THOMAS LARSON

Action/Spectacle September 15, 2025

It may be that the greatest gift humans have given one another comes from the Greeks and their invention of the Muses. About them, Hesiod writes, “They are all of one mind—their hearts are set upon song and their spirit is free from care. He is happy whom the Muses love. For though a man has sorrow and grief in his soul, yet when the servant of the Muses sings, at once he forgets his dark thoughts and remembers not his troubles.” Echoing Hesiod, Edith Hamilton says, “their voices were lovely beyond compare.” Among the nine women was Erato, Muse of lyric poetry, who plays the lyre; Terpsichore, Muse of choral song, who plays the lyre while she dances; Euterpe, Muse of music, who plays the flute. Extending their reach, the Muse Calliope, the goddess of epic poetry, and the god Apollo, a musician who played the lyre and sang, gave birth to Orpheus, the god of song, the Robert Burns of their time. Apollo’s brother, Hermes—the god of boundaries and those who cross them—made the lyre, yoke and crossbar with four strings to pluck and bow and presented it to his nephew.

(San Diego Reader August 21, 2025)

Our Lady of Guadalupe has been known, for decades, as San Diego’s immigrant church. These days if you walk to the bustling neighborhood chapel—its walls of sun-addled white stucco, its doorways outlined in florid blue vines, its unmissable dignity beside the I-5—you pass vendors with pots of tamales and cobbed corn alongside Guadalupe-imaged candles, parishioners milling about just out of Mass or waiting for the next one, a few older men alert by the front entrance, closed but not locked. Through that door you are welcomed: alabanzas, or Mexican folk songs, lather the air; people beam with Sunday forgiveness; the weathered pews sag with accumulated warmth. When the priest trails in for Mass, decked with alb and green-sashed chasuble, he brings solemnity to his conclave of migrants, sheltered by their faith-based anonymity—about your status, no one cares, not even if you speak just a bit of English, your skin is brown, and your hands are callused from agricultural toil.

Except Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who may have its parishioners in its sights.

(San Diego Reader April 15, 2025)

On March 5, 2001, using a stolen 22-caliber revolver and reloading the gun twice, Charles Andrew "Andy" Williams wounded 13 classmates and killed two fellow students at Santana High School in Santee. Local outrage, within easy memory of Columbine, fed on a national desire for vengeance as well as assembled a cruel paradox—an adolescent who lacks reason and restraint as a boy is, because of the random atrocity, also adult enough to be tried as one. In other words, Williams, at 15, was a natural-born killer. Such was the law, and the prosecutorial charge. Consequently, he pled guilty to first-degree murder twice and received two consecutive 25-years-to-life sentences.

(San Diego Reader, February 12, 2025)

For a couple of decades now, I’ve worked in the memoir trade—writing about the form, teaching and facilitating the craft to hundreds, and yes, actually writing one of my own. My students were everyday folks—in most cases, still enmeshed in the universal trial of families and their unfinished business. And it was the “family tragedy” so many wished to tell—Mom’s betrayal, Dad’s cancer, a sister’s suicide, each subject worthy of a near-and-dear’s take. But worthiness does not displace the ethics of authorship. The most concerned query I got: “How do I avoid upsetting my loved ones with [fill-in-the-blank revelation of awfulness], which I believe damaged me and my family?”

When I wrote my own memoir, I too stumbled on this question and the anxieties it raised. I wrote of the living and the dead, and a few living readers ended up wishing they (or I) were in the latter camp. Well, no, that’s extreme—better to say they wished they’d been consulted. That was the lesson, and it formed the core of my advice: try not to make your story an act of revenge, uglier than it need be, even if some justification may exist. (As such, Mommie Dearest is a masterpiece of retribution.) Instead, try, if possible, to make the memoir an act of community, of compromise, layered with some humility. Invite redemption. Don’t merely gavel out a literary life sentence without the possibility of parole.

(Written January, 2025)

The day after the Eaton fire destroyed much of Altadena, California, one of its residents, the L.A.-centric essayist and podcaster Meghan Daum, recorded a phone talk that begins with a somber recitation of facts and becomes a tragic surrender to fate. The previous evening, warned by neighbors to get out, she packed a few clothes, her computer, her phone, and her dog into her car and fled. The morning after, she says, she learned that “my house and every other house on the street had burned to the ground. The wind was so strong and the water was so scarce that emergency crews and firefighters were virtually helpless.”

(Quillette December 30, 2024)

I.

Over the restless course of Bob Dylan’s six-decade-plus career, the 83-year-old singer-songwriter has adopted a different narrative persona for each successive stage of his personal and musical journey. There was the young protest singer of the early 1960s who wrote “Masters of War” and “The Times They Are a-Changing”; this was followed by the period of surreal lyrics and an electrified rock band, resulting in three groundbreaking records; then the pastoral period when he retreated to Woodstock with his family and jammed with The Band at Big Pink; the subsequent mid-decade records chronicling emotional turmoil and divorce; the born-again records of the late 1970s and early ’80s; the directionless decade after that when his muse seemed to have deserted him; and finally, the creative renaissance that began with the Time Out of Mind album and persists to this day.

(Times of San Diego, October 9, 2024)

When it comes to musical humor, one thing’s for sure: To be funny in sound is not like a joke in language whose weird setup (a priest, a lawyer, and a jackass walk into a bar) is upended by a punchline and a bellylaugh. Instead, amusing music follows its own rules.

It’s imitative, say, the trumpet whinnying like a horse in Leroy Andersen’s “Sleigh Ride.” It’s deliberate such as Mozart adding wrong notes to a string piece to lampoon “the work of incompetent composers.” It’s outlandish as with Haydn in Symphony 94, subtitled “Surprise,” when he follows a simple pianissimo melody with a roof-raising double forte chord, intended, legend has it, to wake up a slumbering audience.