THOMAS LARSON

(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.

(River Teeth May 10, 2024)

1 / One thing we learn from the later-in-life memoir, or the personal essay writ long, is that it allows us to see the many digressive routes we’ve followed only after a good deal of life has resulted in our “ending up” on any one of these routes, a place much different than where we thought we’d be. Soren Kierkegaard spoke of living life forward, understanding it in retrospect, and Carl Jung said, “One finds one’s destiny on the path one takes to avoid it.” Fate never fails us; it’s got our welfare in mind, but bugger that it is, won’t reveal the plot until, well, it’s time. Because of our unexpected “off ramps,” we need to wait a while and then we may recognize a plan—perhaps the plan—that provides us with some sense of meaning. At times, a pattern to our directionlessness emerges, and anyone, even fools, can say it’s been predesigned. Think of Donald Trump assessing his 78 years (I know it’s a stretch) as a kind of Destiny: the TV brand, elected President on a fluke, convinced that he’s America’s Lord and Fricking Savior.

(San Diego Reader May 8, 2024)

1. No California politician gets more blame for the denigration of the migrant than Peter Barton Wilson, now 91, last century’s Mr. San Diego. In this political year, inflamed by another crisis at the border, Wilson’s name — and legacy — is newsworthy again. Was the the man an architect of anti-Latino prejudice or a champion of state sovereignty? His pertinent history begins with three years as a Marine Corps platoon leader, followed by a Yale law degree (it took him four tries to pass the bar). San Diego Union journalist Herb Klein, later President Nixon’s speechwriter, encouraged Wilson to come west, where opportunities for a Goldwater Republican abounded. After a brief stint as a criminal defense attorney, he embraced politics, a career for which he seemed born, his persona nailed by a GOP pal: “coldblooded and cleareyed.” Wilson won every seat he ran for in the Golden State, except for one loss in the Republican primary for Governor in 1978. Even so, from 1966 to 1999, he was always in office: state assemblyman, San Diego mayor, two-term California Senator and two-term Governor. When Wilson retired in 1998, he’d proven himself a perennial winner, sunsetting with a 55 percent approval rating. This despite his great failure — Proposition 187.