Writer - work in Threepenny Review, LARB, The London Magazine
Joined February 2022
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I wrote about Dylan Thomas's 1951 trip to Iran. Little has changed 75 years on: the fight for oil, the immiserating sanctions, the naval blockade, the threat of invasion from the south, and the timeless claim that Iranians are irrational for objecting.
'He spends much of his letters from Iran begging his wife to forgive his various infidelities. What’s sometimes lost in this personal story is that he had arrived in Iran at an extraordinary time.'
@kasralang on Dylan Thomas in Iran: thelondonmagazine.org/articl…
For those intrigued by DT's Iranian journey, I highly recommend watching @nazmassoumi's short documentary, "Pouring Water on Troubled Oil"
It's an exceptional piece of filmmaking. Brilliant sound work, with Michael Sheen voicing Thomas.
Always illuminating to read Abrahamian. I was interested to note he considers 'the Azeri question' the main threat to Iran's long lerm cohesion, even if they are well integrated into the elite. Counterintuitive for me as my own Tabrizi fam scoffs at all regional succession talk.
In NLR 157: Iran under Fire
Ervand Abrahamian on the power structures of the Islamic Republic.
newleftreview.org/issues/ii1…
Esfahan is one of the supreme achievements of the human soul. It belongs to all of us, wherever we live, as a testament to our capacity for creation. To stand in this spot is to hear, if only for a moment, the answer to all our formless longing.
Now reading.
I enjoyed Ghamari's 2016 book defending Foucault's view of the revolution, even if, as a certified Foucault hater, I was hard to convince. This one opens with a moving account of Ghamari's imprisonment in Evin during Saddam's bombardment.
Kasra Lang retweeted
Both of the states that have ruled Iran in the last century aimed all of their repressive firepower at the left, only for their main challengers to emerge from the right.
As sharp as people say, a real horror story.
I think the book’s strength is that it (mostly) resists the temptation to just mock the expat Berlin couple. It’s more than a cheap satire of “digital nomads.” We are all implicated in the trap it describes.
The right obsesses over assimilation but the truth is, in “a world of universal particularity” (as Zygmunt Bauman says), there is no coherent society to assimilate into.
It’s not about pressure from above or desire from within; it’s just that assimilation has no fixed meaning.
Kasra Lang retweeted
NEW: 130 Iranians Arrested Across U.S. in Past Week, 670 Now in ICE Custody
Fox News, citing multiple federal sources, reports that ICE is ramping up nationwide efforts to locate and detain Iranian nationals as part of a broader Trump administration crackdown following the U.S. strike on Iran.
🎥 Footage from Los Angeles yesterday shows immigration officers detaining several Iranians who had reportedly applied for asylum.
دیروز در لسآنجلس، دستگیری ایرانیانی که درخواست پناهندگی دادهاند توسط ماموران اداره مهاجرت #آمریکا، بعد از حمله نظامی به ایران:
A beautiful, underrated travel classic. In 1953, Bouvier drives from Geneva to Afghanistan—with a long winter sojourn in my father’s city, Tabriz, during Mossadegh’s trial.
“You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making—or unmaking—you.”
Kasra Lang retweeted
I haven’t read the new novel — but it seems to me the universal pans are a sort of delayed and pent up reaction to his debut novel, which everyone pretended to like for so long, despite its sloppiness. This pile on now is retroactive.
Kasra Lang retweeted
In Tehran in 2017, on a day of hard snow and spiritual distress, I kept having visions of the city destroyed. As if everything I saw—the energy and endurance, the countless daily mutinies, the will to joy—was just the “before” to an aftermath of total ruin. I pray I’m wrong.
