THOMAS LARSON

(Assay April 15, 2025)

1 / From “The Graces of Prose,” a chapter in The Reader Over Your Shoulder by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge (1941), I note this: “Though modern prose is intended to be read silently and two or three times faster than at ordinary speaking rate, some people read with their mental ear not quite closed.”

I’m reading an essay about Caravaggio by Teju Cole, and as I go, I hear his words inside me. As I go, the tongue of my mental ear, forked and flicking, may activate—one tine the eye seeing the word, the other tine the soundboard thought-vibrating the words’ syllables, fast-read, quick-consumed, often as the words motor through when I type. Cole’s essay burbles along, whether I’m sound-notching or not, until I get to the word, misericordia and I pause. I don’t register its meaning, though its rolly collocation is so softly vocalic that I say it aloud. I’ve heard it before, I think. A bell rings. That word applied to musical illustrations of Christ’s suffering, a scene commonly painted and set into a musical narrative by composers of the Medieval and Baroque eras.

(Metempsychosis March 31, 2025)

1 / In the twenty-first century, film scores have much more to say, much more public and private space in which to speak and be heard, than any of the traditional one-dimensional arts. Film scores have a sensory hold over viewers far more than literature has over its readers. This is so, in part, because literature’s interior movement lacks the felt sonorous elements of music in movies. In fact, though I’m a dedicated writer who’s been published hundreds of times, I’m at a loss of how to think about the quiescence nature of literature in our time. Books and magazines have lost their cultural dominance, the megaphonic trust they had—and I had for them—when I was young, admittedly, a long time ago. Today, literature, like Ukrainian soldiers on the Donbas front, is holed up in a bunker, running targeted bomb-loaded drones while their guns and rocket launchers need oil, bullets, and shells.

(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.

(San Diego Reader November 20, 2024)

Life guards

At the top of the Grandview stairway sits a bench, dedicated to the memory of the three women who died under the weight of a 50-ton blockfall in 2019. In a late-July meetup, Dr. Pat Davis, one of the survivors who has fought hard to avenge their deaths, posed in front of the bench for my camera. Behind him is a chain-link fence walling off the condo colony of Seabluffe, many of its units seasonally occupied. As the cliff has weathered and retracted, the community, built in 1974 and numbering 255 units, has crept closer to the edge. Between the ocean-view condos and that edge is a brow ditch for rain runoff; it’s cracked and broken in spots, allowing rain to seep into the bluff.