Writing Seminars, reading lists and Iran
The world conspires to make the work feel small
Note: Get Literate will not publish next week, June 25, 2025. Take your pick of the following reasons: A. I fell ill recently and have not fully recovered and need the time to rest. B. In celebration of Juneteenth and the Union victory over the Confederacy. C. In mourning for the millions of Soviet citizens killed in Operation Barbarossa, which began June 22, 1941. D. To punish you, personally, for not upgrading to a paid subscription.
I was in Bennington, Vermont, asleep or close to it, when the Israeli bombs began to fall on Tehran. I’d gone for the second ten day residency of my MFA program, to meet my new professor, to workshop a piece and to see old friends.
I am tempted, of course, to write at length about Iran. But I am not a scholar of international politics, and my brief time as an historian specializing in Iran is long over. My acquaintance with war is that of an interested amateur, and you would be better served reading Seamus Malekafzali or Responsible Statecraft or Foreign Exchanges than reading Nye Canham. This is a literary substack.
Still, I feel morally compelled to say this: I oppose the American-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, even in its narrowest conception. I believe in the right of states to defend themselves against imperial aggression. Writers who do not say this are cowards, as they were cowards when they failed to oppose Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about the Bennington Writing Seminars, literary craft and the next few months on this blog.
A Romanticist experience
The ten days I spent in Vermont this month were some of the best and worst of my life. In this way—sublime, terrible, passionate—*I had a decidedly 19th century experience. To give a sense:
I spent long hours debating the form and value of art with friends equally convinced of their positions.
I made enemies by staking a controversial opinion on epistemology in literary criticism.
I made new friends, partly because of my enemies.
I was brought to physical debility by the intensity of aesthetic experiences.
I had no air conditioning. I wore linen trousers.
I leant a woman a jacket; I was accused of being in a polycule.
I fell ill and was compelled by circumstance to take my meals on a veranda, where the air was better.
I terrorized my neighbors by keeping odd hours, coughing and sneezing incessantly, and writing long screeds well into the night.
I experienced forms of loss and longing that recalled to me the unsteady days of my youth and forced me to consider the open wounds at the heart of my artistic practice.
It was a much less enjoyable residency than my January stint, overall. Though much of this stemmed from the physical pain of illness and the moral pain of missing the two most significant events of the second Trump administration: the outbreak of militant, large-scale resistance to ICE in Los Angeles and the Israeli attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran.
I have not figured out how to write cogently about the personal and political defeats I’ve so often alluded to on this blog, which provide the negative charge to my work. I suppose when I do figure that out, I’ll have no more use for novels, maybe. Psychic wounds, incurred at a particular age and in a particular manner, remain for years sources of the pain and energy necessary to write emotionally convincing fiction.
What I mean by this is as follows: when younger, I was several times very ill, possessed with yearning, surrounded by aesthetic enemies and engaged in risky political ventures on a New England college campus in the late spring (if I had a nickel, I’d have, like four, which is kind of a lot). In certain moments at Bennington, taking my meals on the veranda for instance, or brushing my teeth while feverish in a dorm bathroom, or seeing a beautiful stranger lit by the horizontal evening sun on a cool after dinner walk, I felt as if the impenetrable barrier between the past and present had grown suddenly very thin, and as if my senses of perception had heightened themselves. I lived, in those minutes, in three or four parallel moments.
There is a sort of pain here that must be felt. It is not nostalgia, that easy longing for simpler, more innocent times. Nor is it luxuriation in recalling suffering. Instead, as I see it, it is the task of working over a painful or interesting complex of emotions and disentangling its constituent elements so that those can be used for the construction of new (non-autobiographical) narratives.
Now that I’ve made you cringe, we can cover the factors that will determine the course of this newsletter for the next few months: my reading list, my assignments and my desired essay projects.
MFA Reading List, Round 2:
The piece I turned in for workshop this time is the start of a novel that deals with young(ish) guys having a bad time. As I think this has the potential to be a longer work, my professors and I tailored my reading list this semester to the young, disaffected, vaguely messianic young man. I plan to read the following books, in no particular order.
1. A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet
2. Buddhism for Western Children by Kirstin Allio
3. Long Halftime Walk by Billy Lynn
4. Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder
5. Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam
6. Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh
7. Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson
8. Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans
9. Something Wonderful by Jo Lloyd
10. A Best American Sci Fi and Fantasy collection for a recent year
11. Bad Dreams by Tessa Hadley
12. Trust by Hernan Diaz
13. Fraternity by Ben Nugent
14. Cool for America by Andrew Martin
15. The Sellout by Paul Beatty
16. Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson
17. Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck
18. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
19. Less than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis
20. American Psycho
21. The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal
22. Hunger by Knut Hamsun
23. Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
24. Exodus, Revelation (King James Version, authorship disputed)
25. Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
As with last semester, it is quite likely that this reading list will evolve in response to both my craft and critical work. Here’s what you all can expect from this process: Eight short, critical essays. Four of these will be the sort of craft essays you’re used to reading. Four will be close readings of specific paragraphs in a work. I will publish two of these a month. One long (~3,000 word) critical paper about some particular craft aspect to run in the later half of the semester. Occasional commentary on other books and on the writing process in the weekly posts here.
In addition to that, I have some projects I’d like to work on, which I will briefly describe here. These are time-intensive analytical essays that require me to read outside my list. Most of them will be free to readers, but some will require a paid subscription. If you want full access to them or want to support my work, I’d encourage you to upgrade to paid. I’m about very far away from this being a self-sustaining critical project; every subsequent dollar helps immensely.
Limited vs. Total apocalypse: an essay comparing Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz with Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. Both were influential novels of the nuclear age, imagining broadly pessimistic outcomes. With the world on the edge of a nuclear attack (I’d put some money, not much but some, on Israel striking Iran) I think it’s time to reappraise some classics of the atomic bomb and to work through some of the literary implications of a weapon strong enough to send us back to the dark ages. All aesthetic arguments terminate with the nuclear flash.
The masculinity crisis is a misogyny crisis: More or less this does what it says on the can. A reading of some of the articles about the so-called male loneliness crisis, and an argument that this crisis arises from an unstable masculinity that can’t reconcile itself to the full personhood of women. In other words, if you don’t want to be lonely, maybe start treating the majority of the population as human beings.
Clausewitzian Friction as applied to war novels: An essay asking if mimetic realism is worth pursuing in depictions of war and exploring what that might look like, drawing on Tolstoy, Keegan, Zola and others. I’ll probably draw in a couple contemporary novels as contrast: (She Who Became the Sun?) Specifically, this will discuss the embedded assumptions about war that shape war fiction. If you have contemporary novels that treat war as a frictionless battle of wills between protagonists, sound off in the comments.
Saving Private Ryan is a bad war movie: There, I said it. This will be a paid post, I’m not watching this movie again for free, I value my time.
The Nazi-Soviet War in film: An essay with an undefined thesis discussing two of my favorite movies, The Cranes are Flying and Ivan’s Childhood.
Cultural senility and nostalgia: One (or two closely-related) essays about generative AI, forgetting and the reactionary nature of nostalgia. This requires a close listen to The Caretaker’s 390 minute long album Everywhere at the End of Time.
If there are other topics you’ve always wanted an amateur literary/film critic to address please comment below, I am always looking for new angles and some of my aspirational essay topics will likely turn out bad.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
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*You witch hunters can pry the em dashes and triadic phrases from my cold, dead, latin-trained hands. LLMs will not get me to surrender Rhetorical Tricks.
Terribly relatable. I hope you’re feeling better!
Can't believe you're reading a Protestant version of the bible, unsubscribed