Your Dreams

Thomas Moore Your Dreams (2023)
Thomas Moore further explores his own seemingly insubstantial existence as he's driven forward by desires which he doesn't quite seem to trust, and which he regards with a certain emotional detachment - which I find quite refreshing and a welcome variation on the usual invitations to spend time rolling around in some stranger's inscrutable fantasy.

 

I think about the idea of community and about how weird it is now that everyone wants to be part of one community or another. Growing up, being part of "the gay scene" seemed too repulsive to me. It represented exclusion, it represented consumerism, body fascism, shit music, assimilation, and the idea of shared community was such a reductionist way of thinking - a sexual preference didn't make me share anything else. The mainstream gays would scowl at me.

Regardless of my own sexual preferences, I feel like I've been waiting half a century for someone to express this. Moore goes places I wouldn't want to go, but for reasons other than customarily waving an assortment of cocks and fannies in your face, thus leaving the somewhat redundant transgressive tag looking ever more like the cliché that it is. Your Dreams concludes on a surprisingly post-modern note involving the author, potential reactions to his work - specifically that which we've just read - then his reactions to our reactions and whether any of it means anything. It could have been a bit too self-conscious for its own good, and yet it works and makes sense as part of the whole.

As with his previous books, what Moore does is so nuanced as to reduce most attempts at description to hopeless generalisation, and I'm not sure that anyone else is doing it. That's a recommendation.

Forever

Thomas Moore Forever (2021)
Once again I'm pretty much lost for words, Moore's prose being of such scalpel precision as to render whatever I might have to say about this unusually short novel equivalent to it's really smart innit. Our man travels to Paris, hooks up with strangers, and coasts through his own fragile existence with the detachment of one whose time is running out, and who acknowledges that none of it truly amounts to anything.

Capitalism is everywhere - especially death. But after death it's gone, like everything else - I presume it will mean nothing. Things will lose their meaning. Things won't matter to me. I won't be me. All this will be just - I should just start leaving blank spaces on the page. I don't cruise again. I don't look at any more websites. Sex is gone now. It feels like a big thing to put to rest. I don't know if it is or not. It's hard to tell if things matter or if they just feel like they do.

Moore somehow manages to describe that which probably cannot be described - emotionally speaking, by mapping the empty spaces around it, and somehow achieving it with as few words as possible; and it's beautiful to behold, even though it really shouldn't be.

Incredible.

Alone

Thomas Moore Alone (2020)
I wasn't really sure what to expect with this one, and yes, the cover, leaves me a little uncomfortable - which is probably the point, but it seemed worth a punt given the quality of 2018's Small Talk at the Clinic. Small Talk was co-credited to Steven Purtill whom I assume was responsible for the visual element, although I could be wrong. Alone is similar in so much as that it says a great deal without anything like the sort of word count you might anticipate, and more impressive is that it does so without the visual element of its predecessor. Alone has the girth and depth of a novel, 162 pages, yet the lines are widely spaced and it took me about an hour to read. It's all about the gaps, about the details which seem to be missing from life, relationships, human existence and so on, or rather it's about feeling that there must be something missing and the difficulty in telling when you have nothing for comparison. Practically speaking, the shape and scale of this absence is mapped out across internet hook-ups and gay sex with multiple partners who drift in and out of the picture to varying degrees of emotional impact; but even to describe this seems like a distraction from what actually happens here, and the title really says it all: alone.

Pain like anything though, is transitory. People miss that. Being happy is simply a state - not a goal or intended or ideal destination. It is a state, like pain, that we experience at points. People get off track when they decide that happiness is something that they should be aiming for - as in their goal is to become happy, for happiness to take over and become their default state.

The cover may leave you a little uneasy, as may some of the sex described within, I suppose, but if so you're missing the point of the novel and that which it communicates - which is the sort of emotional understanding that might otherwise elude description by means of words, particularly words suspended in such economic prose. It's as though the book is only the physical expression of something much bigger and which, once you pass the discomfort and the sense of unease, is revealed as quite beautiful in its own, unfamiliar way; and perhaps unfamiliar only because we, as a society, are otherwise so full of shit these days that we don't recognise the real stuff when we see it. What Moore does in this novel seems so deceptively simple that it's quite difficult to pinpoint what that might be, and easier to say what he doesn't do; but whatever the case, he's clearly a master.

Small Talk at the Clinic

Thomas Moore & Steven Purtill Small Talk at the Clinic (2018)
I've never heard of either of them, but it seemed worth a punt given Amphetamine Sulphate's thus far exceptional track record combined with the ominous suggestion of this being a somewhat limited run, possibly due to it being a slightly more lavish production than usual, perfect bound with colour images.

The title seems to describe the form taken by the narrative rather than the promise of anything too literal - snatches of muttered conversation stripped of most context and perhaps a little more intimate than should be entirely comfortable. The text serves as written counterpart to the images, low resolution snatches of what may as well be webcam footage affording ominous glimpses of the someone's world, leaving ample gaps for horror within all of the information which has been left out. This is private mania described by that which the text excludes; and because this sort of focus places no onus on the authors - or perhaps even editors given that most of this reads like found material - to nail anything to a specific set of descriptions, it would seem to communicate a truly universal experience; which may actually be the most hopelessly pretentious sentence I've ever written, but never mind.

Small Talk at the Clinic works a little like poetry, a little like film, and somehow achieves a terrifying intensity without really seeming to do much - and to the point that I was kind of relieved to come to the end of the thing, but in a good way, I think.

I spend quite a lot of time proofing and editing my own shite, whipping it into shape for publication in forms which hardly anyone will buy but which nevertheless give me a sense of purpose and make me happy. I therefore appreciate that book publishing takes a lot of time and hard work when you're doing it yourself, so each time a new Amphetamine Sulphate title appears, my flabber has grown increasingly and exponentially ghasted. The quality and quantity they have maintained in terms of both production and material has been exceptional, and it's still their first year.

Available yonder.