THOMAS LARSON

Merton in Love: A Novel (2022)

by Thomas Larson

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The character of Tom, Father Louis in his monastic life at Gethsemani, is inspired by his writings. Stylistically, Merton in Love emphasizes the monk and the nurse’s physical and intellectual intimacy. Both elements of their affair are presented via texts and conversations invented by the author. This includes letters, phone calls, journal and diary entries, and Merton’s poems to her. These are the novelist’s creations as is the character of the nurse, Christine Bell.

(Metapsychosis: A Journal of Consciousness, Literature, and Art June 1, 2022)

Thanks to Greg Thomas. Warning: Explicit Content

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Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place appeared in 1971. The book’s inventive mix of memoir, journalism, and criticism by a largely unknown Black American intellectual prompted many appraisals in major newspapers—among the most compelling, one by the Times' book critic Anatole Broyard and another by Toni Morrison. Broyard, a brilliantly incisive reviewer, was a “one-drop” Black man who passed for White; Morrison would become, her “race” aside, the finest American novelist of the twentieth century’s second half. (Yes, I know: Oates, Roth, Bellow, Updike, Baldwin, Cormac McCarthy are all in the run for the roses. But, in my Derby, Toni wins.)

(Panel on Writing & Music, AWP, March 25, 2022)

The Blues Aesthetic of Albert Murray

To say that Americans in the 2020s are suffering from our tribal divisions is nothing new. But what of the divisions based in our hyphenation: African, Asian, Hispanic, Native, and the dwindling majority, white? These identities range from economic to ethnic to racial and extend further to gender and sexuality. But for each assembly there’s another category: the Other, the caste of that which your group is not. Such as Black is not White; Asian is not Native. And so on. Then there’s a third identity, which we might label trans: those who prefer an amalgam, a yesteryear phenomenon, the American. This singular cohort makes the most sense to me as a critic when I talk about the art of music and the art of writing about music

(Written 2022)

(A short story about the retiring Abbot of Our Lady of Gethsemani Trappist monastery, James Fox, and the first night in his hermitage alone, armed and undergoing a trial by snakes. He is rescued the next morning by his dear dark friend, Father Louis. The year is 1968.)

Nose – buried in his A-initialed hanky – dust like Arabia billowing from the retreating Jeep – the abbot hoists a duffel of sacraments and a .410 shotgun – snug in its own leather long pouch – up the six steps to the cabin’s side porch and front door. He slides the long glass door open – six miles from Gethsemani (he’s been dropped off telling the monk to retrieve him in twenty-four hours exactly). This will be his life’s last home – his penitent new abode – his hermitage. (He thinks and writes and prays everything in clipped, unfinished phrases.) He calls his new home, Calvary. It’s mostly finished, roof on, windows set, screened, and spray-wiped. The electricity hums from a small transformer – in a shed of its own – like a chapel of power.

(San Diego Reader January 26, 2022)

It’s been a couple years since City Beat, a Reader-like junior of local news, irreverent columns, and cultural coverage went silent. The rag disappeared after a cascade of events: Times Media Group in Arizona purchased the publication, fired the editor, reset the weekly to a monthly, cut an Uber-load of writers, shrunk the pages and the ad space, and eventually “paused” the enterprise as Covid roared to life. A death by many front-office cuts. Their erstwhile marijuana columnist, Jackie Bryant, known in weed world as the Cannabitch, told me that the suits who took over struck her as a lot of “visionless losers who couldn’t put out a good paper to save their lives.”

(The Truth Seeker January-April 2022)

Director Robert Greene took three years to make the Netflix documentary Procession, which premiered in late 2021. However, the lives of the six grown men the film charts, raped as adolescents by priests in the Kansas City Catholic diocese, have been shattered for decades. The violence and disregard done to them includes the agony of the abuse itself and the humiliation they endured after the scandal broke in 2011. By my count, the six were attacked and injured three times: by a priest known to their families, by the church and its coverup, and by the lack of prosecution, which, as a third crime, aids and abets the first two. Indeed, either by death or a financial settlement, a couple dozen pedophiles dodged justice; that also goes for their Catholic overlords who declined to be interviewed for the film. With epic ambition, Procession documents the psychological toll on six middle-aged men as well as adopts an experimental form to render the abuse’s stark effects. It dares to present their stories in conflictual terms: an artistic primal scream of a feature film amid the therapeutic reenactments of the men’s irreversible shame.

(Another Chicago Magazine October 26, 2021)

In 1966, I was a junior at St. Louis’s Kirkwood High. After the teachers let us monkeys out at 2:50, I lazed about, often trekking to a friend’s home to talk antiwar politics or Salinger stories. I was a serious kid, some days lying on one of the twin beds in Ken Klotz’s room (his unlucky brother off in Vietnam) where we were hypnotized by Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and the literary dazzle of “Visions of Johanna”: “The ghost of electricity howls from the bones of her face.” But then some days I needed a break.

I got one hanging out with Clay Benton. Clay, a wunderkind with a reel-to-reel tape machine, recorded parodies of Superman—the Caped Crusader of comic book, radio drama, TV show. His sendup was Space-O-Ace Man, a half-doofus, half-hippie hero who also flew in to fight crime but whose dorky moves ruined everything. After he and I roughed up a script, we’d record a show with daffy voices and sound effects. We mimicked a big-bosomed girl Clay and I salivated over in class, who needed rescuing. We shielded her from Ming the Merciless with our own bodies in response to her cries of Help!