THOMAS LARSON

(Quadrant December 28, 2025)

1 / I’ve been listening to Terry’s Riley’s In C, the minimalist wonder of variable creation first performed at the San Francisco Tape Center in 1964, all my adult life. I began with the 1968 Columbia multi-tracked recording (remastered here), which, in my solipsistic years, failed to stir me, though the dexterity it takes to play it in ensemble, the original, a sprightly clip of 42 minutes, I found impressive. I also found In C static, void of emotion, a bit soulless, and not fully improvisatory since its repeating patterns were set and you, the musician, decided when and when not and how much to play, though you had to remain linked to the group’s progression, never getting too far ahead or behind. Cleverly ordained by Riley to be free and restrained, like an indoor cat in a three-bedroom apartment.

Action/Spectacle September 15, 2025

It may be that the greatest gift humans have given one another comes from the Greeks and their invention of the Muses. About them, Hesiod writes, “They are all of one mind—their hearts are set upon song and their spirit is free from care. He is happy whom the Muses love. For though a man has sorrow and grief in his soul, yet when the servant of the Muses sings, at once he forgets his dark thoughts and remembers not his troubles.” Echoing Hesiod, Edith Hamilton says, “their voices were lovely beyond compare.” Among the nine women was Erato, Muse of lyric poetry, who plays the lyre; Terpsichore, Muse of choral song, who plays the lyre while she dances; Euterpe, Muse of music, who plays the flute. Extending their reach, the Muse Calliope, the goddess of epic poetry, and the god Apollo, a musician who played the lyre and sang, gave birth to Orpheus, the god of song, the Robert Burns of their time. Apollo’s brother, Hermes—the god of boundaries and those who cross them—made the lyre, yoke and crossbar with four strings to pluck and bow and presented it to his nephew.

(Assay April 15, 2025)

1 / From “The Graces of Prose,” a chapter in The Reader Over Your Shoulder by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge (1941), I note this: “Though modern prose is intended to be read silently and two or three times faster than at ordinary speaking rate, some people read with their mental ear not quite closed.”

I’m reading an essay about Caravaggio by Teju Cole, and as I go, I hear his words inside me. As I go, the tongue of my mental ear, forked and flicking, may activate—one tine the eye seeing the word, the other tine the soundboard thought-vibrating the words’ syllables, fast-read, quick-consumed, often as the words motor through when I type. Cole’s essay burbles along, whether I’m sound-notching or not, until I get to the word, misericordia and I pause. I don’t register its meaning, though its rolly collocation is so softly vocalic that I say it aloud. I’ve heard it before, I think. A bell rings. That word applied to musical illustrations of Christ’s suffering, a scene commonly painted and set into a musical narrative by composers of the Medieval and Baroque eras.

(Metempsychosis March 31, 2025)

1 / In the twenty-first century, film scores have much more to say, much more public and private space in which to speak and be heard, than any of the traditional one-dimensional arts. Film scores have a sensory hold over viewers far more than literature has over its readers. This is so, in part, because literature’s interior movement lacks the felt sonorous elements of music in movies. In fact, though I’m a dedicated writer who’s been published hundreds of times, I’m at a loss of how to think about the quiescence nature of literature in our time. Books and magazines have lost their cultural dominance, the megaphonic trust they had—and I had for them—when I was young, admittedly, a long time ago. Today, literature, like Ukrainian soldiers on the Donbas front, is holed up in a bunker, running targeted bomb-loaded drones while their guns and rocket launchers need oil, bullets, and shells.

(Written January, 2025)

The day after the Eaton fire destroyed much of Altadena, California, one of its residents, the L.A.-centric essayist and podcaster Meghan Daum, recorded a phone talk that begins with a somber recitation of facts and becomes a tragic surrender to fate. The previous evening, warned by neighbors to get out, she packed a few clothes, her computer, her phone, and her dog into her car and fled. The morning after, she says, she learned that “my house and every other house on the street had burned to the ground. The wind was so strong and the water was so scarce that emergency crews and firefighters were virtually helpless.”

(Quillette December 30, 2024)

I.

Over the restless course of Bob Dylan’s six-decade-plus career, the 83-year-old singer-songwriter has adopted a different narrative persona for each successive stage of his personal and musical journey. There was the young protest singer of the early 1960s who wrote “Masters of War” and “The Times They Are a-Changing”; this was followed by the period of surreal lyrics and an electrified rock band, resulting in three groundbreaking records; then the pastoral period when he retreated to Woodstock with his family and jammed with The Band at Big Pink; the subsequent mid-decade records chronicling emotional turmoil and divorce; the born-again records of the late 1970s and early ’80s; the directionless decade after that when his muse seemed to have deserted him; and finally, the creative renaissance that began with the Time Out of Mind album and persists to this day.

(Where Meadows Reside Issue 2.2 September 2, 2024)

1 / It’s the thump of his body hitting the floor. The boards beneath him thud, jostle briefly, and echo. The fading away stills. I’m listening, as I always do, wondering whether his twenty-month-old daughter hears the shaky thud of her father gone down, whether she wakes and feels frightened or soothed by his form nearby and sleeps on. By early afternoon, she should be in deep slumber, following a lunch of brown-sugared oatmeal. I’ve lived in their shadow too long, and the dark speaks to my irresolute nature, namely, that I’ve not fully listened, not fully heard the story of my loss my brother’s been telling me for years, lying there.

That April 1989, Steve, my older brother, was a high-school shop teacher in northern Wisconsin, recently married with two stepsons and a new daughter. That year he was 42; our father predeceased him, as they say, fourteen years earlier, at 61. My dad’s second heart attack (massive is the go-to word) did him in while on a sales junket with Mom in their hotel room.