Please welcome to the world … Forever by Thomas Moore (Amphetamine Sulphate)

Artwork by Michael Salerno

 

SADNESS ALWAYS FINDS PEOPLE

“I’m writing this instead of killing myself” states the narrator of Forever, Thomas Moore’s most compelling novel yet. A young man travels alone to Paris, to see out his days in painful reflection and sexual abandon until the money inevitably runs out.

By turns hauntingly elegiac and viscerally brutal, Moore charts with forensic precision the topographies of violence and self-harm that flourish within the dehumanised environment of predatory global capitalism.

Unflinchingly crafted in exquisite prose, Forever is a vividly political and intensely personal vision of life and language pushed to the very limits.

“We are always told that things should be more, everything should be bigger, better, owned, ownable. Things should be forever even though nothing is.”

“Thomas Moore is one of the best writers the world has in stock.” -Dennis Cooper

 

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BUY FOREVER

Publication date: September 3rd 2021
USA/RoW: https://amphetaminesulphate.bigcartel.com/product/forever
UK/EU: https://cargorecordsdirect.co.uk/collections/amphetamine-sulphate/products/thomas-moore-forever

 

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Excerpt

I look down on Paris knowing that I’m going to die soon. This is my final trip away. I have enough money left to cover it and then it’ll be gone. I’ll have spent what I’d managed to save for the last few years. It’s overwhelming – just that this isn’t a daydream. I’m acting out one of those stupid impulses people get – like jumping from a bridge, shouting something obscene in a serious situation, whatever. It’s like that but it’s real.

Goosebumps tickle my arms as the clouds drift away and the city becomes increasingly visible.

It’s beautiful. Absorbing the beauty is too much for me. I feel stunned. It’s almost too much – the awe of it all feels like it could capsize everything in me. I don’t why pleasure makes me feel like I’m suffering. It’s the same thing as when the feeling of love is too much to take.

Paris is a place that I’ve objectified so much, in as many shallow ways as deep, that it’s become this thing to me, in my imagination. I’m always happier here – that’s why I’ve chosen it as my last place to visit. But – because it’s already Paris, it’s sort of instantly a cliché. Nothing I feel is profound, nothing I think is new – that’s the thought that occurs to me, whether I genuinely mean it or not. The rot is set deep inside me.

Once I’m off the plane I take the RER train from the airport into the centre of the city.

I walk outside the Gare du Nord and light a cigarette. I try and act natural. I shake my head at a homeless guy asking me for something – I try to look like I know who I am and what I’m doing here.
Paris is busy being itself and doesn’t notice my arrival at all, which is perfect. I walk a familiar route from Place Napoléon- III, crossing the road onto Boulevard de Denain and then turning left on to Boulevard de Magenta.

I feel weirdly at ease. The mix of beautiful architecture and graffiti go so well together. Maybe this is what it feels like to feel like yourself for once. I’m not sure.

It’s late afternoon and the tenth arrondissement of Paris feels like it’s ready for the day to hurry up and leave so that the night can carry out its plans.

African music plays loudly from hair salons. I can smell fruit. Scooters zip by and cars beep their horns.

I make my way to the hotel where I always stay and check in.

I throw water on my face and look at myself in the bathroom mirror. I try and work out if anything has changed. There’s a sense of half panic, half ease that I can’t quite discern so I purposely try to distract myself. I pack my suitcase away and throw a hoodie on and quickly make my way outside.

 

I sit outside a large café just round the side of the Centre Pompidou. I’ve been here many times before. I can’t remember the first time. I smoke and I watch people. I start opening apps on my phone, so that my profile will start to register on other people’s grids, and then put the phone back in my pocket to give it time, let people decide if my face fits their potential evening plans.

A few offers pop up quickly, but they don’t catch my attention enough to instantly interact. I’m just dipping my toes into the water of the evening.

The night already has its arms wrapped round the city. It squeezes a little harder. The last bit of sunlight starts to fade. I stop and watch the last few flourishes of evening. I take a photo on my iPhone and try to catch the faltering light – the hazy sky and the final remnants of day draped across the buildings at a junction between Boulevard de Sébastopol and Rue de Turbigo.

I’m aware that I’m about a street away from Le Dépôt. It doesn’t open for another hour and a half or so. I go and down some shots in a bar nearby to kill time. I can do what I want with time for now.

Knowing that there is an end in sight offers such a relief. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a relief that balances on the most daunting thing that you could ever be facing but when you reach a certain level of resolution, then there’s a real sense of freedom. Capitalism still tries to interfere and control until the very end though – I have time based on my monetary resources, which are limited. So long as I act within my limits and try to ignore the rage that is easily ignited when I think about the self- perpetuating hold that we have allowed to have further imposed upon us by money – so long as I can do this, then I can have an illusion of choice that obscures any illusion of choice I’d had in my life under less extreme circumstances. Look at the world that raised us – we’re all okay with an illusion – if we’re honest. We are all okay with a lie.

 

Inside Le Dépôt, I meet a cub wearing a Black Flag t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. It takes a minute to realise that he doesn’t know who Black Flag are. The t-shirt is from some upmarket fashion store. He tells me the address and I pretend to be interested. I give him a blowjob in the bathroom and move on. Before I do, he offers me a bump of some powder. He tells me it’s M-Kat, which I haven’t had for years, so I snort it and kiss him. Then we’re over.

I drink too much too fast. I stumble around the cubicles on the bottom floor. A hairy guy pulls me inside and closes the door. We both drop our jeans. We don’t fuck but he pushes me against the wall and rubs his cock against mine over and over. I feel so warm and so good.

As I leave, I see someone arguing loudly with a member of the bar-staff. I think he’s saying that his watch has been stolen. The person behind the bar is trying to tell them that there’s nothing that they can do about it – that kind of thing just happens.

I try to smile at the receptionist in my hotel without looking as wasted as I am, but I can tell I fail straight away. I fall face down onto the bed and try to kick off my clothes from there.

 

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Some things that are related in some way to Forever.

 

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‘Running out of time, money and energy’: Peter Sotos in conversation with Thomas Moore

PS: I’m not great at this, first off. So apologies beforehand. Has Philip explained why he wanted us to do this -or you with me specifically, I guess?

TM: I think you’re doing yourself an injustice there – Philip was saying that he trusts you to draw stuff out. He was saying he was hoping for more of a dialogue than just a Q&A. I think his thoughts are that standard interviews can be kind of simplistic sometimes, so he was hoping that with this we could perhaps bring out some more interesting stuff.

PS: That’s why I ask. I had told him awhile ago that I liked your writing but was disappointed somewhat by the interviews I’d been reading. Not all of them but many. And I was telling Philip that I thought those sort of answers and questions might become more difficult as your oeuvre expanded. In that some of the more identifiable and common issues or themes might give way to an overriding prejudice or taste. I sound a bit like I’m arguing for a prurient deconstruction but I believe it’s more than that – One of the things I like about your work is this struggle between the core, let’s say the easier identifiables like love, and then the salves. Not sure if you’d be happy with either of those words -love or salve. Forever does chart the same sort of territory though that Alone does. Or no?

TM: I think you’re asking about the themes of the writing? I think of my work in two ways (although a lot of it is intuitive or instinctive rather than cohesively pre-planned, some of the thinking comes in once I’ve realised what has naturally taken shape, which I think is important to say here ) – there are the themes of the writing and then the mechanics of the thing – the structure of the piece. I feel happy with the idea of love or at least in the way that you use it here. Would you be able to elaborate a little on what you see as the salves? Forever definitely has some of the same terrain of Alone – I do feel that the two books are linked, maybe more than others have been previously.

PS: Yes, I’m not asking personal questions. Unless it’s the extremely personal that becomes extrapolated from the writing; I think that’s basically the way intuition works, right? The same way aesthetics works? Whereby, as themes become more pronounced and repetitive, the more work you have to do to understand where and why you started somewhere “surprising” in the first place. And then stayed there.

So your, or the, characters in both books are troubled by failures underneath the great umbrella of promised love. As is typical and identifiable and not facetious. They then look for bodies or acts to, and I should ask here, to relieve the pain somewhat? It becomes confusing, character-wise, when the desire for love is translated to a physical desire perhaps?

To be blunt; salves, here, would be the cheap immediate idea to touch only the edges of love as if at least it’s something close. To be blunter; asking for a phone number after a restroom suck and grapple. Is it love that doesn’t work? And/or then can’t work with these, possibly counterintuitive, desires? First and Forever?

TM: The more I write and the longer I go the things that interest me become more apparent and I have a feeling that they will always be in the work in some form – perhaps they’re ingrained in me. I suppose Alone was the closest thing to some of my thoughts in the real world – not entirely, I have to stress, but certain parts are definitely very close to “me”.

With Alone, I think I was very much channelling a lot of my own personal ideas about love. I know you said you weren’t asking personal questions, but I think the best way to answer is with a very personal answer – my idea of love is very much at odds with the idea of love that I felt I was taught or expected to believe in. I don’t see one on one monogamous relationships as things that work – I can’t think of a time that I’ve seen two people in that kind of heteronormative setup and thought that it looked like a situation that would appeal to me, or that I could function honestly or be satisfied within. So that came out very much through the character. Alone was almost a celebration of that. I can’t remember where, but I think one review likened it to a manifesto or something along those lines – of that way of thinking. I think the struggle in that book was with the character and the rest of society maybe, or at least the traditional ideas of romance that are still prominent.

With Forever, I think that there is more of a struggle with the character and himself. The narrator there is if not confused then aware and tormented by the fact that despite wanting to reject certain ideas of love, he has also experienced some of the things that he feels resigned to not having.

And where does all of that come from? I suppose, going into even more personal detail, which I know you didn’t ask, but it’s the only explanation that comes to mind – when I’ve been in therapy I’ve definitely spoken a lot about attachments and attachment disorders. I’m sure that’s where some of the aesthetics I’m drawn to write about must come from.

PS: This is more difficult then. I think the importance of aesthetics, like therapy, I guess, is that it -something- needs to be defined. The definitions -only possibly- hidden within the personal reaction to a material or person or another fantastical thought that was so initially strong and thus insistent. It’s important to remember, I think and am sorry, that I don’t look to your books as heteronormative critiques. But rather, and what keeps your work away from most writers and more traditional thought, is that you’re looking elsewhere than strictly within the details of the tragedies that you start with and then “might” veer off to. First off, both the last books are heavily suicidal. And you use the word rejection. Both titles fit the books incredibly well. So, with some insistence that I’m not asking for personal details, do you think that your characters, that is- the design of the writing and narrative, is at odds with legitimizing the core emotions set up at the beginnings of the writing? You’ve exploded those notions perhaps? And it’s not exactly scorched earth after the deconstruction, is it? In other words, the reader is eventually following, or finds himself tracking forward, a very specific tragedy in the shape of no longer generalized aesthetics? An aesthetic reaction. The sex, the bodies, the relief, morph from access to taste, or am I wrong? There’s something legitimately exciting about that? Something that, what, might insist on less indulgence and more desistance?

TM: I agree that I’m looking elsewhere than just the details. I’m sitting here trying to work out where that is and I honestly don’t know if I can work it out. When I write I feel like there’s something out of sight – there’s a way that I want the books to make me feel and I can tell when that starts to happen but it’s something I don’t feel I can pinpoint until I get there. And yeah, I definitely find those aesthetics appealing and exciting. As for the characters being at odds with legitimising the core emotions, I can see that yes, and that’s fine with me. I think there is plenty of conflict and contradiction in there.

PS: Are the books finished when something that was out of sight is reached, seen and then what?- Collected? Memorialized? …as process, journey? When the writing praises the concept of confusion is that a brutal acquiescence or appreciation of contradiction? An exhaustion of sorts?

Here’s another, perhaps less reflexive or circuitous, view -I’m pretty sure that for me, your books write and define or pinpoint, especially lately and especially as they compound, the appeal of Trade. That wretched term that means very different things to very different people. There’s a bit of predation in my preferred definition.

TM: Yes, and I’ve usually already got the end of the book in my head before I’ve reached that point. It worked that way with my last three books. I wouldn’t call it a journey because I don’t think my work tends to operate on that way, with that clear start to end route, although Forever is the closest I’ve done to that actually. In Their Arms ends just before the beginning of the book so that it just looks straight round and can go over and over like a record on repeat, or a loop.

And yeah I’m guessing our definition of Trade may be along the same lines maybe? I definitely find the idea compelling.

PS: Perhaps I’m being tedious, sorry. I’m glad to hear you don’t think your books operate on the level of a recorded or captured journey as I don’t read them that way. I see them as complete. Then again, I’d have to, wouldn’t I. Do you find it easier to talk about how you do the book than what it might toss back at you?

TM: It’s not tedious at all, no. It’s a real thrill to be able to talk about the work in a more expanded way. Surely you must find that when you write about certain subjects then people get distracted by that subject matter and don’t end up looking at the writing in a deeper way. Do you find that? I think when people write about sex, and specifically things like cruising or sex clubs, glory holes etc, I think people tend to start thinking down a certain line or just jump to lazy conclusions. For me, to be able to take the writing apart at length is a real pleasure.

When I think about the doing and then what comes from the doing then there’s a certain point where it seems to blur for me. My books are really made in the editing, so maybe that has something to do with it. I cut out a lot when I write. My books are so short in length – I don’t need them to be longer, I just need them to work and to feel like they are as complete as I am capable of at the time of writing. And I’ve definitely become a lot more confident with editing the work since I started. I couldn’t even edit my first novel – I had to ask someone else to do it because I was so lost. Since then, I know I’m a lot more confident in what I’m doing. I don’t care about ripping out pages or “storylines”. I keep the source material and can reshape it afterwards. Most of the books that have really got to me have all been short.

What I’m saying is that as I edit, the books start to feel more apparent, I realise more about what I’ve been trying to do. Things become clearer through really taking the work apart. It’s not like I’m editing because what I start with isn’t what I want – it’s more that I can’t really tell what I want until I start editing it. I don’t know if that’s just me contradicting myself but it feels like a big difference to me.

PS: So the editing is where you find out what the actual work is “saying”? Yes? That’s where you see what has been tossed up at you. Tell me if I’m wrong -but the acts and interests coalesce into the book after you felt compelled to write down what you were dealing with, living through, thinking and/or obsessing about? This does go back to what I was asking you about Trade as well. And, of course, I asked because it’s what so much of your writing, seems to me anyway, to be about when you’re cruising. Which, forgive me, is creating trade. There’s other words for cruising as well. There’s dogging, prowling. In fact, I read “Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime” recently and despised it. My read is, forgive the pun, radically different. Never mind the history. So here’s where I’m going with this – Is it possible that the violence that comes from the books tells you things you’d thought you’d rather not know until you do? I’m thinking specifically, right now, about the part where the narrator jerks off and realizes, or gave in, to having imagined Guillaume. This is also a theme in your other works, yes?

TM: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’m aware of the themes that I’m writing about. I know what things fascinate me and what things I obsess over. Those things have to be in there as a way of anchoring my attention – and I can spread those interests and subject matter out, so as to sustain the book – I think those things are a way for me to make sure the narrative still propels when there isn’t much in the way of traditional plot. In the original writing I get to play around with those things and then in the editing then I guess I get more of a hit of … something else. I get a feeling that feels way more different and separate to just the words and language and nuts and bolts on the page. When it’s cut up and chopped down and reshaped is when I start to feel some emotional release from the text.

Cruising is always there in my writing I think. I think it was a formative experience that just changed me. I remember talking to this older gay guy in a cruisey bar when I was younger, and he was talking about how once he’d got the scent of it (cruising), he could never stop the hunt – I remember him saying that he thought he’d never be able to settle down because he had that scent and he’d never be able to stop hunting. I found that fascinating but also I think I get it. And as fortune would have it – it also fits into my writing well. Cruising is so much about language without words – certain looks, the coughs, the slightest movements that hint at much more – all without language. And a recurring theme with me is that language won’t work properly – so cruising will always fit in well with my work. It’s more explicit and more hidden, depending on the work. With Forever, it’s blatant – it couldn’t be referenced more obviously.

Oh – that’s the Alex Espinoza book that you mentioned. I have it but I have not got round to reading it yet, for whatever reason. I will do. Would I be able to ask about your reading of it?

As for your last point, I’m reading what you said and thinking that you might be right, yes. It’s interesting that you picked that particular point, because even though it’s a split second part of the book, it really did haunt me when it came out, so to speak. It felt kind of small in the scheme of the writing but it really got to me, because up until that point, the narrator is obviously obsessed with Guillaume and what happened to him, but there seems to be a barrier between that and thinking about him sexually … that bit revealed itself to me and it kind of haunted me. So yes, I think the writing is showing me things afterwards that I’m not always expecting. And from there, will come other ideas. If something jumps out and disturbs me, then I’ll try and spend time thinking about that and getting to the bottom of it if I can.

PS: It’s significant, I think, that you talk about an emotional release. So that it needs to happen, I guess. You can’t have these ideas lurking around and settling in beside or behind you, to use the obvious definition of release. No? But I’d argue that there’s something greater there in that you’ve hardly relieved yourself. Very much in keeping with your friend from the bar back when you were young. Once he got a whiff, he was done for. So to speak. I don’t think you’re writing books just because books need to be written. Or people need to be entertained. And so I’d like to talk about your creating a plot -I’m not sure your plots are as thin as you say, in fact. I’m reading the movements of the characters as ideas you play out, that you need to have created and itemized and identified. Follow trails. Have them put into places and situations you respond to or have responded to. But I’m not trying to guess at your history when I read you. I’ve been to Le Dépôt, your authenticity works fine for me. I’d argue that fortune having it fit well has very little to do with fortune at all. Tell me if I’m way off here but I’m, of course, interested in your particular take on these situations. And, to answer your question about Espinoza, I like that, while you and I may differ in opinion or take, I don’t think you’re trying to shove your history into a contemporary read of tried and true acceptance and spirituality. Different definition of sex if nothing else.

On the other hand, we could argue about the small gestures and nonverbal ticks and licks of men walking back and forth in the backrooms and bars and parks as a form of something much less compelling than a dearth of language. There’s an economy that comes through training just as much as fear of arrest; the same economy that comes from the crippling fear of rejection at those sedimentary levels. It compounds. Language is spoken and writing is inadequate. But it’s what makes Foucault’s books more interesting than the obviates from Le Keller. Are you not in fact saying that there needs to be more from these experiences? And that, possibly, the only way to draw your unique attractions together is less to write them down as a diary and more to destroy them? As in Release? To wit, your characters don’t fare too well too often.

TM: You’re right about the lack of relief if I’m honest. I used to think about writing as this cathartic thing but I don’t think I can in all honesty now. If it is, then it’s minimal. I know that if I don’t write at all then I definitely feel worse. So I have a compulsion to write. Maybe I need to write more than the books need to be written. They make me feel less bad than when I don’t write.

There are certainly times when I’m putting characters in places that I have been and I’m writing about their response or looking at situations and experiences through their particular lens or way of seeing. It’s funny though, because I don’t know if I would have said it like that without you saying it. It’s almost like I’m more aware of the spaces than my place in them, if that makes sense? Maybe the characters there are trying to make sense of my absence in my own memories or experiences. I don’t know. Maybe I’m trying to justify my experiences? Although, my instinct says that it isn’t the latter. Or maybe that’s just what I’d prefer to think.

Oh yeah, the fear of arrest in those places – I’ve seen plenty of occasions when a loud, drunk guy disturbs that secret place for everyone and people start leaving the woods fast. That definitely leads to the silence, but even there the nonverbal stuff still totally fascinates me – maybe it would be more accurate to think of it as a whole new language rather than a dearth of another. And yes, I think I do want more from some of these experiences. I feel they get close to something but it’s never enough – and again – the something is just out of reach. The same as with the writing.

PS: Blank spaces and pages seem to halt the action, the narrative, and let time go by. It’s not even pacing so much, is it? Or I thought that maybe they alluded back to the earliest contention that the narrator is looking for the words to disappear. Then there’s the concern that there aren’t any thoughts going in. And finally, it could also be a device where thoughts are going on but being kept from the reader. So I wondered if the narrator was becoming frightened? Maybe even prudish, struggling, worried about more? Best, maybe just kind? Something you might think should be kept from the reader if not yourself first? All of that, I think, forms the “language” of those places if we think of it as less language and more… demand, patois; the actual books themselves within degraded forgotten epistemologies and almost immediate obsolescence. There are serious arguments, alterities, depletion, going on in there, not just body language and muscle memory and heavenly promised ecstasy. All under some sort of excitement rubric. You also critique capitalism. But can you see where it would have had to be commodified? Is the idea of cruising, trolling, to get it done quick and get it done most of all?

TM: Partly I really enjoy the blank spaces and the layout of my books, just visually. I tend to like books where a page is just a few sentences and then blank, or just a full on one paragraph block. It’s all or nothing. Aside from visual tastes, I love the absence of text. When I edit I love seeing a page stripped clear – there’s something satisfying about it. Personally, knowing what was there and seeing what is now left, the bare bones, feels really good. That’s a very personal thing though because no one else can ever see that in the text, it’s like a treat just for me. It’s mine. The text is mine and I did this to it.

Then of course there are parts that I just think are terrible and need to be deleted or just really throw the tone off and divert from the mood that I’m trying to make. Sometimes it can really help. I ended up writing my book of short poems/haikus, Skeleton Costumes, because there was a weird subplot that I was trying to weave through as part of my second novel, In Their Arms, that I just couldn’t get to work. I ended up ripping it all out of the book, and I wanted to change it into something new – it ended up being source material for that book of poems – I just kept reducing and reducing and then as a joke I tried to make it into a haiku, which led to a bunch more which led to a whole book being formed from these deletions.

I also think that it does cause a bumpy rhythm to the books as well. Maybe it interrupts a sense of momentum or something – edging maybe!

The capitalist stuff is something that I’m sometimes unsure of. It’s kind of cropped up in all of my work. I didn’t realise that at first, but it always pops up at some point. It’s a strange thing because I’m the world’s worst anti-capitalist, I’m sure. Again it’s a contradiction, and I’m happy to live with that. I think that I contradict myself all of the time. I can see so many contradictions in the characters, in myself. Although, aside from the heavy sadness that is there, I try to avoid too many specific judgments about the characters in the books.

PS: You see the characters as apart, separate, from your judgement? And the contradictions are maybe evocative? Like the bare bones and stripping away that feels really good? Sorry if it sounds like I’m asking you to repeat yourself. I hope I’m not.

TM: Most of the time I try to think of characters as mechanical parts of the book, devices to make the whole piece work. However I also know that because the work operates emotionally, then it is hard to keep them away from that, too. But yes, ideally I want most of the writing to feel judgement free. Maybe for someone looking in from outside this might sound ludicrous or like a huge failure, you tell me. Yeah I think the contradictions are similarly satisfying. I like thinking and writing about confusion, so that all plays into it, I guess.

PS: Outsider syndrome, yes? You’re asking if it sounds ludicrous from an outside perspective but isn’t that the exact perspective you’re trying to adopt for the writing? Of course, you’d have to make it sound judgement free -how else would you manipulate and complete the emotional machine? Like confusion, innocence, non judgemental purity -I would imagine they’re states spotted, or mined, in others that’ll only work if you don’t suffer the same maladies.

I’m thinking of these old American exploitation and preterm exploitation films. The sort of things Something Weird used to put out. Small but important part to remember while you’re watching them is that the term “exploitation” essentially comes from the movie producers exploiting the audience. Promised more than they would or could deliver, “selling the sizzle not the steak” as they’d brag. Then came others who’d kindly try to dish out in prized bits what the poor dumb audience came there for. The real job was in cynically skirting the laws and idiot regulations to let the fuckers get fucked and take the money and integrity off the top. And then again, maybe, for once, give the suckers exactly what they didn’t even know they wanted yet. It’s now a genre, a branding. So back to cruising and trade, right? For the audience, unless it’s sad ol’ nostalgia you’re looking to indulge, it’s almost perpetually far less than you wanted. And they’ll have to bust that cycle. So, in Forever, he’s trawling, prowling, trolling and constantly checking his hook-up apps on his phone. He even leaves a review. It’s hardly like he doesn’t care or sees it as simplistically as a producer would when he views the demographics and potential ticket sales. The whole picture is a different job entirely when you insist on the writing holding up past the blank stare of new pornography or stupified emotionalism. How important is the concept of the audience to your editing process?

TM: I think Alone was quite a positive feeling book from my point of view, and Forever feels like the come down from that maybe. So when he’s trawling and prowling he’s just running out of time and money and energy. Also, I just thought of the part in the book where he cruises at the train station and almost comes under attack – there’s definitely things lacking from his perceived freedom, yeah. His need to disappear then is purely for self-preservation, which is at odds with other thoughts he has – if he’s gonna go – why not be gone there and then? I guess having his head kicked in isn’t as serene.

I think I try and think of myself as the ideal reader at that point, as biased and as unfairly informed about the work that I am. Maybe realistically I’m too close to it to be the true audience. I don’t think I have very many conscious thoughts about the audience while I’m editing. I just mainly feel obsessed with the text by then and making it feel how I want it to feel or how it needs to feel. Once it’s done I’m of course surprised and happy when people read it and click with the book and respond to it.

If I may, I have to ask you about that too, Peter – where is the idea of importance when you are writing?

PS: I was responding to this idea of working within and without the book, underneath and above this framework of a piece that still moves but as a sum, a function; the mechanics involved to have a full and complete artwork with the details and contradictions encased, liquid or not, within supporting the whole. And this is how I read it, I think. My opinions do not change the book and my opinion, to you, does not change the work -I’m not really much a fan of postmodernism and try my best to ignore the gossip and excuses and anecdotes that support the hawk of the piece or mistakes and apologies and improvisations and then the shining success of the struggles. I try my best not to think like a producer. I don’t have to be cynical or manipulative or annoyed when I’m talking to myself, you know? But I have a subject. Every time. So I get to ask you… and I may well have already asked… When you consider your oeuvre and the way you work and write and edit and dispatch and consider again; Can you put a name on your subject?

To be clear. A producer would ask for your brand and I’m not.

TM: I always used to think the work was about communication and more often than not that’s how I would describe it. I feel like I’ve moved away from that thinking more recently. I think the constants are death, sex and loneliness. I’d say if I was forced then it might boil down to those.

 

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Further links

Thomas Moore at Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thomasmoronic/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thomasmoronic
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7326539.Thomas_Moore
Amphetamine Sulphate: https://amphetaminesulphate.bigcartel.com
Kiddiepunk: http://www.kiddiepunk.com

 

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p.s. Hey. It’s a joy to employ the blog’s limited abilities to help assist in the birth of Thomas Moore’s brand new novel ‘Forever’ from the literary powerhouse Amphetamine Sulphate. I’ve read the novel, and it’s very beautiful, and it comes super highly recommended by me. So please investigate it and its accompanying stuff this weekend, and thank you! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Unfortunately ABBA has a lot of popularity-related baggage that the discerning must cast aside or contextualize interestingly in  order to glean their sublime genius, but disbelief is a loss. PT to my and everyone’s rescue! Everyone, Have you been swept into the Play Therapy cult yet? If not, there’s a new episode of Ben _Black_Acrylic Robinson’s exploding Zeus head of lower extremities salvation ready for you here, and your weekend will thank you kindly for pushing gently on ‘here’. ** David, Hi. Oh, you know, I’m actually a big fan and frequent haunter of art galleries, but I certainly get what you mean, and one should certainly never think of them as art’s churches. Burning inside could be fun? Or, yeah, possibly not fun. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein’s big sale is still extant. Go back to his comment on yesterday’s post to see what some of prospective gets are. ** Dominik, Hi, D!!!! I hope your brain cells are back to percolating wondrously. I don’t know Lidokami yet, but I will know him very quickly to some degree at least. Thank you! Ha ha, your two brain cells managed to make an uproarious love there. Love altering humanity such that when we’re happy we frown and when we’re really happy we snarl and when we’re angry we smile and when we’re really angry we laugh, G. ** James, Hello, James! Good to see you, sir. Oh, yes, that is exciting news. Everyone, Mr James Nulick alerts y’all that Amphetamine Sulphate and Nine Banded Books will soon release a new and very long awaited book by the great Peter Sotos (w/ the artist Lionel Maunz) and you can pre-order it here or here. Stockholm was great through and through, so maybe I did get the syndrome, yes. Hope all is really great with you. Love, me. ** Steve Erickson, Ah, ha! Everyone, Mr. Erickson has released his first EP! It’s called ‘Final Boy’, and I think you want to join me in absorbing that post-haste. Do so here. The only inter-Europe travel on the menu is a trip to Germany to go to Phantasialand, but other things will arise no doubt. Since we won’t have the new film finished and ready to go until late next year, I feel reasonably confident that we’ll be able to travel with it. We could travel with it even now in many parts of Europe. Thanks for the Haynes doc review. I definitely want to see that. That’s interesting. Yours is the first report I’ve read. ** Bill, It/you only appeared once. I actually don’t know DeForge’s work outside of what Chris put in the post, so I’ll start with ‘Stunt’. Thanks. Have a spectacularity speckled weekend. ** Okay. Back to the Thomas Moore release fest, yes? Enjoy everything. See you on Monday.