THOMAS LARSON

(San Diego Reader February 8, 2023)

The first thing you realize once you start investigating “intelligence” is that no two people—whose personalities and abilities, capacities and traits, are as different as their DNA—use the word the same way. It’s one of those concepts like pleasure or truth or value where the variety of individual variation makes a reliable definition unlikely.

If, on my block in Clairemont, I ask ten neighbors what they think they are smart at, I’d get unique profiles from each. One has an affinity for native-plant gardening, another is a crackerjack piano teacher, another is a pickleball champ, still another’s Master’s in computer graphics is in such high demand that soon she’ll move out of Clairemont. Each person is better-than-average and one-of-a-kind, a credit to the species. So they will all say. It’s hard to control for self-aggrandizement, the stats tell us: When 64 percent of Americans rate their driving skills as excellent, the same folk score drivers of their own age and skill at 22 percent.

(First published in Times of San Diego October 2, 2022)

Now that I know that just thinking about classified documents will declassify them, my mind is being overtaken by thoughts I dare not think for fear that thinking them makes them come true.

Just the other day I was thinking about that famous line of Henry the Second, King of England, when in 1170 he supposedly said (though, remember, it’s not clear that he said it but perhaps only thought it and said later that he had said it), “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?”

(San Diego Reader August 8, 2022)

In the infinite flatness of southern California’s Imperial Valley, an irrigated desert of cropland and skin-frying heat, lies Calipatria State Prison, a mostly maximum-security Level IV warren of cellblocks, surrounded for miles by massive ag plots: white plastic-coated storage barns of alfalfa hay; acres of livestock to which the bales are fed; fields of greenly ripe, ruler-straight commodities like sweet corn and leaf lettuce; flocks of snowy egrets that feast in those fields on lizards, snakes, and mice; and, powering some of the valley’s energy, large pitches of solar arrays on barren parcels. More widely diffused are the sun-withered towns, mottled and cracked by dust storms, where cadres of prison guards live. Not much moves in the desert other than the birds and the wind, breezing over Colorado River water rushing down the concrete ditches. And, arriving every hour, females driving families in battered Corollas who come to visit their lost loved ones.

(Times of San Diego July 5, 2022)

Those who call themselves pro-life are, to say the least, a self-deceiving lot; they’ve been convinced — from without and from within — that all fetuses should go to term and be born, no matter the consequences to the safety of the woman, the child, the family, or the planet.

I wouldn’t call these people pro-life. They’re pro-birth. Better put, they’re pawns of politicians and so-called religious leaders, dominated by white Christian men, who use the pro-birth status to enforce outdated sexual mores and to handmaid women.

(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.