THOMAS LARSON

(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.

(The Truth Seeker September, 2023)

Before the Florida Department of Education issued its curriculum directive this past summer that slavery in the United States produced “personal benefits” for the enslaved in the form of a well-stocked resumé of trades, useful after Emancipation in 1863, the board members might have consulted a seminal document in the literature of the oppressed—Angela Davis’s 1971 essay, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.”

These days we’ve rightly exchanged the conditional designation, “slave,” for enslaved person. Fifty years ago, Davis prophesized this nominative shift; she cataloged how Black women resisted the shackles. Among the first scholars to gather the evidence, she argued that a woman (daughter, mother, wife) was equal to a man in undermining the slaveholder, surreptitiously and openly, at her peril. “If she was burned, hanged, broken on the wheel, her head paraded on poles before her brothers and sisters, she must have also felt the wedge of this counter-insurgence as a fact of her daily existence.”

(San Diego Reader August 23, 2023)

I’m not sure why but my hearing capacity is large and, lately, my ears have grown scarily irritated by noise. That’s putting it mildly. I wish I could annihilate lots of sounds, silence their obnoxious producers—the rifling of popcorn from a plastic bag behind me at the Rady Shell or the vibratory menace of subwoofer speakers quaking like the San Andreas from a car stopped beside me. But no can do. I hear it all, the soft, the loud, the aural invasion of my everyday life. On planes I listen to Wayne Shorter on earbuds and affix, over them, form-fitting earmuffs, the sort workers who guide planes into their slots on the tarmac wear. If I don’t, I go screwy with the dopey chatter, the squalling babies, the engine rumble, and, for me, the audible internal terror, set to buzz, like a Geiger counter—turbulence. My ears need their privacy, dressing them, as I must, behind a curtain. No wonder I prefer a life writing alone in my double-paned windowed home office.