On Errands of Life

There are at least two types of readers, those who stay with a book until it’s finished, or abandoned, and those that jump among two or more at once. I used to be firmly in the camp of the former, but as I’ve grown older and hold myself to less stringent standards, I’m more the one that reads in alternation. I found myself reading two novels, both in their way about foreign writers who are lost in America, a Frenchwoman in Nathalie Léger's Suite for Barbara Loden and an Argentinean in Ricardo Piglia's The Way Out, when they somehow converged in successive readings, quoting the exact same passage about the Dead Letter Office in Melville's “Bartleby,” which as it happened I'd re-read just recently. There was a moment in my confusion that spun into a kind of bottomless spiral where all three texts became one and the same, and it was only in my flimsy hold on this reality, that is, the one where I was the reader, that I thought of them of them as distinct.

Continuing with the Piglia, I then stumbled across a passing reference to the Nicholas Ray film Johnny Guitar, starring Joan Crawford, recommended to me by a good literary friend of mine, which as it turned out I’d just watched the day before, and it was as if the book itself were stalking me, like those ads that target your online behavior, and actually rewriting itself in order to complement whatever I happened to be doing or showing a predilection for at the time. This is an idea that seems right out of the paranoid world of Piglia’s books and also a model for some kind of not too far-off future literature, just as we are about to reenter this world, after this long pause, and are all more than ready to overload it with our competing private realities we have each been working on in seclusion and isolation.