“Colonel Tom” keeps getting rejected. I think it is too dark, even though everyone who has read it says they like it. That is, except for editors of magazines to which I have submitted the story.
My friend Joel C has called my writing Indiana noir. I do not think that most Hoosiers will appreciate that designation, but I do not know happy stories from around here.
Anyway, I read Nathan Knapp’s No Consolation: On Gabriel Blackwell thinking this might point me to a place to send “Colonel Tom.” This did not happen. What I learned was of a writer whose interests touch on mine, probably go even darker, insofar as I think there are things seriously wrong in this country. The whole of the review I suggest as needing to read, but what follows should explain my thinking.
“The reasons the woman had threatened the parents of the murdered child were now, she admitted, more or less incomprehensible to her,” opens one story. “These were not her exact words. I don’t know what I was thinking, Your Honor.” Immediately, the narrative shifts from a direct account of the woman’s defense to a description of the trial as covered by the press, reporting that the media “chose to run a photo in which [the defendant] was sitting in a wheelchair (she was not wheelchair-bound), wearing a nurse’s scrubs (she was not a nurse), and in which, because of a poor coloring choice and the angle from which the photo had been taken, she looked bald.” A moment later, the woman confesses to the judge that she did, in fact, tell the father of the murdered boy, that she hoped he “would see his son real soon,” and that the shooting, in her opinion, was a “hoax perpetrated, so her posts implied, by CERTAIN ELEMENTS,” in order to “impinge on the GOD-GIVEN RIGHTS OF TRUE PATRIOTS.”
Repeatedly, while reading Correction, I had occasion to recall a certain white man I saw while covering the 2020 Trump rally in Tulsa—an event whose location and date had been deliberately chosen to coincide with both with Juneteenth and the ninety-ninth anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. The man, who wore a Trump campaign T-shirt and, super-hero style, as a cape, a Trump flag, repeatedly hollered the phrase “ONE MORE MASSACRE” over the heads of Black Lives Matter protestors. Later that same afternoon I heard him say he wasn’t a racist.
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Suffocation, in a way, is the only thing that makes sense in the novel. Increasing airlessness, or so Blackwell seems to be saying, is the true condition of life in our country in this century. Not just airlessness but an airtightness, the sense of all life having already taken place elsewhere, on the other side of a glass barrier. Reading both Doom Town and Correction, I couldn’t help thinking of these lines by the Italian writer Guido Ceronetti: “Everything has become bank, museum, archive; everything that we call life is already in glass cases. Who are the visitors and customers? The formerly living.” The protagonist of Doom Town exists in just such a state. This dynamic seems to reach into Blackwell’s collection Babel as well, where one story’s protagonist—who shares many of the same characteristics as the narrator of Doom Town—wakes up to find he has been trapped inside a room with floor-to-ceiling mirrors. If life—the life of everyone and everything else—is happening on the other side of the glass, the only life for the Blackwellian individual seems to take place inside the increasingly airless and cramped space of the head, where each thought circles itself into nothingness.
No, I do go as far as Gabriel Blackwell. I would fear reviving my depression. However, I wish I could when all I can do is record the emptiness, the futility of what I see around me. I do water down the despair with the idea that those can create have the knowledge they stood up for life, regardless of the final outcome.
sch 2/10
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