THOMAS LARSON

(Guernica November 24/25 2014)

A Deviant Nature /

That which we call American music, whether it’s pop, show tunes, Motown, country ’n’ western, or any other mixed breed, is seldom wholly original. It is—it must be, to appeal widely—a sound and a style already known to its composer-musicians, and their audiences, before it’s written. The declamatory songs of Bob Dylan in the early 1960s, for example, owe everything to the then-familiar swagger of Woody Guthrie, talking blues, pentatonic Shaker hymns, and backwoods white gospel. These elements the troubadour kept as a foundation even as he evolved and wrote new material based on a lyric élan all his own. Pre-Dylan, Guthrie’s music binds Appalachian hillbilly tunes to topical story songs, which, themselves, owe their fluency to the broad-siders and the balladeers of eighteenth century Scotland and England. And so it goes, way on back. But there is, as always, an exception to the rule. Cultural critic Stanley Crouch argues that African-American gospel, blues, and jazz—styles that standardized the flatted third and seventh, syncopation and polyrhythms, and the chaotic, improvising soloist—are unique in music. In song, Crouch says, there had never been, with African or American music, such tap-rooted anguish as can be found in “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” where the melodic genius lies not on but between the notes.

(TriQuarterly October 21, 2014)

For me, the edgiest of the double-edged questions we’ve all asked a teacher, a colleague, or ourselves concerns the “outline”—first, when do I do it, before, during, or after I write, for which the mordant answer is yes, and second, why do I do it, which is harder to quantify because it suggests that planning a piece may be categorically different than writing a piece, as though the pair are maliciously counterbalanced, feathers and lead. I say malicious because such a myth (writing fun, outlining dumb) invites a more emotional query: Does the outline mean that we must succumb to that which is not writing, as though we’ve fallen from rapture to drudge—Lewis and Clark giving way to the Conestoga wagons?

(Psychology Today Blogs #1-8, March-November, 2014)

Cuddling With Mamie

To introduce myself for this, my first blog at Psychology Today, I’m the author of The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease, Hudson Whitman Press, 2014. The book rewinds and unravels my life during and after my three heart attacks.

The core argument of the memoir is a relational one: My recovery, as good as it can get after the damage of three myocardial infarctions, surged once I shared my condition with my long-time partner, Suzanna. In addition, I cut out dairy, ramped up my exercise, and added supplements. A no-oil Vegan and daily walker, I have lost 35 pounds as a plant-based eater, and it’s been three years since my last angioplasty.

(An Afterword to Rank 'N' File by John Abel, Summer 2014)

Exaggerate the essential, leave the obvious vague. —Vincent Van Gogh

I admit to struggling with a couple phrases while I tick-tock my way through John Daniel Abel’s latest sad and poignant collection of speaking images. (His previous marvel was The Last Word: Sixty-One American Epitaphs.) The phrases that trouble me are underclass and working-class. Why? Their sell-buy dates have passed. Anymore, such terms as the wealthy, the middle-class (the politicians’ fantasy), the nouveau riche, and other mass descriptors have lost definitional distinction. The problem is, cliché guarantees stereotype: ah, the poor—ignorant, opinionated, desperate, racist, self-abusive. You know the drill. But couldn’t those knee-jerk responses fit any “class”? Aren’t the 1% ignorant, opinionated, desperate, racist, self-abusive?

(Written June 15, 2014)

“Feel Like Funkin’ It Up”

In the HBO series Treme, the opening parade sequence, all of 6:46, heralds the program—in its entirety—one that will ripple and storm and flood into 36 episodes over four years. The mise-en-scène depicts the post-Katrina re-jiggering of New Orleans, three months after, as it affects one neighborhood, the Treme. It’s a noisy array of street sounds and band music—a trumpet player oiling his valves, a glaring cop expecting trouble, a man lustily tipping a beer, a van going by blasting hip-hop, a fade-in/fade-out snippet of that wanton lullaby, “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.”

(Guernica May 22, 2014)

Strange as it seems, writers and their work used to be welcome on TV. Via YouTube we can find, from 1959, the very cool, Boston-inflected Jack Kerouac, reading from On the Road to a jazz trio improv on The Steve Allen Show, and, from 1968, a very inebriated, belligerent Jack on Firing Line with William F. Buckley. There’s Jerzy Kosinski, William Saroyan, and Gore Vidal on Johnny Carson, as well as (my favorite non-author) the foresty-eyebrowed Ed Begley Sr., reciting Robert Service’s “The Face on the Barroom Floor.” Mike Wallace probing Aldous Huxley. Edward R. Murrow person-to-person with John Steinbeck.

(Bright Lights Film Journal April 11, 2014)

In our culture, the onset of a myocardial infarction is depicted (we know it best from the movies) one way: a chest-clutching, chair-clattering, death-summoning heart attack that a man (seldom a woman) suffers in public, is ambulanced to emergency, and, if he survives, awakens to one or more of these three dramas: the unplumbed depth of his character, as in he’s never too old to learn; the unconditional love of a woman who cares for him; and the exposure of his relatives’ divided loyalties. There are genetic legacies to expect it, there are gender roles to enact it, and there are psychological wounds to graven it. Not surprisingly, for decades Hollywood screenwriters have used the infarct to wring out a morality tale whose outcome ennobles women’s love and retribution as well as men’s helplessness with this “male” disease. There may be no better example of the female-comeuppance, heart-expanding, heart-attack film than Something’s Gotta Give, a 2003 screwball comedy by writer/director Nancy Meyers.