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December 8, 2020
Gabriel Blackwell's Playlist for His Story Collection "Babel"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Gabriel Blackwell's collection Babel is filled with surreal, comic, and always moving stories.
Brandon Hobson wrote of the book:
"Babel is a collection of stories full of characters who are both comic and tragic. Its syntax is precise and astounding in the way it builds and unfolds sentence by sentence with a sort of magic one sees in Borges or Nabokov. Gabriel Blackwell is a startlingly original writer and deserves ranking among the great stylists."
In his words, here is Gabriel Blackwell's Book Notes music playlist for his story collection Babel:
In keeping with the title of the book and the idea of noises that, for some listeners, are just noises, while for others they are or can be something beautiful or clever or heartfelt, I've focused on somewhat noisy, possibly confusing songs and songs with significant noises that are also songs I listened to during the eight years it took me to write the book. Ten songs for the ten fictions in Babel.
1. and 2. Drive Like Jehu, "Super Unison" and Pere Ubu's "Non-Alignment Pact"
Two takes on Allen Ravenstine's opening squall. "Super Unison" calms just enough to make Rick Froberg's sprechgesang lines "Wasn't me who phoned/Don't let that man inside your home" audible (lines that are relevant to "The Student," a fiction in which a man and a woman are terrorized in their home by things that might be ghosts or clones or something much worse). Each is about an attempt to resolve a strained or soured relationship, as are "Fathers and Sons" and several of the other stories in Babel. Turn the volume up before pressing play.
3. Brian Eno, "Mother Whale Eyeless"
Eno described the writing of the lyrics as a process of "idiot glee," which is at least half apt when applied to my own writing process. Polly Eltes's vocal about a man in a whale in a sea in the sky in a tree, an improvised or oblique Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, puts me in mind of the structure I chose for the first story in Babel, "( )," a set of stories about echoes and emptinesses all nested within each other. The moment when Eltes's voice comes in is always an oddly emotional moment for me. Phil Collins on drums.
4. Essential Logic, "Albert"
This song keeps shifting and changing and lifting off into the ether, an aspiration I can't help but have for my fiction. Lora Logic's lyrics—"Albie ain't new and Albie ain't old/He's just an in-between advancement who hasn't been told/That life is for breathing not sitting alone"—were also a kind of sideways inspiration for "Leson," and Logic's lines about Albert's "jelly boutique" and "jelly unique" rhyme with the ending of the story, when Leson is jellied and turned into a toxic sludge by something called a "passage worm." Anyway, there should have been much more from Essential Logic.
5. The Pop Group, "Trap"
Another kind of sideways inspiration for "Leson": "Snap my skin/Scissors cut the seams/Limb from limb, now the sand flows in"—Leson, the protagonist, sews rotted food (among other things) into the seams of his skin as a way to break out of the rut he's stuck himself in. In a less direct way, "Choice is the freedom to say no" and "Life's just a flash/constricts like a tomb" gets at the motivations of the narrator and the narrator's father in "Fathers and Sons." Mark Stewart's performance anticipates David Yow (and echoes David Thomas; see #1, above).
6. Liars, "This Dust Makes That Mud"
I like the melancholic loop that begins at around 8 minutes, punctuated by that weird, vacuum-starting-up-in-another-dimension noise. I don't really listen to music while I'm writing—I'm much too easily distracted for that—but I listened to this a bunch of times when I was revising "A Field in Winter." "We're the ones who can't sleep at night."
7. Wire, "A Question of Degree"
Live versions of this song are disappointing, I think because this was the beginning of Wire's attempt to make guitars sound like synthesizers and synthesizers sound like guitars, and the incredible noise made by the guitars at the end of "A Question of Degree"—a ring modulator, I think?—is sort of inimitable and apparently impossible to recreate outside of the studio. The lyrics ("Don't touch my luggage/ I can surely manage," "I hide my shaking/Thus protect my pride," and "Can I really manage/to survive outside?") put me in mind of the man at the center of the title story, "Babel," a story based on a real man who was taken advantage of over a period of decades by a conman, and who heartbreakingly maintained throughout the con a kind of dignity, even apparently developing a sense of responsibility for the man who was conning him.
8. Ex Models: "Three Weeks"
"It takes three weeks of your life/To buy a mattress" sums up the predicament of the narrator of "La tortue or The Tortoise," worried he may have put off the pursuit of a satisfying life for so long that it has become unattainable, but it also touches on the torpidities of the husband in "The Student," Leson in "Leson," the unnamed narrators of "The Invention of an Island" and "Afterthought," etc. A running theme for me, I guess, all these people lacking direction, stuck. Seeing Ex Models play at the Mermaid in New Orleans in 2002 and then again in 2003 was eye-opening. Just an unbelievably tight group, not a missed beat.
9. Funkadelic, "Maggot Brain"
The chances that Clinton was out of his head when he wrote and recorded the intro to this song are, I think, pretty much 100%—the story is acid—but "Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time/For y'all have knocked her up/I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe" makes enough sense to kind of work as a summary of "The Before Unapprehended," more or less, and I listened to this song so many times around the writing and revising of this book, I can't leave it off the list. Eddie Hazel's guitar is the focal point, but Clinton deserves credit for the crackle of delay that opens the song—an Echoplex feeding back on itself—and for his decision to mute just about every other instrument when mixing it.
10. Professor Longhair, "Big Chief"
"Babel" is the first time I set a story in New Orleans or southern Louisiana (where I'm from; also one of the settings for "Afterthought," which I wrote later, especially for this book) and wasn't completely disappointed by the result. When I think of the city, I hear this song; street musicians play this one especially around Mardi Gras, for obvious reasons, but Mardi Gras is like a third of the year in New Orleans, so that's not saying much. In the years I lived in the French Quarter, I must have heard this song hundreds of times. Not an especially noisy song—though, you know, noise is in the ear of the beholder, I guess—but it makes the list because, although Fess's version is built around his piano (and whistling), when you hear it on the street, there's no piano (and the whistling, when there is any, is inaudible when the horns are going). Those diverging paths for the song are mirrored in the diverging paths of "Babel," a story built on the many different possible stories that might have been, and they also resemble, at least in my mind, the negative image narratives in "Afterthought" (riffs on Ingrid Bachmann's Malina and Lucia Berlin's "Melina"). It's easy to get sick of songs you hear hundreds of times, but I don't get sick of this one. Homesick, maybe.
Gabriel Blackwell is the author of five books, the most recent of which is Babel (Splice, 2020). His fictions and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, Tin House, Post Road, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review Online, DIAGRAM, and many other places. He is the editor of The Rupture.
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