"Made during company time"

Be honest, but...

Gawker offers "five elements of today's memos that illustrate everything you corporate flacks need to know about firing people like us."

Against the night

Franz Kafka wrote as insurance against suffering the fates of his characters. It was as if every hour he spent writing, by candlelight and, later, by electric light, was an installment paid against darkness. He knew that with a stroke of the pen he could conceivably, at any time, have restored to Joseph K. his easy life before The Trial, and obtained for land surveyor K. a better position with a gentler Castle. But this is what makes Kafka the great writer of what has been called Modernity: That he stayed true to his fictions, and retained their tragedy.

This week, Joshua Cohen writes about Kafka's office writings at Nextbook. (Five installments.)

(Correction made: Nextbook, not The Forward!)

Lightning strikes

Fictitious office memos!

(Via VSL)

Brrrr!

The Independent (UK) names Personal Days one of the "50 best winter reads"!

Smartly of-the-moment, this is office life at its best and worst: the "instant folklore" of the internet age ("when you feel a tingling in your fingers it means that someone?s Googling you"); the modernist poetry of an email inbox; the weird of experience of being a boss: "Every night, the chances are that at least one of [your staff] dreams of you."

Everything is illuminated

From Moonlight Ambulette:

So now that I remembered how to read I've been picking up all the many half-read books littering my apartment, and have happily re-delved into Personal Days, Ed Park's very funny novel about a group of people who work in an office at a time of economic upheaval and rampant layoffs. It just goes to show you what a difference it makes to be reading the right book at the right time -- even just a few weeks ago I'm sure the employees' skittishness about layoffs wouldn't have struck so chillingly close to home, but now layoffs (and rumored magazine shut-downs) are sort of the theme of the day at the media company where I work.

And then the most amazing thing happened. One day I read this paragraph: "Week after week, you form these intense bonds without quite realizing it. All that time together adds up: muttering at the fax machine, making coffee runs. The elevator rides. The bitching about the speed of the elevator. The endlessly reprised joke, as it hits every floor: Making local stops." Funny, I thought, and so true about the unexpected bonds. But no one makes that elevator joke where I work, bub! I mean, no one really makes small talk or even looks each other in the elevators in my building.

And guess what happened the next day at work. Two security guards in the elevator, going up, with practically every floor's button illuminated. One turned to the other and before he even said it I knew what he was going to say. Making local stops.

This book must be magic!

Recession reading

To this list...

...add Personal Days!

The New Yorker writes:


This comic and creepy début novel takes place in a Manhattan office depopulated by "the Firings," where one can "wander vast tracts of lunar workscape before seeing a window." The downsized staff huddle like the crew of a doomed spaceship, picked off one by one by an invisible predator. Crippled by computer crashes (one worker suggests that the machines are "trying to tell us about the limits of the human"), the survivors eddy in a spiritual inertia; when one of them is banished to "Siberia"—a lone desk on another floor—no one can muster the energy even to reply to her increasingly anguished e-mails, until, one day, she is simply no longer there. Park transforms the banal into the eerie, rendering ominous the familiar request "Does anyone want anything from the outside world?"

The PD blog reminds you, it's...

—An affordable $13.—


after you read the book, send the two names that are anagrams of each other to

info@ed-park.com

and get a
free whimsical jpeg!