What’s He Building In There?
Adam Thomas, architect of shadowplay upon barren walls and sometime clean shaven anti-poet, is undertaking a new project discussing his growth into interpretive academia, focusing specifically on post war literary theory.
For Thomas, a central concern has long been the camouflage of actualities in order to saturate reality with a refreshed truth. In previous incarnations the m.o. was to isolate the colourwheel rotations of the day: to distil the experience of becoming a man into a palette of graphite sketches. The resulting stark, spare language and profusion of colliding core concepts lent the old Thomas a lyrical, yet angular aesthetic firmly rooted within the minutiae of a bleached world. Reading him was rather like finding emeralds on the floor of a sterile laboratory - he invoked a sun seen through a double glazed window.
“Speckled carpet, shorn of dust, clean parallels, no sex anymore.”
Such exposure to a quixotic world required a constant configuring and restructuring of reactions. In order to maintain his logical continuum, his growth, Thomas was perhaps occasionally victim of his own emotive subterfuge. When precise geometries are described with such definitive cruelty, it seems almost as if there is no space left for the boy to grow into, as if any deviation from previous revelations will jeopardise the integrity of the original thought.
“I wait for my words to mean nothing, pared down as they are by a lack of context, a discreet humbling which renders my outpourings little more than an exercise in hand-eye co-ordination.”
And so divorcing the ‘years worth of unfocused idiocy’, we find him cut loose upon the lifeboat, scraping sodden matches against their vesta case and hurling scraps of unrequired flesh to the sharks. Alone upon some Northern ocean, he is exerting constraints upon his environment like the man who was god. This unflinching, acetate etching is both an evocative diary of the mundane and a blackboard for the de/construction and debate of modern literature. The voice has matured without losing the laconic and likeable nuances, and his most powerful character is still the city.
Personally, since the subject matter is specified to a degree, it is way over my head. But then I like nice words, so I tend to sit at the screen absorbing as much as I interpret and listening as much as I read.
It is far too early to remark upon much else, so I suggest you take a look for yourself and find out what he’s building in there. You have a right to know.
For Thomas, a central concern has long been the camouflage of actualities in order to saturate reality with a refreshed truth. In previous incarnations the m.o. was to isolate the colourwheel rotations of the day: to distil the experience of becoming a man into a palette of graphite sketches. The resulting stark, spare language and profusion of colliding core concepts lent the old Thomas a lyrical, yet angular aesthetic firmly rooted within the minutiae of a bleached world. Reading him was rather like finding emeralds on the floor of a sterile laboratory - he invoked a sun seen through a double glazed window.
“Speckled carpet, shorn of dust, clean parallels, no sex anymore.”
Such exposure to a quixotic world required a constant configuring and restructuring of reactions. In order to maintain his logical continuum, his growth, Thomas was perhaps occasionally victim of his own emotive subterfuge. When precise geometries are described with such definitive cruelty, it seems almost as if there is no space left for the boy to grow into, as if any deviation from previous revelations will jeopardise the integrity of the original thought.
“I wait for my words to mean nothing, pared down as they are by a lack of context, a discreet humbling which renders my outpourings little more than an exercise in hand-eye co-ordination.”
And so divorcing the ‘years worth of unfocused idiocy’, we find him cut loose upon the lifeboat, scraping sodden matches against their vesta case and hurling scraps of unrequired flesh to the sharks. Alone upon some Northern ocean, he is exerting constraints upon his environment like the man who was god. This unflinching, acetate etching is both an evocative diary of the mundane and a blackboard for the de/construction and debate of modern literature. The voice has matured without losing the laconic and likeable nuances, and his most powerful character is still the city.
Personally, since the subject matter is specified to a degree, it is way over my head. But then I like nice words, so I tend to sit at the screen absorbing as much as I interpret and listening as much as I read.
It is far too early to remark upon much else, so I suggest you take a look for yourself and find out what he’s building in there. You have a right to know.
posted by Rory at 8:48 PM
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