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.

(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.

(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.