THOMAS LARSON

(The Truth Seeker January 31, 2018)

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Flying home from Washington D.C. to San Diego on a new American Airlines plane, I have, privileged American individual that I am, my own TV screen on the back of the seat in front of me—inane movies, dopey sitcoms, time till landing. The welcome-image is a grinning, competent woman, fifty-ish, professional, sartorially regal, with non-lustful red lipstick, tartar-blasted white teeth, a blue-and-red striped artificial silk scarf tied jauntily around her neck, white shirt, smart dark blazer, and a winged ID badge—Abigail.

(San Diego Reader January 17, 2018)

Like you, the Little Italy I love has always been its sumptuous food and sensual people, both of which, despite the gentrifying nouveau riche takeover of late, remain as present and prosperous as ever. That Little Italy is alive in Mona Lisa Italian Foods, the tang of Parmesan, the toasty fume of fresh-baked sourdough, the nasal snap of balsamic vinaigrette dousing a saucer of EVOO. It's alive in the cannoli, the crispy-shelled, ricotta-filled, sugar-fairy pastry, just out of the freezer at RoVino (shoehorned next to The Waterfront) and served by two generations of homegrown cooks, the Tarantinos.

On the other side of the cannoli are Rosalie Tarantino and her nephew Tom, the fifty-two-year-old owner of RoVino. The pair love parsing their shared history, all things Italian except the family meatball recipe. Rosalie, her features still fine-boned at eighty-four, has the face of a beloved kept in an oval locket. She, like Tom's mother and Tom's daughter, and his brother's daughter, are all Rosalie Tarantino. Of course, their friends and neighbors know by sight and sound who is whom. But this naming tradition is like a bulwark against the risk that their ethnic claim may be vanishing.

(Sustenance: Writers from British Columbia and Beyond on the Subject of Food December, 2017)

You don’t wet the bread board. You flour it, generously, as the Tassajara Bread Book says. Next, you splat-set the antsy dough onto the wood where it fate-flattens with a shrug. Already, you’re speaking up for the lump—to wit, its voice, yours for the taking, such generosity, indeed.

You knead the pile. The pile needs you, so much so that your push meets its fetal mass, serpent-bodied. Its bouldered build yeasts a gathering force, an orneriness that matches your provocation, hail batch, well met.You put your hands’ heels into it and the mass rolls its shoulders and spine back and the water leeches out, and with it the gluten, which sticks to your fingers, gums them up, and gloms onto your intent, hosts this transference, what the psyche of food plots in you, its host-maker.

(San Diego Troubadour November 1, 2017)

Few composers push so many musical moods onto their listeners—shifting from ecstatic to brooding on a dime—as much as San Diego’s Joe Garrison does. He interrupts his pieces with silence only to shock them awake with sonic surprise. His unconventionality is twin-engined: sound’s nature to vanish before us and music’s design to take us somewhere. We do get somewhere but Garrison stops regularly for coffee like a night-driving trucker. He loves studying the territory’s map, momentarily pondering the road he went down—and then, shifting gears, heading off in a new direction.

(Berfrois UK October 17, 2017)

When I was growing up, I was uninspired by Christian dogma. Perhaps it was because my cradle-Catholic father became an atheist or my Sundays, by my choice, were spent singing (not worshipping) in a church choir. Later, after reading James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I knew that if I fell headlong toward any faith, I need only revisit that novel to keep me honest. The most frighteningly apostate fiction ever penned should disabuse anyone of holy orders. Joyce begins his semi-autobiographical work (made all the more powerful because it was semi) portraying the familial heaviness of his Irish Catholic family. He is further assailed at school where, via monumental sermons, he is enthralled by the Church’s vision of Hell. Post-grad, he begins to escape his indoctrination and adopt the life of an agnostic via literature. There, he cherishes those theological conundrums and literary questions Catholicism sometimes raises and sometimes won’t touch.

The rest of the essay is here: https://www.berfrois.com/2017/10/thomas-larson-thomas-merton/

(Pacifica Literary Review Summer, 2017)

In Langston Hughes’ story, “Salvation,” from his autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), he tells us that “going on thirteen” he was saved from sin—saved, “but not really.” At a special children’s meeting in the church, charged with the expectation that he would “see and hear and feel Jesus in your soul,” Langston waits while the minister asks the “little lambs” to come forward. Many do. A few hesitate. Most go to the altar. And there, by their voluntary presence, they are saved. But not Hughes and another boy, Westley. Neither budges; Langston, especially, is not feeling it. But it’s hot, and the hymns keep insinuating, and the preacher keeps intoning, and the flock keeps expecting, until Westley finally capitulates: “God damn! I’m tired o’ sitting here. Let’s get up and be saved,” he says to Langston, and so Westly goes to the front of the church. And he’s saved.

(San Diego Reader June 28, 2017)

It’s decision day in the City Council chambers, Two Broke Girls vs. Billions. Call it a classic smackdown between local architectural preservationists who want to save any Spanish Colonial Revival building (and think someone should pay) vs. the downtown developers who can’t wait to erect residential towers (and have investors ready and willing to foot the bill). It’s early April, and the horseshoe room is packed, its 53-year-old semi-gloss teakwood a kind of paean to the past. Backrow perched, I think of Pete Wilson’s wily quip from 1975: “The future of San Diego should have as much of the past in it as possible.”

I think as well that each city-adjudicated, skyline alteration rehashes our city’s core ideological battle—the geraniums of George Marston (guard the green) and the smokestacks of Louis Wilde (grow the gray), nearly a century ago. The way the pro-housing, pro-job, pro-business “special interest” typically wins is to outspend, out-own, and out-promise opponents, one 40-story, 282-unit glass spire at a time.