THOMAS LARSON

(The Literary Review September 11, 2024)

1 / In the twenty-first century, film and music have a dominant presence in public and private space in which to speak and be heard and be of great influence to the culture. In addition, film and music have much more of a sensory hold over viewers and listeners than literature has over its readers, in part, because literature’s interior movement lacks the video-in-motion and the inner and external sonorous elements of its competing media. Though I’m a dedicated writer who’s been published nearly five hundred times, I’m at a loss of how to think about literature and its quiescence anymore. Books and magazines have lost their loudness, the megaphonic range and companioning 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.

(Bridge Eight August 25, 2024)

Oh, the sonic pleasures of the 2023 film Tár: casting Cate (body, voice, face: her elasticity, her fearlessness) as the first-ever female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic; Mahler’s most revelatory symphony, the Fifth; the musician Sophie Kauer who acts and plays the Elgar Cello Concerto; a catalog of ominous sounds, musical and not, bedeviling Lydia and us with its undertow; and the eclectic score, which is both “in” the film and “accompanies” it and, in turn, enchants and destabilizes the ouroboros of making a movie about a musical subject musically. Another oh for the film's diabolical pleasures: Blanchett’s ferocious musical talent and her equally astute bedding skills as she sets up a scholarship program for young women conductors to manipulate them and, in the process, betray her wife, her personal assistant, her assistant conductor who “questions her integrity,” and a protégé who commits suicide.

(Quillette August 15, 2024)

Though I’m a happily terrorised fan of John Krasinski’s dystopian films, A Quiet Place (2018) and A Quiet Place, Part II (2020), a question has been stalking me since their premieres. In these first two films, giant, human-gobbling praying mantises fall to earth and begin annihilating humankind. They cannot see, so they navigate and hunt by sound, their acute hearing provoking them to attack even the faintest sound. But why are they doing this? This remains a maddening mystery. Hunger? Malice? Revenge? The racket of our outdoor concerts and football games, interstate traffic, explosive munitions in Gaza and Ukraine, the mind-frying hum of our electrical grid and data mines? The chilling horror in the first two movies unfolds without explanation.

(Times of San Diego August 2, 2024)

As a journalist and critic, I revise my work constantly whether in longform articles, personal essays, or a quickie on Twitter where I worry over the post a while, wince a bit, and send it. Of my crafted prose, I’ll draft a piece a dozen times, recast dozens of paragraphs, recalibrate and move dozens more sentences while phrases and words by the hundreds get cut, altered, rethought, and, if necessary, brought back from their burial ground. “All the writing matters,” the novelist Frank Conroy said.

I’ve noticed (for years) the opposite of the writer’s verbal practice is the lazy summaries and word salads of live TV reporters, especially the national outlets and especially during election years. Many in the profession strangle the language with clichés and bore us with fatuous analysis. Their so-called skill is to talk “off the cuff,” whose relationship to thoughtful journalism baffles me.

(Another Chicago Magazine August 1, 2024)

Every once in a while, a memoir can seem like a strange beast, stepping away from the usual show-and-tell drama. Such is the case with Tomás Q. Morín’s tricky new book in which the narrator’s id claws its way through and out of the wilds of identity, the simple title notwithstanding. This skinny-spined outlier is partly about where the Hispanic author finds himself—living temporarily in an unwelcoming Northern town. But the person(s) to whom the tale mostly happens is multifocal—Morín, his son, a few bigots he encounters, or any you who carries the cross of his origin. Of those foci, the son’s presence seems the least revealed. “Jack” is an addressee, a longed-for object, a boy of many ages; he’s in the womb, a newborn, a kid, an adult who lives in Texas with “your Marxist mother” while his vexed father is alone up north, teaching composition. Morín’s four letters feel emotionally ordered; the writing is often Janus-faced, at once insistently admonishing for the son, at once cunningly creative for the reader.

(The Rumpus June 18, 2024)

Not long ago, I started ruminating about the future of memoir, a literary art that seemed to have stopped evolving, bogged down in copycat subject matter. I’m speaking of the flood of memoirs about illness by mothers and daughters (How Mom Gave Me Her Alopecia), books about identity and ethnicity (Growing Up Anxious and Andorran-American), and stories about toxic boyfriends (I’m Glad I Shot Him). I exaggerate, but you get the idea. These topics sprung from the poor-me ilk, enabled by publishers wanting more of the same, supplied by authors happy to oblige. How long would memoir be stuck in this victimhood wallow, and what would it take to bring the form back to the earlier, more surprising creative nonfiction?

Then I read Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (2012) by Adam Phillips and, viola, a lighted path. His therapeutic thesis is that each of us carries a story of the life we should have lived, the life we missed out on, and, according to Phillips, the life we’ve already lived, to a degree, psychically. The boxing contender who had to quit because of his wife’s illness, the songwriter who was snowed-out of her debut at the bitter end.

(La Piccioletta Barca June 15, 2024)

1 / For two decades, the Edinburgh University Press has been publishing a series of volumes under the group title, the “Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities.” Considering the "death of the humanities," declared far and wide a fait accompli, these compilations are brave undertakings, exhaustively conceived and handsomely produced. They weigh up to five pounds, run to 500 pages or more (Moby-Dick length), and are squintable in 11-point type. Reference tomes, morbidly expensive. One recent cast member is the Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies, 422 pages at $165. The volumes are like valentines, sent to and from the professorial class: The mission is for scholars to bestow academic gravitas on beloved literary forms and authors. The audience is the English-speaking literate realm—the Modern Language Association horde and whatever its org is called in the United Kingdom. That audience (and curious writers like me) insists on academic writing. The learned “paper” confines and confirms a community of university-trained readers, who fetishize literary forms in prose stylings fortified with rhetorical distance and, at times, affected jargon.