photographs were taken of the device from various positions, and a set of these photographs are being forwarded herewith for the Bureau’s inspection and information. I’m an artist working in Light, and that’s my whole interest, really. First and most important is the experience of light. Everything seen by those who visit the mind’s antipodes is brilliantly illuminated and seems to shine from within. Thou has been in Eden, the garden of God. Every precious stone was thy covering, the sardonius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald and the carbuncle, and gold…” (HW, 202)] as the minor premise. And [“Although many officials scoffed at the stories, more than one astronomer stuck to his belief that the mysterious things might be coming from outer space. The novels reads us.” (HW, 321)] to be a possible conclusion.
It is not clear what Hidden World is for or if what Hidden World is for is a relevant question to ask after. The only conceit of being a book is being. Peripatet is not particularly for being read. Sentence-Making is for making sentences with. Smearlike as a concept for literary use is at its most drawn out and most effective and affective in Hidden World, at least as it relates to the book-objects Maierhofer filed before Hidden World, but where literary use relates to book-making is circumscript beyond most book-makers, which latter point is more about some thing to do with market forces acting on a book-seller than about some thing like an art-making; some thing like a craft.
Maierhofer dials proximity as a technical term in your glossary of choice in Hidden World and Sentence-Making and Peripatet and “The Here Book Which is a Book Here Created from the Husks of Other Books There Such Books There as the Bibliomania Book There by Thomas Frognall Dibdin and Perhaps Either Literally or Metaphorically Made from Certain Works by Iain Sinclair Especially His Book White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings Which is a Truly Inspiring Work I Can’t Recall Anything About it… Truly I Am a Phony Ah… Now What Else A Book of Critique Perhaps Could It Be Called That I Guess So” whose full title’s acronym is P.B.D.T.P.W.S.B.T.P.C.O.O.A.C.
Passages underlined where letters had been, blackened boxes where information is, underscores for letters in a name, underscores for names in letters, typographical errors, [“The time was80 9:27. █████ [sic] returned to the Fargo airport and landed, convinced that some intelligence had been controlling the actions of the unknown[IV-1]. All of this occurred on the night when Alan Clarke’s masterpiece, ELEPHANT, was shown on television for the first time in the Americas. An impenetrable thing, and a work of the surest, most vital art ever created, these adjacent reverberations are meant to point to what, one wonders. Everybody getting shot. There is not Death.” (HW, 390)], smearlike in understanding as if reading had anything to do with understanding in the first place, what mars is not here synonymous with what smears, dialled to the smearlike setting if Hidden World is equal parts composition and ufology, distinctionless between wheat and chaff, one can identify the ufo’s parts with as much confidence as the parts of the book, where a life of letters sands down everything at the time of writing is the text, some thing smearlike like Mark Fisher suggesting that someone suggested that it is easier to picture the end of the world than the end of capitalism, [“There can be no antagonism in a unit. There is only a restless energy and impulse to effect changes; to continue the work of creation or evolution.” (HW, 270)], smearlike within [“All so-called ‘destructive conditions” are due to the breaking of the circuit and the violent determined effort to close it again, and are in themselves constructive processes. Smearlike.” (HW, 123)] and smearlike without with Feral Dove printing Sentence-Making when book-making is a smearlike practice, where what Eric Ormsby calls isotope and isotopic in Poetry as Isotope: The Hidden Life of Words Maierhofer identifies as submission in Sentence-Making, an inter-ruption, where the sentence-writer in Maierhofer’s sentence is “not necessarily interested in finitude, in bare clear light of what is being expressed, but rather the humanity within what is being expressed, the human spirit, so the effort elides what might be seen as a perfection, in favor of the spiralling, dwelling nature we tend to have in our actual thinking” (S-M, 127), which acting and gerunding is apophatising but is less apophatic than Maierhofer means it to sound beyond [“This determination of the stimuli that triggered the UFO sightings, while not an insurmountable task, was a long, tedious process. The identification of known objects was routine, and caused no excitement. The excitement and serious interest occurred when we received UFO reports in which the observer was reliable and the stimuli could not be identified (HW, 58)] that which Eric Ormsby finds in the isotopic placing of one word next to another, purpling and unncannying them in the process, synonyms for transforming, what one might now physically feel, what Ormsby says Wallace Stevens says is read with one’s nerves, this Maierhofer forms in the allotropic. The smearlike transject. One can say Hidden World is more in conversation with the parts of the closed loop of its self than the parts outside the self. Neither nuts and bolts cosmogony nor metaphysical novel, Hidden World does not feel as if it follows from some thing like Visitors from Lanulos by Woodrow Derenberger or The Ra Material by Donald Elkins or The Council of Seven Lights by George Van Tassel or The Masks of Lucifer by David Morris. Where Peripatet for all its pages and sinuous layout and readability and obsessive citations is itself unpaginated and difficult to cite, a numb brick in its assemblage, mere physicality; who, if it can be said to be composed of parts, one could name them on one’s fingers, I do not take its meaning as a dumbbell, those books whose note is as a flex; hyperlinks in ink and for every hyperlink in ink in Peripatet, there exists a marginline or more in Sentence-Making on which to sustain the presence of the whatness of reading to return as [“a ceaseless loop, smearlike” (HW, 230)] to the notes you wrote when you were last a part of the text, and a reader retrofits a voice to a language. Communion. Any charm is in how the sausage is made which is made a foregrounded part of the finished thing if any thing is ever finished. No more a block universe than a block of wood is, it is tempting to reject the image of the isotope in favor of some thing like the same volume of water passed between two bowls of different dimensions. But the water’s motion is what stands out. Or to throw one’s hands up and to reject the image of the isotope in favor of the at-hand image of the ufo: a placeholder with which to start over.
In Hidden World as in Peripatet and Sentence-Making, the present participle of writing is preserved, as if in their final drafts the texts are being written in the reading, as if their respective book-objects are incidental to the writing, as if their respective book-objects are present not as a matter of convention but quiddity, souls who happen to posses, presences who happen to project onto the present, [on the one hand everything is incredibly interesting constantly, and on the other” (S-M, 199)] entangled, the effect is the affect, projects itself [“a Eucharist of some sort should most assuredly be consumed daily by every magician, and he should regard it as the main sustenance of his magical life. It is of more importance than any other magical ceremony, because it is a complete circle. The whole of the force expended is completely re-absorbed; yet the virtue is that vast gain represented by the abyss between Man and God” (HW, 213)] as a transject of a conclusion in some floaty place. Smearlike. As sound as a smeared conclusion allows. One reads Hidden World for hours and feels no closer to what one thinks one is after than when one began, or a synonym for read. Hidden World is not paulstretched meaning, it is RFI’d meaning, a sense of bearing between the magnetic poles of front cover to back cover, to make the meaning of the smear into what one will make of it, like one midden word.