THOMAS LARSON

(Zero Readers March 31, 2024)

I’ve been on a journey the past five years that some writers who come tantalizingly close to publication know all too well. From 2018-2022, I worked on a novel, paid thousands to a professional editor, another thousand for a lawyer’s opinion of my legal liability, and landed a big-time agent whose name will be familiar to most authors in Southern California. As I went, I cut a seven-hundred-page monster down to four-hundred with solid guidance from the New York editor and the all-star agent. They read long drafts, suggested sizeable changes, pushed me to drop characters and deepen scenes, and commended my rewrites. I treasured the agent’s encouragement and tenacity, in particular.

(Times of San Diego March 3, 2024)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how public spaces (trolleys, airports, music venues) no longer feel public, but temporarily accommodate people (us) who isolate and seem wholly removed from even looking at others—a club whose members are linked via their disconnection. Weird, I know. As if bus riders and plane passengers are hiding some secret (drug runners or deadbeat dads) or else feel guilty for a cultural misstep they’ll be canceled for.

(San Diego Reader January 10, 2024)

It’s an evening in early October, and Charli King, co-founder of Pawsitive Teams, is opening a new class for dog owners, canines in tow, who aspire to help people in need. That need is great — society is rife with both anxiety and trauma, and people need comfort: people in hospitals, assisted-living homes, airports, rehab centers, even college campuses during finals week. “Comfort” here means reduced blood pressure, reduced heart rate, reduced stress. That’s comfort that dogs can provide, but in order to fill that basic therapeutic role, those dogs must be trained by volunteers to the point where they can demonstrate fundamental skills with strangers and always, always display a calm demeanor.

(Times of San Diego January 6, 2024)

The other day an estate lawyer said to my partner and me that the older we get, the faster time goes. Psychologically, that’s so. But in what sense is this “psychology” true? Is it because we geezers have more to do in less time, and we’re worried we’ll run out of what we assume is our due, a squishy estimate at best? I think it means we’ve put off the unpleasant things, too busy reading and seeing friends and petting the cat, though we will, it’s in the bag, run out of time — and soon — to jump rope or climb ladders. Just as well.

When young, time is “on our side.” But as long as we have some left, isn’t it on our side as well? I have as much time as I have left, and it matters only to me what I do with it. Still, life is no help with its persistent pounding away, a disco score of measured pulses whether we recognize them as such or not. We get our share, our due, so speeding the plow or taking the siesta is purely a choice. It’s not time that moves at varying rates but our awareness — blithely, fastidiously — of its tick-tock.

(The American Spectator January 2, 2024)

One of poststructuralism’s simplest dictums — if you can say any French literary theory seeks simplicity — speaks to why the world and our experience of it is not organized with binary oppositions, gender inherency, or the like, say, good and evil, man vs. nature. Life is just too fluid, too random. The philosopher elites didn’t invent rhetoric to systemize argument. Rather, rhetoric arose to handle the tensions of daily exchange, involving a lot of haggling and fisticuffs. Indeed, neither the material nor the spiritual realms exist as pre-planned no matter how much categorizing we insist they answer to. Sometimes our lives stumble on a purpose, which, the stumbling, is the point — purpose is not intrinsic. I was reminded of this poststructural axiom often while reading Sam Forster’s Americosis.

(Write or Die, December 6, 2023)

1.

I have a friend, no, a good friend, no, a devoted friend who, whenever a month elapses between our get-togethers, he emails me with a date to go walking, the same walk we always take in a beautiful, tourist-laden southern California coastal town beside the Sunset Limited Amtrak and Coaster rail line, ending up, hot and sweaty, our knees aching, at a vegetarian restaurant.

(The Rumpus October 25, 2023)

In a "By the Book" chat with the New York Times in 2014, writer Teju Cole was asked to describe a favorite or underrated writer. Citing Lydia Davis and Anne Carson as brilliant and ignored, he then called the conventional form of the representational novel “overrated” and added, “the writers I find most interesting find ways to escape it.” His own breakthrough fiction, Open City, published three years before, surveys the cross-Atlantic or bicontinental psychology of its Nigerian American alienated protagonist, Julius, who wanders New York City in a W. S. Sebald–like mapping of self and surroundings. Much praised, Cole’s book didn’t escape the conventions of the real-life-centric novel and, for the next decade, he put fiction aside. In the interim was a reissue of his 2007 debut novel, Everyday Is for the Thief, set in Lagos, along with two essay collections and two books companioning photography and text.