Personal Days

"The Golden Path"

2012-02-02T18:33:00.000-08:00

Chipchase and Maltravers

2011-09-16T12:52:00.001-07:00

At the National Book Critics Circle blog, the one and only Damion Searls not only said nice things about Personal Days, but mentioned it in the same breath as a book by one of my heroes, Anthony Powell. The question: What's your favorite comic novel? (Over to you, D.S.)

Can I name two? Anthony (Dance to the Music of Time) Powell's little-known third novel, Agents and Patients, is hilarious: rogue Freudian screenwriter-adventurers Chipchase and Maltravers try to take dim, well-intentioned, wealthy Blore-Smith of everything he's got. Somebody get this book back into print!
But only humor of your own moment can touch you to the core. The funniest book I've read from the past ten less-than-hilarious years--both deeply moving and literally-laugh-out-loud-in-public funny--is Ed Park's Personal Days, an office dystopia fizzing with formal and verbal energy.

Spinal column

2011-08-07T15:10:00.001-07:00

Both images from We Pitched a Tent at Night:

Panel this Thursday (6/16) in NYC; Post45 piece on PD

2011-06-14T19:48:00.000-07:00

How to get your book published: From Writing a Query Letter to Signing a Contract
Thursday, June 16, 2011, 7PM
Are you a recent MFA graduate trying to figure out how to turn your manuscript into a novel? Or a a journalist who dreams of publishing the next Maximum City? Or maybe you're writing short stories on the side and looking to craft a collection.
At whatever stage you may be, these prominent writers, esteemed editors, and ace agents will walk you through the process of getting your book published. From rising above the slush pile to choosing an agent, Juliet Grames (Senior Editor at Soho Press), Kirby Kim (William Morris Endeavor agent), Wendy Lee (author of Happy Family and editor at HarperCollins), Ed Park (author of Personal Days and editor of The Believer), Zohra Saed (editor at UpSet Press), and Monique Truong (author of The Book of Salt and Bitter in the Mouth) will share their insights, experience, and expertise. Jin Auh (The Wylie Agency) will moderate the panel discussion and Q&A session.

The Asian American Writers' Workshop is at 110-112 West 27th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues), 6th Floor, Buzzer 600

"The fact that the reader is not told the race of most of the characters in the novel, even after letting it slip that some are black or Asian, disrupts the assumption that, if one does not know the race of a character in a novel, then he or she is probably white...."

—from Min-Hyoung Song's "Race and Racelessness in Personal Days," at the Post45 website.

Sloane Crosley and Ed in conversation

2011-05-04T07:18:00.000-07:00

I'll be talking to Sloane Crosley tonight at 7 at McNally Jackson (52 Prince St.)—more info here! Sloane's second book, How Did You Get This Number, is just out in paperback.

April doings

2011-04-09T20:14:00.000-07:00

File under "!": The great Arthur Phillips on Personal Days, at the Barnes & Noble Review:

"Another debut. In one of those odd burps of culture, 2007-8 produced two novels about office politics and sociology written in the first person plural, Personal Days and And Then We Came to the End. Park's book is the less well-known, but very undeservedly. It is extremely funny, dead-on in its descriptions of slacker work ethics and corporate compromise. And, then, out of nowhere, it's somehow very moving, showing how youth's fragile idealism can shatter under the weight of bad decisions and economics."

I'll be reading this Tuesday (4/12) at the Believer edition of KGB's "True Story" night, with Deb Olin Unferth, author of the memoir Revolution. Doors at 7.

Chair + readings

2011-03-19T19:12:00.000-07:00

(Photo from Jessica)

On April 12, I'll be reading at KGB's "True Story" night with Deb Olin Unferth—she'll be reading from her wonderful new memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, while I'll be reading from...uh...I'll figure something out. (Maybe this?) More here.

On May 4, I'll be in conversation with...Sloane Crosley! We'll be yapping it up at McNally Jackson, on the occasion of the paperback release of her second essay collection, How Did You Get This Number.

Elevator pitch

2011-03-09T21:03:00.000-08:00

Number of people trapped in elevators, 2010
33,316

—Manhattan User's Guide

Annals of staplerdom

2011-02-22T07:26:00.000-08:00

• You know, we were about to deduct points for the fact that Stefano Tonchi’s assistant wouldn’t have her own stapler, but then we realized that in our offices, we are constantly looking for staplers.Plus 2. Seriously, only Grub Street Dan has one, and sometimes it’s difficult to find it even on his desk, as it is constantly covered in an avalanche of free booze and graft. It is good to be Grub Street Dan. Swag and a stapler.
—New York's Daily Intel

Pretend ductwork

2011-02-16T05:14:00.000-08:00

Around his plant-strewn work cubicle, low whirring air sounds emanated from speakers in the floor, meant to mimic the whoosh of conventional heating and air-conditioning systems, neither of which his 222,000-square-foot office building has, or needs, even here at 5,300 feet elevation. The generic white noise of pretend ductwork is purely for background and workplace psychology— managers found that workers needed something more than silence.
—"Soaking Up the Sun to Squeeze, NYT

"Living & Writing New York" — a reading at Fordham this Tuesday 2/8

2011-02-06T19:54:00.000-08:00

I'll be reading and participating in a panel on February 8 at 7:30 p.m. at Fordham (the Lincoln Center campus, in Manhattan). The topic is "Living & Writing New York." I'm not sure what I'll read!

The other writers are Arthur Phillips, Mary Elizabeth Williams, and Jim Dwyer.

Rather complex directions here. It's in the 12th floor lounge at 113 W. 60th St.

Open City #30 — reading and party

2010-12-14T05:03:00.001-08:00

The new issue of Open City has a story of mine—I'll be reading (with Alissa Quart) at the party around 8 tonight. It's at The Magician, 118 Rivington (Essex/Norfolk). $15 gets you open bar and a copy of the issue (which also features one of my favorite novelists of yore, Louis B. Jones)...

Reminder! SWEET: Actors Reading Writers (12/2)

2010-11-29T10:07:00.000-08:00

This Thursday (12/2) at 7:30 p.m. at Three of Cups (83 First Ave. @ 5th St.), come listen to actress Joya Mia Italiano reading from Personal Days!

Other performers will do dramatic readings of work by Sonya Chung, Jonathan Dixon, poet Maya Pindyck, and the one and only Amanda Filipacchi, whose Love Creeps is one of my favorite comic novels.

(Here's the Facebook page for Sweet: Actors Reading Writers. And here's the same information configured slightly differently on my glorious webpage.)

"Bound to Last"

2010-11-22T02:11:00.000-08:00

A piece I wrote on E. Gary Gygax's Dungeon Masters Guide (TSR) is in an interesting new anthology, Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book (Da Capo), edited by Sean Manning. The introduction is by Ray Bradbury, and contributors include Sarah Manguso (on Ripley's Believe It or Not!), Karen Joy Fowler, David Hajdu, Karen Green, Jim Knipfel (on Mason & Dixon), Anthony Swofford, J. Courtney Sullivan, Jim Shepard...

(Bonus! You can listen to me, editor Sean Manning, and contributor Sigrid Nuñez discuss the book on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show.)

Two new pieces

2010-11-22T02:00:00.000-08:00

I have two new pieces up/out:

1. For Bookforum, I look at the 16th (and 14th) edition of The Chicago Manual of Style.

2. For the Poetry Foundation, I meditate on Garrett Caples's pamphlet, "Quintessence of the Minor: Symbolist Poetry in English," and John Ashbery and James Schuyler's novel, A Nest of Ninnies.

Dramatic reading! 12/2

2010-11-22T01:56:00.000-08:00

On Thursday, December 2, Personal Days will be one of five books being interpreted—dramatically!—by SWEET Actors Reading Writers. The actress Joya Mia Italiano will read from the novel; also featured will be work by Sonya Chung, Jonathan Dixon, and Amanda Filipacchi—our greatest living "pure" comic novelist!

The event takes place at Three of Cups, 83 First Ave. at 5th St.

Reading tonight (10/27) — NYC/KGB

2010-10-27T06:25:00.001-07:00

I'll be reading tonight at 7 at KGB (85 E. 4th St.) with Bryan Charles—more info here.

Reading at KGB, 10/27

2010-10-19T09:46:00.000-07:00

On Weds., Oct. 27, at 7 p.m. I'll be reading with novelist/memoirist/Pavement scholar Bryan Charles at KGB—it's a reading for Open City. (A story of mine will be in the winter issue.) Bryan's memoir, There's a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From (a VTS, as the narrator of Joseph Weisberg's 10th Grade would say), is out now from Open City Books.

I'm excited! I don't know what I'm going to read from yet...

Beard award

2010-08-08T16:09:00.000-07:00

Chin Up!
I work the second shift in an office where cubicles are shared. The fellow who uses my cubicle in the first shift has a luxuriant beard. Every night, I come to work and find beard hairs all over the desk and keyboard. I find this incredibly disgusting. Is there a polite way of asking him to clean up after himself?

How about weaving those molted whiskers into a wreath that you can hang from your shared cubicle wall — with a bit of verse attached:

“Your beard is handsome
and deserves an award.
But on your face,
Not in my keyboard.
Don’t forget to tidy!”

And if you’re short on time, feel free to skip the wreath.

—NYT, Social Q's

6/30 Reading in Bryant Park!

2010-06-24T20:53:00.000-07:00

From Underwater New York:

Wednesday, June 30

12:30 – 1:45 pm

Bryant Park

An afternoon with Underwater New York

Featuring

Music for Underwater Things by Michael Hearst;

Readings of original underwater-y stories by

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Ed Park, Personal Days: A Novel

Nelly Reifler, See Through: Stories

Said Sayrafiezadeh, When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir

Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation;

And an underwater letter-writing activity from

Ben Greenman, What He’s Poised to Do: Stories

The world and the word

2010-06-02T08:21:00.000-07:00

A short plug here for Ed Park’s novel, Personal Days. The book is replete with inventive wordplay (unwanted backrub given by a character named Jack = jackrub; character called Graham with whiny British accent is renamed Grime). Plus, there’s a nice un-Eating Sideways moment. It’s when the narrator suggests that there should be a French expression, along the lines of l’esprit d’escalier, for the sensation of being initially amused but later unnerved by something that’s said to you. —PRI's The World (podcast on language)

"Work Friend Accidentally Becomes Real Friend"

2010-06-01T19:54:00.000-07:00

Phipps, 31, told reporters that the interactions with his coworker, which for two years had been confined to job-related matters and breezy small talk, first took an unplanned turn toward authentic friendship this past March. According to Phipps, he and Jenkins happened to leave the office at the same time one day and decided to kill half an hour at a nearby bar before heading off to separate evening engagements. —The Onion

Let's do "lunch"

2010-05-31T19:50:00.000-07:00

Coworkers, in phone calls, always sound like they're plotting bank robberies.
—TWSL

Keep holding

2010-05-20T09:26:00.001-07:00

Your call is important to us.

That is why, although we are not now answering,

we will, as soon as possible, answer,

provided you keep holding.

If you do not keep holding,

we assue you

we will not answer

—from Philip Dacey's "Recorded Message" (in The Deathbed Playboy)

How bad do you want it?

2010-05-06T22:44:00.000-07:00

Dandy Warhols, "All the Money, or the Simple Life"

The Brown Corpus

2010-05-05T12:38:00.001-07:00

Speech recognizers make educated guesses at what is being said. They play the odds. For example, the phrase “serve as the inspiration,” is ten times more likely than “serve as the installation,” which sounds similar. Such statistical models become more precise given more data. Helpfully, the digital word supply leapt from essentially zero to about a million words in the 1980s when a body of literary text called the Brown Corpus became available. Millions turned to billions as the Internet grew in the 1990s. Inevitably, Google published a trillion-word corpus in 2006. Speech recognition accuracy, borne aloft by exponential trends in text and transistors, rose skyward. But it couldn’t reach human heights. —Robert Fortner, "Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition"

(Via Jenny D)

Use your illusion

2010-04-26T23:59:00.000-07:00

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.” —NYT

Look like the lunatic

2010-04-01T05:38:00.000-07:00

To cultivate a ruinous grimace for the upcoming office softball season, ditch the stickers AND the grease stick. The answer is original eye black, homemade with just a cork and a flame. Here's how:

Burning a cork's end until it's blackened and moist will produce a convenient and disposable char applicator. Just smear two fat streaks under the eyes—preferably en dashes, not hyphens. Perfectly rounded edges be damned, eye black isn't supposed to be neat, and it isn't supposed to be pretty. Your pores plugged with red wine-scented carcinogens, you'll look like the lunatic taking the intra-squad scrimmage way too seriously. But you'll also look like the guy least likely to abide a high and tight fastball (albeit delivered underhand most likely).

No doubt by the seventh inning stretch, sweat will have made a mess of your mug—probably something resembling a bridesmaid with a bad case of beer tears. Now, that's intimidation.

—Martin Mulkeen, GQ

"Take This Job and Write It"

2010-03-16T07:03:00.001-07:00

"Joblessness may be hovering around 10 percent, with some 29 million Americans out of work or searching for full-time employment, but there’s one group of people whose persistent alienation from regular employment has emerged as a particularly serious problem. I refer, of course, to novelists."

The New York Times Book Review's Jennifer Schuessler writes about Personal Days and other books about work.

The first film

2010-03-06T19:30:00.000-08:00

Whatever Reitman's original intentions, Up in the Air has become a movie about its own significance. The director, an avid believer in his own press, has suggested that it is nothing less than "the portrait of 2009." I honestly don't know what the film has to say about 2009—other than that it's kind of tough out there—and my guess is that Reitman's claim (which echoes the abundant critical praise for the movie's "eloquence" and "prescience") has something to do with the long history of evasion and denial in American cinema when it comes to matters of work and the workplace.

The first film in history was an 1895 short by the Lumière brothers with the self-explanatory title Workers Leaving the Factory. In the years since, as if in deference to their function as a leisure activity, movies have been largely blind to the daily rituals of work and the meaning it has in our lives (unless the characters are, say, detectives or assassins). Documentaries are the exception, as are sporadic outliers like Mike Judge. There is a kind of bracing novelty when a big movie with a glamorous star so much as glances in the direction of the real working world, where people toil, lose jobs, and struggle for survival (and have done so since long before 2009).

—Dennis Lim on Up in the Air, Slate

The Unkindness of Crow

2010-02-28T19:59:00.001-08:00

"Crow is the fallen angel, old man death, Christ, Ulysses," Eagle Twin guitarist Gentry Densley says. "The universality of myth is something that figures strong in Eagle Twin."

—Pittsburgh City Paper

(Via James)

Tonight! (Saturday 2/20)

2010-02-20T05:33:00.000-08:00

Tonight at 8! Reading with Lynne Tillman, plus film & music, for "Impossible Geometries"—at 177 Livingston in the heart of Brooklyn.

More info here...and here...

Look alive

2010-02-18T13:10:00.001-08:00

Quick heads’ up letting you know that Eve Ensler is going to be coming through the office this afternoon, so Jared if you could deconstruct your little cup-fortress, and Bethany maybe put away the vintage Walkman for an hour, that would be great.
—Good Jobbb

Bashfully

2010-02-16T12:56:00.000-08:00

Time Out on this Saturday's (2/20) event in Brooklyn:

The multidisciplinary benefit party Impossible Geometries, for the online journal Triple Canopy and the art-film space Light Industries, kicks off with readings by Ed Park and Lynne Tillman, follows with films and music, and promises to be the literary bash of the week.

"Staff cuts have socked up the overage"

2010-02-14T19:41:00.000-08:00

Two February readings

2010-02-07T16:45:00.000-08:00

On February 20, at 177 Livingston in Brooklyn—a benefit for Light Industry, Triple Canopy, and the Public School:

Then on Wednesday, February 24, I'll be appearing at Housing Works with Hari Kunzru and Mary Gaitskill for a Bookforum event:

Why not come to both?™

Up and down

2010-02-06T12:17:00.000-08:00

At work I climbed from office boy to field officer to regional sales manager to CFO, and then back down again. —Luc Sante, "Flannel Ball" (at Significant Objects)

The sting

2010-02-03T12:56:00.000-08:00

From the stinging embarrassment of the company softball team’s record-setting losses to the odd, enchanting power of a Post-it, Park repeatedly finds ways to turn the minutiae of office work into exciting, inviting prose.
—Lee Ellis, The New Yorker

(from Levi)

Lunch hour lit

2010-01-26T18:48:00.001-08:00

At the Guardian, Toby Lichtig says Personal Days is not a book to read at work.

But in an actual, well-earned break from work, who's got the mental strength to curl up next to the fax machine and photocopier and be transported to a different world?

"Cc'd to Andy"

2010-01-14T08:37:00.000-08:00

Add to the list of answering machine songs: Mink Lungs, live on WFMU.

(Via Good Jobbbbbb)

Spirit/soul

2010-01-13T20:30:00.000-08:00

Ryan from The Office's photo blog: "My pictures serve as a mirror, not only reflecting the truth in existence, but also providing the viewer a glimpse back through my lens, past the viewfinder, and straight into my spirit/soul."

"Agile space"

2010-01-12T05:11:00.000-08:00

Cutting cubicles is part of this ongoing effort. The company has divided its workforce into three categories. A “resident” works at one location most of the time. A “mobile” works in a variety of locations: home, the airport, at company locations, or with customers. An “off-site” worker is at a fixed non-company site such as home or at the office of a business partner.... —Susan E. Reed, GlobalPost

(via NYT)

From Jen

Photo: Taipei (Nicky Loh/Reuters)

Slow news day

2010-01-11T21:52:00.000-08:00

Cool slanted image (from Sifter X).

Jim the Vampire

2010-01-06T05:29:00.000-08:00

"Memos from the future"...and some more of the top Office pranks.

Time after time

2010-01-03T20:21:00.000-08:00

Malty's Post-It Note Confessions

Top of the pops

2010-01-02T20:29:00.001-08:00

In The Atlantic, James Parker looks back on the decade's Top Pop Culture Moments—you know, Radiohead, Grand Theft Auto, Jackass the Movie, and:

2008: Personal Days by Ed Park. The debut novel from the editor of The Believer captured the precise moment in U.S. office culture before everybody got fired. Cleverer than Office Space, shorter than Then We Came To The End, this excellent little book sits gloating atop the ash-heap of corporate history.

1-1-1-1-1

2010-01-02T20:09:00.000-08:00

I once had a laptop at my old job. It was heavy. Only the 1 key worked. I sat at a meeting with only that key working and managed to get to Blogger and read through the blogs of the day to keep myself entertained. Moral of the story: you don't need a working keyboard to use a laptop. —Livin' the Dream

First-person corporate

2009-12-05T10:50:00.001-08:00

"With Jonah’s e-mail to Pru Park manages nothing less than the articulation of a peculiar narrative point of view — first-person corporate — which, incidentally, he marshals throughout the whole of Personal Days to astonishing effect, giving new impetus and texture to Dilbertian anomie. One detects in Jonah’s remarks resonances with Tret’iakov’s biography of the object. But, whereas Tret’iakov wishes to point a way toward overcoming workers’ alienation, Park simply characterizes such alienation in terms consistent with the nature of work in the early 21st century. If Tret’iakov imagines a novel without a hero, Park imagines one without a reader." —Anton Steinpilz, "Building the Mystery: Social Media as Collective Epic," at Generation Bubble

Into the mystic

2009-12-04T18:44:00.000-08:00

I talk to the Columbia Spectator about Personal Days, and opine: “Language is never static.”

Shut the door. Have a seat.

2009-11-21T14:00:00.000-08:00

(From Jessica)

Park-Lim-Hsu in Brooklyn

2009-11-13T20:45:00.000-08:00

I'll be appearing today at Page-Turner: The Asian American Literary Festival, at 2 p.m., on a panel with my friends Hua Hsu and Dennis Lim. (It's at Powerhouse in DUMBO.) Lots of other great-sounding speakers, readers, panels—check 'em out!

Here's a bit from an interview I did for Beatrice:

We all know that writers can be exceptionally good at procrastinating when they should be writing. What do you typically do to procrastinate?
This week I spent far too long watching YouTube clips of old Sandra Bernhard appearances on Letterman. I just couldn’t get enough.

Ka-ching!

2009-11-11T18:23:00.001-08:00

Sixty...sixty-five...seventy...eighty...eighty-five!

November appearances!

2009-11-05T06:43:00.000-08:00

I. Thurs., November 12, 7:30 p.m. (TIME CORRECTED!): Reading with Sung J. Woo for Dirty Laundry, at the Avenue A Laundromat (97 Avenue A).

II. Sat., November 14, 2 p.m.: Panel ("Everyone's a Critic!") with fellow critics Hua Hsu and Dennis Lim, for Page Turner: The Asian American Literary Festival. Ground floor, PowerHouse Arena, 37 Main St., DUMBO, Brklyn.

Personal Days — Autumn 2009

2009-10-23T18:42:00.001-07:00

Hudson Valleyites! This Sunday, 10/25, at 4:30: I'm at the Hudson Valley Writers' Center in Sleepy Hollow, NY, reading with Christine Lehner.

* * *

And on November 14, I'll be appearing with my good friends Hua Hsu and Dennis Lim to talk about criticism at the Asian American Literary Festival. It's at 2 p.m. at the PowerHouse Arena in Brooklyn.

Unstoppable

2009-10-20T06:24:00.000-07:00

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write this book [The Interrogative Mood]?
Padgett Powell: Let us say I received workplace emails exclusively in the interrogative, like this: "Is it time for our esteemed Director [I was the Director] to have a chat with the Provost about our autonomy? Are we remembering what was promised us last spring by the Dean? Will we be content, again, to let History repeat itself?" and let us say I started wanting to have some ready answers: How do you stand in relation to the potato? Do you love the velvet ant as much as I?

And could not stop, for 140 pages.

—CBS

(Via TEV)

Reading at the Hudson Valley Writers' Center, 10/25

2009-10-17T19:00:00.000-07:00

Hudson Valleyites!

I'll be reading with Christine Lehner (Absent a Miracle) at the Hudson Valley Writers' Center in Tarrytown on Sunday, October 25, at 4:30 p.m. (It's actually in the Philipse Manor Railroad Station...)

Is this it?

2009-10-09T08:10:00.000-07:00

The Post-It note confessions of Malty

Reading this Thursday, October 8 at KGB

2009-10-06T08:37:00.001-07:00

I'll be reading with two of my favorites, Lev Grossman (The Magicians) and Rivka Galchen (Atmospheric Disturbances), this Thursday at KGB, which is on 85 East 4th St. Doors open at 7.

It's a benefit for "Behind the Book," which promotes reading for schoolchildren and adults.

See you there?!

Pushing the envelope

2009-10-04T16:48:00.000-07:00

"This small, sixteen-page pamphlet is produced to put inside the postage-paid, business-reply envelopes that come with junk mail offers. Every envelope collected is stuffed with the pamphlet and mailed back to its original company."

(From Fred)

$28.46

2009-10-02T06:02:00.000-07:00

Inspired Amazon offer:

Should Thursday be the new Friday? (A: Yes)

2009-10-01T13:46:00.001-07:00

Some work-related links, at Bookforum's blog. (Current Bookforum is devoted to work.)

Richard Russo on Morning Edition

2009-09-29T05:57:00.001-07:00

Richard Russo, author of That Old Cape Magic, was on NPR's Morning Edition today, talking about his favorite office lit, from Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" to...Personal Days!

Listen here. (Whole show is here.)

Weds. 9/30 at Columbia....

2009-09-28T19:28:00.000-07:00

Getting Personal with Ed Park
Wednesday, September 30, 8PM
203 Mathematics Hall

Columbia Professor and acclaimed novelist and critic Ed Park will give a reading from his novel Personal Days, followed by an open Q&A. Personal Days, one of Time’s top ten fiction books of 2008, was a finalist for the PEN Hemingway Award and the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. Park is a founding editor of The Believer magazine, former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement and a contributor to the New York Times and LA Times, among many other publications. The Columbia Review and 114 Rue de Fleurus, the writers’ house of Columbia University, are co-sponsoring the event. Attendance is open and no RSVP is required.

Fall readings

2009-09-24T09:30:00.000-07:00

I'll be reading a few times this fall — so far:

October 8 — NYC — "Behind the Book" benefit at KGB — with Lev Grossman (The Magicians) and Rivka Galchen (Atmospheric Disturbances) (This is, I believe, the third EP/RG reading).

October 25 — Sleepy Hollow (!!) — I'll be reading with Christine Lehner (Absent a Miracle) at the Hudson Valley Writers' Center.

November 12 — NYC — I team up again with Sung J. Woo (Everything Asian), this time at the Dirty Laundry reading series.

Quasi semi

2009-08-25T19:28:00.000-07:00

If [Shop Class as Soulcraft author Matthew B.] Crawford is correct about the decline of America's information economy, we should brace ourselves for a series of mournful, indignant books that eulogize the modern office—a highly networked, quasi-social, semi-autonomous refuge, where turn-of-the-century workers spent their pleasant days solving problems, exploring the limits of cöoperation, and wasting valuable company time on the Internet. —Kelefa Sanneh, "Out of the Office," The New Yorker

For a eulogy for the pre-Internet office, go here.

Remember the pre-Internet office?

2009-08-20T06:44:00.001-07:00

Here's an extract from a little EP memoir, up at the L Magazine as part of its "Office Issue":

We used an editing system called Atex, amber letters glowing on dusty screens so old the black fields had burned to brown. A story editor would put an article in the copy queue and one of us would call it up, make corrections, and place our initials in the space at the top. When I first started, I would keep checking the queue and pounce on any new piece. Then I learned to sit back like the veterans in the department and at least finish the chapter I was reading.

What fuchsia means

2009-08-18T19:30:00.000-07:00

"She doesn’t really understand the use of ellipsis so a lot… of her…..emails…look like this…"
—Malty

XOXO

2009-08-13T14:12:00.000-07:00

For Daniel Morrison, CEO of the D.C.-based international relief nonprofit 1Well, the wrong sign-off posed an impediment to deeper romance. "I sent an e-mail to a girlfriend, and she was very put off by me signing off with 'Regards,' saying that I sounded very 'emotionally detached,' " Morrison says via e-mail. "We did break up shortly thereafter, so maybe she was right."—Washington Post

(From Jenny)

Richard Russo on PD

2009-08-12T15:41:00.000-07:00

BNR: You wrote the introduction to the Collected Stories of Richard Yates, and you once said, "(H)is work is so honest and his vision is so clear, so clear-eyed, that when I'm reading a Richard Yates story, I'll go back to work on something of my own at the desk and I'm suddenly a different person. I see the world differently, and the story that comes out of me is not going be influenced in that sense by Yates, but while I'm there with him, his vision for that period of time is my vision, and it's that way with most really good writers." In the same interview, you also mentioned Alice Munro. Beyond Yates and Munro, what other writers have this effect on you? Are any of them young, up-and-coming writers?

RR: There are several young writers whose vision is so precise and spot-on that I'd follow them anywhere. Joshua Ferris and Ed Park have staked out similar territory (cubical culture) in Then We Came to the End and Personal Days. Doug Dorst's Alive in Necropolis and Hannah Tinti's The Good Thief also took my breath away. And I cannot recommend strongly enough the work of Jess Walter, whose eye and wit are unparalleled. If you want to understand post 9/11 America, he's your guy.

Cutting costs

2009-08-08T21:29:00.001-07:00

The company was owned by old showbiz people. They ran the place like the family they were, and we responded like family. We had each other’s backs. Our loyalty was fanatical. Once, I worked 60 days in a row, got a day off, and worked 30 more straight. My wife was pregnant at the time, but we thought it was worth it. I was building something that would carry us to retirement, with a pension and a body of work behind me that we could be proud of. I got promoted, early and often. The family trusted me, and I trusted them right back. For 13 more years, I was happy as a clam.

Then the management changed.

We were always profitable, but the new guys wanted more. They got it by cutting costs to the bone. I was a cost. I got cut.

—"My Good Life After Being Fired," Lee Child (author of the Jack Reacher novels)

Edward Hall, RIP

2009-08-05T14:10:00.000-07:00

Space as a form of communication, a field he dubbed proxemics, embraced phenomena like territoriality among office workers and the cultural meanings of architecture. The use of time as a form of communication can be seen, he argued, in the executive or the movie star who keeps a client waiting for a precisely calibrated number of minutes. His ideas were synthesized in “Beyond Culture” (1976). —NYT

'Retropromozione'

2009-07-31T03:00:00.000-07:00

From an Italian blog, squeezed through Google Translate:

'Geniale la figura di Maxine, prosperosa "capa" che alterna comunicati minatori a mail piene di gattini svenevoli, che puntualmente fanno impallare tutti i PC. Geniale the figure of Maxine, prosperous "capacity" which alternates miners reported a mail svenevoli full of kittens, which are punctually impallare all PCs.'

Kveta Pacovska

2009-07-29T21:02:00.000-07:00

From "Fairy Tales for Work Days and Personal Days":

(From A Journey Round My Skull)

"Time for Vader to be Vader"

2009-07-15T07:36:00.000-07:00

The grass is always greener

2009-07-13T19:38:00.000-07:00

When McKenzie Ray plays make-believe, she dreams up a world that is as far from her everyday life as she can make it: she pretends that she works in an office.

“We write letters, put things in envelopes and send them out,” said McKenzie, 11, who with her 10-year-old sister, Maci, has a real life that is the stuff of fantasy for most children. For more than half the year, the sisters travel the West on the rodeo circuit. Their father, Lee, better known as Boogie Ray, makes a living roping steers. —NYT

"The ones that never come"

2009-07-12T18:41:00.000-07:00

Electric company

2009-07-07T09:23:00.000-07:00

I once worked a cubicle job. One day I picked up a copy of Dylan Thomas’ Adventures in the Skin Trade on my lunch break, and read as I ate. The stories reflected truth in life which was stifled in mine. Afterward, I found it impossible to return to work. —Electric Literature FAQ

Tonight — July 1 — Korea Society Panel (repost)

2009-07-01T07:14:00.000-07:00

Tonight (Wednesday, July 1) I'll be appearing on a panel at The Korea Society in New York, along with novelists Janice Y.K. Lee (The Piano Teacher) and Sung J. Woo (Everything Asian). There's a reception at 6; the panel, followed by Q&A, starts at 6:30.

The topic? "New Currents in Korean American Literature: The Origin and the Distance."

The official info:

A growing number of Korean American authors have found both critical and commercial success in the past decade. Does this "literary wave" mean that Americans of Korean origin have successfully moved from the margins to the mainstream of American literature, writing simply as a "writers" and not as "ethnic writers?" Join us for a literary conversation with novelists Ed Park, Janice Y.K. Lee, and Sung J. Woo, as they discuss issues of acculturation, isolation, cultural alienation, race and class, in relation to their own works.

$10 for members and students, $20 for nonmembers
(Walk-in registration will incur an additional charge of $5.)
Buy tickets
For more information or to register for the program, contact Patrick Clair at 212-759-7525, ext. 328, or email .

About the Authors

Ed Park is a founding editor of The Believer, a four-time finalist for the National Magazine Award. His novel, Personal Days (Random House, 2008), was a finalist for the PEN Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. He writes a monthly book-review column for the Los Angeles Times and contributes to many other publications, including the New York Times, Bookforum, and Modern Painters. He was an editor and writer at The Village Voice for many years, where he was also the editor of the Voice Literary Supplement. Park teaches creative writing at Columbia University.

Janice Y. K. Lee was born and raised in Hong Kong, where she currently lives, and went to boarding school in the United States before attending Harvard College. A graduate of Hunter College's MFA program and a freelance writer, she is a former features editor at Elle and Mirabella magazines in New York. Her critically acclaimed first novel, The Piano Teacher, a New York Times bestseller and Richard and Judy Summer Read pick. The book will be published in 23 languages.

Sung J. Woo’s short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and KoreAm Journal. His debut novel, Everything Asian (Thomas Dunne Books, 2009) has received praises from the Christian Science Monitor, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews. His short story “Limits” was an Editor’s Choice winner in Carve Magazine’s 2008 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. A graduate of Cornell University with an MFA from New York University, he lives in Washington, New Jersey.

The Korea Society
950 Third Avenue @ 57th Street, 8th Floor
(Building entrance on SW corner of
Third Avenue and 57th Street)

Chuckling nervously

2009-06-27T19:20:00.000-07:00

"I just thought it was weird, just because you and I have been working so many hours together on this Hendricks account, and now you're popping up in my dreams," said Pagano, chuckling nervously and taking a single step back. "Ha, no, totally G-rated."
—"Dream About You Not Sexual, Coworker Reports," The Onion

Disinformation

2009-06-23T18:42:00.000-07:00

Few companies, indeed, are more secretive than Apple, or as punitive to those who dare violate the company’s rules on keeping tight control over information. Employees have been fired for leaking news tidbits to outsiders, and the company has been known to spread disinformation about product plans to its own workers.

“They make everyone super, super paranoid about security,” said Mark Hamblin, who worked on the touch-screen technology for the iPhone and left Apple last year. “I have never seen anything else like it at another company..."

Secrecy at Apple is not just the prevailing communications strategy; it is baked into the corporate culture. Employees working on top-secret projects must pass through a maze of security doors, swiping their badges again and again and finally entering a numeric code to reach their offices, according to one former employee who worked in such areas. Work spaces are typically monitored by security cameras, this employee said. Some Apple workers in the most critical product-testing rooms must cover up devices with black cloaks when they are working on them, and turn on a red warning light when devices are unmasked so that everyone knows to be extra-careful, he said.

—“Apple's Management Obsessed With Secrecy,” NYT

Korea Society panel, 7/1

2009-06-18T11:24:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, July 1, I'll be appearing on a panel at The Korea Society in New York, along with novelists Janice Y.K. Lee (The Piano Teacher) and Sung J. Woo (Everything Asian). There's a reception at 6; the panel, followed by Q&A, starts at 6:30.

The topic? "New Currents in Korean American Literature: The Origin and the Distance."

The official info:

It looks like a game of Missile Command

2009-06-18T06:17:00.000-07:00

The Geography of Jobs

(via the Rumpus)

Extra-strength anvil

2009-06-16T08:37:00.000-07:00

"I was at IBM for five years; I don't know how much work I did," Foxworthy said.
The comedian, who said he used to make prank phone calls to his boss at work to lure him back and forth from his desk, had this tongue-in-cheek advice for people about how far to take things on the job:
"You don't really want to get fired; you want to have a job. But you don't want to do it well, because you're going to be promoted, and that's a lot of pressure. Who can have any fun with that kind of anvil hanging over your head?"
—CNN.com

The lost Ark

2009-06-16T07:21:00.001-07:00

"This reminded me of a slightly darker Douglas Coupland."

Post-it, Pixel, Pong

2009-06-12T11:37:00.000-07:00

(From Alex)

Straight man

2009-06-10T20:15:00.000-07:00

"I almost wet my pants reading that. It was so funny." —Richard Russo on Personal Days, at BEA

Life is sharp

2009-06-07T04:15:00.000-07:00

"Here's a novel for anyone who feels alienated at work (ie most of us)....Park's eye for the minutiae of office life is sharp: self-Googling, computers that won't correctly format CVs that shouldn't be being written; sexual tensions; smokers who stub out their fags when the boss comes to join them; the Good Starbucks and the Bad Starbucks. That self-conscious, ironic obsession with the trivial that smart metropolitan Americans do so well is much in evidence. (Wherever did the absurd myth that they don't do irony spring from?) This is as funny as Seinfeld." —The Independent

Restructuring

2009-06-05T14:39:00.001-07:00

The infinity building, 2009 version:

(Julieta Cervantes for NYT)

Find yourself

2009-06-02T20:07:00.000-07:00

—from Malty

What do you do?

2009-06-01T11:54:00.000-07:00

Alain de Botton:

Beyond the page, work remains at the center of our identities. It is hard to have a conversation with a stranger for more than a few minutes before needing to ask, "What do you do?"—for herein lie clues not only to monetary status, but more broadly to one's entire outlook and character. The literary silence is puzzling and regrettable, for it denies us the chance collectively to honor the excitement of work as well as to reconcile ourselves (through laughter and tragedy) to its inequities. —The Boston Globe

We got your "ambitious new literature of the office right here," bub!

(Via The Elegant Variation)

Star fee

2009-05-29T09:52:00.000-07:00

What all the cups look like at the Very, Very Bad Starbucks.

(Again from Malty)

D'oh!

2009-05-28T11:31:00.000-07:00

"Witty and engaging, this novel is to corporate America what The Simpsons is to the American family."

From the Ramsey County (MN) Library's list of the "Best Books of 2008."

The very bad Starbucks?

2009-05-28T06:01:00.001-07:00

“This is the real deal?” she said. “I’m explaining it like it was a movie,” she said as she grabbed the girl’s hand and hurried away. —NYT

Hey, Sisyphus

2009-05-27T06:14:00.000-07:00

New Yorker comic for the virtual corkboard.

(From Joe)

Rage against the macheese

2009-05-26T07:39:00.000-07:00

"[Burn This Book is] a slim volume, one that can be read in an afternoon, but don't let this fool you into thinking it lacks power. Morrison's—and the book's—central thesis is true, if not necessarily original: 'A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.'

"It's the book's writing quality, itself, that speaks the loudest. Given our Internet world of lazy thinkers, it's almost a shock—certainly, an awesome delight—to read writers of such caliber take on threats to reading's very existence....So Pamuk, also a Nobel Prize winner and Turkish free-speech advocate, chronicles in "Freedom to Write" how shepherding Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter inside Turkey's post-coup 1980s crackdown years helped to infuse his writing with a sense of political angst. Novelist Ed Park, a Web columnist for The Times' book section, rages at book censorship in an odd, futuristic Q & A about Robert Cormier's "I Am the Cheese" (1977), banned in the late 1980s by the school superintendent in Bay County, Fla.

—L.A. Times

Getting through the day

2009-05-21T21:35:00.000-07:00

"I feel like I’m in Ed Park’s novel, ‘Personal Days’. Everyone is fearing for their jobs, gossiping who is next....The thing is, as much as I complain about my job, without it I’m pretty much lost. Plus my love/hate relationship with my coworkers is what gets me through the day..."
—Malty

Visualizing Personal Days with...

2009-05-19T13:47:00.000-07:00

Visible Tweets

RTST means...

2009-05-17T21:59:00.000-07:00

"Routines to Savor Time," from Love Your Layoff

Tall cotton

2009-05-12T10:42:00.000-07:00

Burn This Book is a Buffalo News Editor's Pick. Jeff Simon calls it "a superb, wildly disparate collection of writers being brilliant about the beleaguering of their own profession—everyone from John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Russell Banks, Paul Auster and Nadine Gordimer to Pico Iyer, Francine Prose and former Buffalonian Ed Park (walking in tall cotton)..."

Shyness can stop you...from recommending PERSONAL DAYS!

2009-05-12T10:29:00.001-07:00

Ask about any good books: I love knowledge workers who ask me to recommend any good business books. Shy people can definitely benefit from this since this will give you insight into the type of manager your boss is just by the type of business books they recommend. Asking about recommended reading also demonstrates that you’re committed to self-learning and mastering your skills.

—"5 Tips to Overcome Shyness at Work"