An MFA Reading list. A David Lynch essay.
My semester plan. But first, remembering a fallen friend.
Today you get some juicy authorial revelations. For free.
In the winter of 2022-3 I saw The Elephant Man at an independent cinema on the second floor of a rowhouse in Washington D.C. The bouncer edited a magazine. The beers were five dollars. The seats gave me a weeklong back spasm. You know the type of place.
I teared up when John Merrick, the elephant man, was released from his cage in Belgium, when he was chased by the mob, again when he lay dying, asleep on his back for the first time and last time in his life, an acknowledged human being.
It was around the time I’d started coming to terms with the possibility of my own distance from the society of the normatively able. But there was a deeper alienation at play.
I went to bed one night in March 2020 as a grad student who kept his books in boxes and woke up midway through 2022 as a successful beat reporter with an apartment, two bookshelves, a partner and a cat. All my life, I had been the odd man out: A white kid in a black school, an atheist in a church school, a working-class kid in the NESCAC, a Yankee in the tidewater, a socialist in America, a journalist on the scene.
Chosen outsider lives are easy, in my opinion, because you have your defined social role. I was always running towards a world that was always receding from me. Between me and all the people I knew there were little rituals to acknowledge their place as host and mine as guest. Between us there was bread and salt. And while I might stay a night on a museum floor, or an air mattress, or a couch, there was always someplace else to go.
Politically, I was an emissary from a dead world in the land of the living. Left-wingers are at war with American society on behalf of American society; we are seldom welcomed, rarely loved, and never at rest. When I woke up, by accident, as a normative image of urban American masculinity I no longer recognized myself. I did not know the world or the man I was.
So when Merrick lay back to die that last time I wept. I could see that all my life I had wanted to be the elephant man, had made myself an elephant man, had lived in a costume that, if I did not conform to its bounds, would suffocate me.
Everything I’ve seen of Lynch plays in that same troubled zone: the war of the social world against the self, the slippage of the dream into reality, the violence of the mask. His characters are always waking up somewhere not-quite-known, in bodies not-quite-theirs, but still ready to play their parts.
There is almost nothing subtle in Lynch if you are brave enough to read the text. He worked with the images of dreams and he made associative leaps on the screen that felt, at times, to break the form of argument. But these works operate with an ironclad inner-logic and every action feels inevitable. These are not images of literal events, but maps of a psychic world recognizable to anyone who has ever felt alone.
“Fix your hearts or die,” Lynch’s character said in an episode of Twin Peaks: The Return. While this is rightly seen as a motto of queerness (and particularly an assertion—in the show by a cis white man—that trans women are women) it is also, I believe, one of the many lessons of queer and feminist critique that can salvage life for the cis-hets of the world. Those of us fortunate enough to live within the normative bounds of gender and sex so rarely notice our chains, so rarely know that we too, are elephant men, that we become the baying crowd, reveling in socially permissible cruelty. We do not see what is broken in our hearts.
I only watched one half of Twin Peaks: The Return, and this some while after it came out. At the time (Jan-May 2019), I was organizing on behalf of a group of survivors of sexual assault who were trying to persuade some Boston-area political organizations to expel several serial rapists. For months, I was stuck in meetings with people who simply refused to see the violation of other people’s bodies as something that demanded a political response. And outside of those meetings it seemed that everyone around me was disclosing or about to disclose that they’d been sexually assaulted.
There was a plague circling and circling and circling. We were all sick. I felt like Camus’ Dr. Rieux. I fought my losing battle because it was the only thing I could do and because I too knew the feel of fever.
I watched The Return with a close friend who had been assaulted some months prior. We got as far at the atom bomb episode. On that winter night, the scenes of metaphoric sexual violence and bodily violation became impossible to tolerate. We shut it off.
I walked home. It was very cold in Somerville that night. So cold that nothing moved. A bitter, intolerable silence lay over the dense city, with its beds full of misery and its secrets buried deep.
Since then, I have found almost every discussion of the literary/cultural portrayal of sexual violence to be facile, if not offensive. You can always close the book, shut off the television, get up and leave the theater. The great evil of sexual violence is the violation of consent. The great power of the cultural commodity is its participatory nature.
A culture that shies away from the depiction of complex sexuality and sexual violence is a culture blind to rape.
I want you to think very carefully about who actually benefits from a literature that can’t interrogate sexual violence in the social world or its place in a cultural structure of desire.
In The Plague, Dr. Rieux has a companion, Tarrou, who fights because his heart calls him to battle. They meet only because of their shared struggle and become friends out of a sense of mutual duty. Tarrou dies late in the plague, long after most of the dying is done. After they swam together in frigid seas and braved every hazard.
“There as here it was the same solemn pause, the lull that follows battle; it was the silence of defeat,” Camus writes at Tarrou’s death. “But the silence now enveloping his dead friend, so dense, so much akin to the nocturnal silence of the streets and of the town set free at last, made Rieux cruelly aware that this defeat was final, the last disastrous battle that ends a war and makes peace itself an ill beyond all remedy.”
For a little while, when it really mattered, my Tarrou was David Lynch. Captain of the Weirdos, Electo* of Alienation, Prophet of Rupture.
I miss him already.
The school part
I recently returned from Bennington, Vermont, where I participated in the 10-day writing seminar that opens Bennington College’s MFA program. It was a wonderful time. I made many friends. I got advice on buying sport coats in Rochester, Minnesota. It snowed every day, just a little bit.
At Bennington, reading is part of the program. A mastery of form requires knowledge of the possibilities of form. Together with my professor, who I will not name because I am discreet, I have compiled the following preliminary reading list to last from now until mid-May, in no particular order, and arranged by theme:
Modernist works paired with contemporary novels responding to them
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Trust by Hernan Diaz
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Second Place by Rachel Cusk
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
An Irish detour
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Dubliners by James Joyce
Cheating at Canasta, or another collection, by Trevor Williams
One of Kevin Barry’s collections (maybe Dark Lies the Island)
Contemporary short fiction collections
A collection’s worth of stories from The Collected Works of Deborah Eisenberg
Last Days of the Dog Men and/or Selected Stories by Brad Watson
Evening Land by Michael Knight
Pure Hollywood by Christine Schutt
Daddy by Emma Cline
One of David Means’ collections
Something Wonderful by Jo Lloyd
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
Criticism:
Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison
Modernist works on the bench (likely to be replaced by contemporary novels/collections):
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (paired with The Hours by Michael Cunningham)
Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
Either L’Assomoir or Earth by Emile Zola (I know this counts as naturalism, but I love Zola too much.)
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The purpose of this list is to explore the short story form and, to an extent, to interrogate some of the afterlives of modernism. An MFA is a practical degree, not a theoretical degree; we’re not here to read the classics. Between now and late May I will have to complete several critical reflections and one major (10-15 page) essay on these books as part of my coursework. Those will all be published here.
Each week (likely each Thursday) I will update you with a post describing what I have read, and discussing how I have written fiction in the intervening time. I hope to mix in some essays on other topics, but that may not happen. The response to this blog has exceeded my expectations—I didn’t think I would hit 100 subscribers until June, if ever—so I’m revising a previous statement: I will turn on paid subscriptions in June or when I hit 1,000 readers, whichever comes first. I will warn all of you before I do that.
I thought I would have more to say about Bennington, but the Lynch obituary felt more necessary than bragging about how much fun I had up north.
Next week: I re-publish a short story and discuss how to read it.
Fix your hearts or die.
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*Electo is a term from the Spanish armies of the 16th century, meaning the elected leader of a mutiny or strike by the soldiers. I have used it here because Lynch was a man who cared deeply about questioning the social and psychological wages of masculinity. How many consecutive newsletters can I write with a footnote? We’ll find out.