THOMAS LARSON

(The Literary Review September 11, 2024)

1 / In the twenty-first century, film and music have a dominant presence in public and private space in which to speak and be heard and be of great influence to the culture. In addition, film and music have much more of a sensory hold over viewers and listeners than literature has over its readers, in part, because literature’s interior movement lacks the video-in-motion and the inner and external sonorous elements of its competing media. Though I’m a dedicated writer who’s been published nearly five hundred times, I’m at a loss of how to think about literature and its quiescence anymore. Books and magazines have lost their loudness, the megaphonic range and companioning 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.

(Bridge Eight August 25, 2024)

Oh, the sonic pleasures of the 2023 film Tár: casting Cate (body, voice, face: her elasticity, her fearlessness) as the first-ever female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic; Mahler’s most revelatory symphony, the Fifth; the musician Sophie Kauer who acts and plays the Elgar Cello Concerto; a catalog of ominous sounds, musical and not, bedeviling Lydia and us with its undertow; and the eclectic score, which is both “in” the film and “accompanies” it and, in turn, enchants and destabilizes the ouroboros of making a movie about a musical subject musically. Another oh for the film's diabolical pleasures: Blanchett’s ferocious musical talent and her equally astute bedding skills as she sets up a scholarship program for young women conductors to manipulate them and, in the process, betray her wife, her personal assistant, her assistant conductor who “questions her integrity,” and a protégé who commits suicide.

(Assay April 1, 2024)

1 / My partner and I have seen many therapists over the years of our longtime commitment. We know such tune-ups are critical for our relational health; she’s a therapist herself, and I’m always willing. During sessions, we are reminded to practice what’s called “looping”—listening to the other and then repeating what was said. “I hear her saying that she’s sick to death of my grumpy moods in the morning and, what’s more, she’d like to have one day a week where we get out of the ‘damn house’ and do something fun.”

(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.

(Ilford Review March 22, 2024)

1 / It took listening into my seventh decade as a musician and a critic, my life’s crossover passions, to arrive at the purest listening experience of classical music I have ever had; highlights of Sergei Prokofiev’s Suite from Romeo and Juliet (1938) and, in full, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony (1937), performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and led by the Czech conductor, Jakub Hrůša, at the Konzerthaus in Vienna. Surely I am not the first to have been so moved by these twentieth-century Russians in Vienna’s music halls, I thought. That feeling had previously alluded me as an American whose seated anticipation in stateside venues had seldom measured up to what I hoped it would.

(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.

(Los Angeles Review June 1, 2023)

GENESIS • One hundred years ago, the most fearsome cultural critic in America was Edmund Wilson. Writing in 1931, Wilson noted in an essay that even though the Great Depression ravaged the country, “Americans still tend to move westward, and many drift southward toward the sun.” With economic displacement rampant, he thought our “westward expansion” had come to a “standstill.” Nowhere was this more tragically apparent than in San Diego, which he visited in 1930, the city where I’ve lived since 1982. With 150,000 people at the time, Wilson named it, inelegantly, “the jumping-off place.” What was it, he wondered, that magnetizes people to move here and feel suddenly unmoored? At first, the cause eluded him. But one consequence was clear: the suicide rate.