Imitating Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Vineland’
Political morality, greasy vodka and a reading list.
I did not intend to take a two week break. I meant to do this essay last week, but the flu took an end march around the vaccine this year and, instead, I spent the week prostrate on a couch. There is much to say.
The president’s fantasy media apparatus attempted to stir up a pogrom in Minneapolis; the political police (ICE, DHS) came to carry it out; the people resisted; Renee Good was killed by the political police; the people resisted more, they organized a citywide mobilization of political forces aimed at demonstrating strength; the political police killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, in response.
There is not much to say about America right now. The empire’s decline is self-inflicted, particularly with regard to our European allies. NATO stood by us in the Global War of Terror with slavish devotion. They sent their soldiers to die alongside ours in the illegal occupation of Iraq and for the glory of heroin trafficking Afghan pederasts. To squander the devotion of such loyal vassals was foolish.
But the domestic rot of the Republic goes back deeper than Trump; the DHS/ICE/CBP apparatus, the whole evolution of the national security state, its trajectory towards this state of affairs, is simply the evolution of the War of Terror’s logic. In the first decade of the century, America launched a war intended to turn the whole world into a single zone of interest, a permanent state of exception. But when the regime responsible for this war fell, there was no political accountability, no end to the killing and no retreat from this global ambition. We never revived the great investigative committees of the 1970s, never punished the torturers, never imprisoned the butchers or stopped the bombers. Instead, America’s formal political institutions genuflected before the man with the gun.
I have seen calls for an American Nuremberg of late. My barber wants it. My friends talk of it. On the streets and in the bars, among the historically inclined, that’s the word now, not normalcy, not reform, but Nuremberg. It is a prayer for the scaffold and the trap. There are signs at protests demanding it. And yes, I want the trials and the transcripts and the documents and the confessions. With all my soul, I want this settling of accounts. The abuse of political authority is the sole crime for which death is a reasonable (but not just, for death is never just) punishment.
But Nuremberg followed the loss of the war. And where is the Red Army now? Who will supply 300 divisions to occupy the continental United States? How can this be done without Megaton detonations? It cannot. We would blacken the sun from the sky sooner than fall before the lesser powers. No, there will not be an American Nuremberg. What Judgment Day we must have will be achieved by domestic means, by broad layers of the American people, acting at last in concert, to remake the country. Not Nuremberg then, but Reconstruction, another unfinished revolution.
We will have to do it all ourselves.
What that means will vary from heart to heart, from city to city. As Hamilton Nolan has written, this whole country will be Minneapolis soon. What is here looks an awful lot like the first two Red Scares. The hour for idle talk online has passed; what matters now is not what is posted, but what is said and done in person, in thousands of meetings and millions of conversations, and what, perhaps, is written on the page.
The dictatorship America has spent the last generation constructing is a technological dictatorship; Trump is one part of an emergent technological oligarchy, a new system of capitalist reaction that draws its fantasies from fascism, its political practice from the dirty democracies of the 20th century, and its staying power from the synthesis of tech capital, extractive capital and the regional gentry.
All political organizing carried out online is carried out on the dictatorship’s terms. To give an example, this week I tried posting a TikTok about the works of Michael Parenti, connecting his vision of a materialist marxist politics to the class struggle ongoing in Minneapolis. Larry Ellison, however, (allegedly) molested the algorithm so anything critical of the regime gets shadowbanned. Alas! My future speech on that platform will consist of layered allusions (On the road from Port Huron to Flint, one doesn’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows) and suchlike to edify my viewers in the know and to convince my less stable fans that I really am sending them coded messages through their phones.
Still, the enemy owns the screens. The enemy owns the air. The enemy hears and sees through our phones and screens and reads through our emails and our text messages and our newsletters. For this reason, you will probably see less political writing from me in 2026; what I have to say hasn’t changed, but there is very little point in posting it on the internet. As I said above, what political engagement means will differ in all of our individual lives.
But there is a verse from a song from this country’s brief flirtation with radicalism that returns to me evermore frequently: “He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat; Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!”
I hear that trumpet, ringing loud. Don’t you?
Reading list and residency review:
About a week and a half ago I finished the third of five MFA residencies with the Bennington Writing seminars. In January 2025, I was new to the whole MFA/residency thing and everything was scary and overwhelming and also it was freezing the whole time. And David Lynch died in the middle of it.
The June residency happened in the middle of an extremely agonizing stretch of work-related stress and travel continued after residency for some weeks and ended with me weeping on a park bench in Monterey, California while watching a harbor seal sleep. Also in June, I was struck by a series of aesthetic impressions so intense that they were literally physically debilitating. May we all be so lucky.
So this residency was easier. My workshop was less intense, my work was better. My new professor seems a bit more demanding, in some ways, than my previous two. It was, in many ways, the best residency so far; though it lacked some of the highlights. I returned energized, determined and with fresh ideas for attacking major problems with my project [Burgerreich Amerikkka].
I also returned with a nice reading list for this semester, which you can find here, in no particular order:
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
Self-help by Lorrie Moore
Bright Lights Big City by Jay McInerny
Rules of Attraction by Brett Easton Ellis
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Snares by Rav Grewald Kok
The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida
Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin
Mao II by Don DeLillo
Oromay by Baalu Girma
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen
Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte
Burr (or Lincoln or 1876) by Gore Vidal
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
My Education by Susan Choi
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
Dispatches by Michael Herr
Heart of Darkness (maybe? I read it 10 years ago, IDK if I should revisit it)
The Answer is Always Yes by Monica Ferrell
The Aesthetics of Resistance V1 by Peter Weiss
The Aesthetics of Resistance V2 by Peter Weiss
The Aesthetics of Resistance V3 by Peter Weiss
On imitation
Bennington’s monthly work cycle expects students will turn in two “annotations” per packet, plus about 20 pages of fiction. The annotations are typically critical essays of the sort I’ve posted on this blog before. But Bennington’s professors also encourage students to experiment by imitating the style of other writers. Inhabiting another author’s voice is a good way to identify one’s own tendencies, including one’s weaknesses. It also helps break you out of stylistic ruts and makes you think more deeply about the relationship between formal decisions and the content of a work.
When I was in high school and college I used to do this sort of imitative work a lot. I wrote four or five different versions of Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” I wrote a mashup of several of the stories from Hemingway’s “In Our Times,” and I wrote novels with large sections inspired by the histories of Theodore Ayrault Dodge and Fernand Braudel. I’ve imitated Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. LeGuin, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I’ve been accused (baseless slander!) of aping Brett Easton Ellis. And I’ve parroted the styles of my personal pulp princes: Stephen King, Bernard Cornwell, Dennis Lehane. So much of learning to write, when you’re young at least, is stealing techniques from other people and using them on one’s own raw materials. Literature exists in a continual process of imitation, reference and refinement. We are all reading and responding and reworking everything that came before us. And it is only by knowing that past that we can avoid being trapped in it.
Until now, I’d avoided doing imitations largely because I do publish my annotations. It felt weird to show you all pastiche as homework. But whatever.
For this annotation I have chosen to imitate Thomas Pynchon, specifically, I am imitating the atmospheric sections of his 1984 novel Vineland, especially the section where Frenesi (an informant) watches a line of thunderstorms roll in over Oklahoma City with Brock Vond (a federal prosecutor and her lover).
I am imitating that style using the characters from my own work [Burgerreich Amerikkka] (using a fake working title because I’m superstitious about saying the real one in public). We get the perspective of Antiochus Campbell, a rightwing streamer and close ally of the president, in Chicago during a period of domestic instability. My professor also imposes a radical economy on annotations (2 pages! Max!!) as a way of forcing us to make better decisions, so I’ll be more concise in most of my formal analysis for a couple months. Comment if you catch the Nevil Shute line.
[Burgerreich Amerikkka] by way of Pynchon
Note: This occurs at some point during [Burgerreich Amerikka] after the outbreak of significant domestic unrest but before a joint American-Israeli nuclear attack on Iran. The POV character, Antiochus Campbell, is the black sheep of a Virginia democratic dynasty, a popular streamer and political extremist who volunteers to aid in the repression of domestic unrest. His cousin, Lawrence Campbell, is a military contractor and member of the American Kreisau Circle.
The steward served Swedish vodka, in the bottle it was not translucent but had a faint, shimmering iridescence of many colors and a texture like the inside of a fish oil capsule, so that when poured over ice, the liquid bunched up and oozed with a viscosity like detergent. Antiochus, wishing to seem like a drinker, did his best to choke it back, saluting in his head the Secretary of War and the Sonderkommandant of Joint Counterintelligence Task Force. He kept replaying the conversation he’d had with Lawrence before the drive to the airport and found himself mumbling his half of it to his sleeping seatmate, another volunteer for the President’s crusade.
“I have to go.”
“Why?”
“Because I gave my word to join this fight.”
Lawrence had shaken his head slowly. “It’s childish cowboy shit.”
“Yeehaw,” he replied. “Somebody has to wrassle the cattle back in order.”
“By shooting them?”
“It’s that girl making you all cowardly, Katherine. Where’s Lawrence with the bayonet? You’re going soft because of her.”
He smiled on the plane, as he had talking to Lawrence who thought he’d concealed his political castration so cleverly.
“Foxed you this time,” he said, loud enough to wake his seatmate. He felt more heady than hammered and hoped he could bring back some trophies, hats or teeth maybe, from Chicago to impress his sincerity upon Lawrence. He wasn’t playing soldier boy. He was answering the president’s call. Lawrence couldn’t see that, poor unhappy Lawrence, who went strutting about with his security clearance and his personal carry weapon, embracing soldiering as only a man of peace could, talking of Cincinnatus and Republics with the pained severity of a new father assuring his wife he will return with the rest of Mr. Lincoln’s 90 day boys. With the drink in him, he could see the path his cousin was following, wished him also to follow, a bland gray march through homogenous flowing time, a river running smoothly, on from GS-10, apps, dates, girls, a dog, a stint as a contractor to save for the ring, the downpayment, the child; each day a step further into that wasteland where all things possess the same value and therefore mean nothing at all where war was only the management of savagery by spreadsheet — so why bother fighting at all. A universal value negated the value of individual things and Antiochus believed in the value of the Cross and the cleansing fire. He cracked open a second nip. He dumped the oozing liquor into the plastic cup and raised the plastic shade. Outside, a hundred miles and more from the plane a great beige bank rose up from the flat black land, far above it the twilight was fading blue, a last smear of the day. It was the dust storm, the first to strike these plains in a hundred years, a biblical plague given form. He leaned his head down to get a better look. The bank rose vertical from the flats, before it the small towns of the heartland glowed silver against the black velvet fields, tiny and delicate against the terrible rush and he was sure the storm must crush them, tear them upwards and devour them. He had never seen a storm like this on Earth, no summer thunderhead and no winter blizzard could match that tawny devilry, from deep within the roiling sandcloud came dull red pulses, stretching slowly towards its outer edge, blazing orange streaks — silent at so great a distance — from time to time they reached out beyond, into the clear air and turned from sullen flame to dazzling electric blue. Those lightning bolts might be two hundred miles long. They stretched all the way to the city he was coming to conquer.
Next Week: It’s a surprise for you and me both.
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