Book without a reader

From Anton Steinpilz's "First-Person Corporate," in The New Inquiry:

It might be, however, that Tretyakov’s biography of the object was an idea whose time had not yet come and may now only be just arriving. Specifically needed was development in the direction of what has come to be termed “post-Fordist” relations of production, in which value inheres no longer in goods primarily but in information and services. Within such relations, labor becomes immaterial, and Tretyakov’s conveyor belt doesn’t so much disappear as attenuate and ramify, becoming more a mediating trope than a real mechanism. In the novel Personal Days (2008), author Ed Park offers a spirited send-up of postmillennial, post-Fordist office drudgery. The final section consists of an enormous e-mail composed on a laptop by a character named Jonah while he is trapped in an elevator. The correspondence, addressed to a former colleague of Jonah’s named Pru, ends with this arresting observation:

You said yourself, once, waiting for stuff by the asthmatic printer, that the office generates at least one book, no, one novel every day, in the form of correspondence and memos and reports, all the reams of numbers, hundreds of sentences, thousands of words, but no one has the mind to understand it, no one has the eyes to take it all in, all these potential epics, War and Peace lying in between the lines [...]

Here Park manages to articulate a narrative point of view you might call first-person corporate — which, incidentally, he marshals throughout the whole of Personal Days to great effect, giving new impetus and texture to Dilbertian anomie. The resonances with Tretyakov’s biography of the object are obvious; but whereas Tretyakov points toward overcoming workers’ alienation, Park simply characterizes such alienation in terms consistent with 21st-century work life. Tretyakov imagines a novel without a hero. Park imagines one without a reader.

Heyyy—I'll take it!™

*

(One interesting note: toward the end, Steinpilz writes: "Social media simply consolidate and lend greater force to the anxiety felt by the characters of Personal Days. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter are the treadmills that fuel this anxiety." One thing that pins PD to a certain point in time is the fact that FB and Twitter aren't mentioned—I wasn't on either network while writing the book. I'll update it in the next version.)

Starry eyes

Mildly bummed by this one-star reception of Personal Days on Amazon ("I'd rather drive spikes into my forehead than read this again"—ouch!), I was thrilled today to see this wonderful review by Robert Dupont of Brooklyn, which manages to invoke both The Magic Mountain and Charles Portis! Thanks! I needed that!

(What's that? No, I do not obsessively check my Amazon page every two hours...why do you ask?)


II. From Andre Agassi's memoir Open, which I'm live-blogging:

"Stratton Mountain, I conclude, is my magic mountain. My anti-Wimbledon..."

Parker/Park

At The Atlantic, the great James Parker—who wrote about Personal Days a couple of times when it came out in ’08—calls the book one of the Top Pop Culture Moments of the Decade (alongside Radiohead and Grand Theft Auto)!

Cogito ergo yum!

Social media simply consolidate and lend greater force to the anxiety felt by the characters of Personal Days. Weblogs, Facebook, Twitter provide the treadmills necessary to fuel this anxiety. They become much more than communication devices; they become the very means by which people secure an effective ontology: “I tweet, therefore I am.”
—from Anton Steinpilz's interesting consideration of Sergei Tret’iakov and Personal Days, at Generation Bubble

I think: therefore, I ate breakfast.
—Charles Fort, Wild Talents

Table-Talk for New Year's Eve 2008

I. Happy new year!

II. At the New Yorker's Book Bench blog, PD has been dubbed "2008’s Best Novel About Doing Battle with Microsoft Word and Losing"! Heyyy—I'll take it!

An eeriely prescient tale of layoffs; think “Alien” set in an office, where computers are stealthily self-destructing and people keep disappearing from their cubicles, leaving vast empty warrens of corporate debris. Did I mention that it’s deeply, bitterly funny?

(Thanks to Levi for the tip.)

III. At Moving Image Source, assorted cinéastes weigh in on their favorite moving-image moments of the year. Here's a tidbit by Dzyd David "Shadowplay" Cairns:

I attended a rare screening of Sidney Lumet's Tennessee Williams adaptation Blood Kin and was most impressed by a shot where a giant plastic cow was wheeled past James Coburn. It made me feel alive in a special way. The combination of elements—Coburn and cow—something about it was just so right, and so bold.

(Here is Part 2.)

IV. Happy new year, again! Thank you for reading this blog! (AND a big thanks to everyone who read PD, or reviewed it or blogged it or end-of-year-listed it, or came out to see me read, or sent in PD sightings.....)

And that's...



(Via VSL. See more "The End" cards here.)

Navel academy

At the Louisville Courier-Journal, my former coworker-turned-geniusy-novelist Samantha Hunt has nice things to say about Personal Days.

Other Dzys faves also weigh in, and I get all mysterious about something called Bottomless Belly Button.

"Like a palindrome spelled with acts of corruption"

I. From Levi:

From the Chicago Reader blog, about our galactically stupid and corrupt soon-to-be-ex-governor (the third Illinois governor out of the last five to be arrested!!!!!):

"Chicagoland correspondent KC:

'If I'm reading the Sun-Times article right, then:

'Blago contemplated appointing himself to the Senate seat because he'd get better lawyers to defend himself for trying to sell the Senate seat that no one wanted to buy, which is why Blago contemplated appointing himself to the Senate seat.

'It's beyond circular logic, it's like a palindrome spelled with acts of corruption instead of letters.'"

II. Irony! The PTSNBN puts PD on its list of the Best Books of 2008...

In a prelapsarian New York populated by surging, infinity-sign-shaped real estate developments, an office is undergoing endless layoffs....Park's unsettling, uproarious debut delights as much in sending up various crimes against language as it does in satirizing workplace culture....

(Via Other Ed)

III. The mystery of language, cont'd: "Two cases of compulsive swearing—in sign language."

(Via Uncertain Times)

IV. At A Journey Round My Skull, Will has some "Musings and Thunderings of Leon Bloy":

"My existence is a sad country where it is always raining...."

V. Parenthetical of the day: "First, I must preface this conversation by saying that from time to time (hourly) I google myself." —Ta-Nehisi

"Time" is on our side!

Personal Days hits Time magazine's Top 10 Fiction Books list, clocking in at #6! Lev Grossman (a/k/a the Greatest Book Critic in the World) writes:

"This is a book that gets frighteningly truer month after month. Somehow it also remains just as funny."


As a Dizzies reader, you can:

• Read the full Time article here, as well as rundowns on books by Bolaño, Sittenfeld, Lahiri, Price, and others!
• Visit the PD site, and buy books there or at your local bookstore!
• Participate in this PD anagram contest!

Monday warmup

I. Another nice mention of PD from Moonlight Ambulette (with bonus clip from 9 to 5!).

II. Dzyd Rachel has a...blog? More like a gathering of all (or most) of her excellent pieces from the last few years, many of which (for the Blvr., V.V., and TPF) I've had the pleasure of editing...Quick picks: Russell Hobson, high-IQ societies, the mysterious "Footprints" author, and the perils and pleasures of public speaking...amazing!

III. In The Stranger, Paul Constant reports on the return of L. Ron Hubbard's early fiction: "Many reviewers—myself included—have extolled the glories of pulp fiction, and this series provides a good opportunity to make something perfectly clear: Most pulp fiction is awful crap that was cranked out in order to make a fast buck. Hubbard's fiction is the worst of that dreck."

IV.

Roth says he spent most of his time at Sony working on his own projects, sketching logos on the company stationery and making long-distance phone calls from his desk. One day, someone from personnel called him into the office. Roth was sure he’d be fired. When he sat down, the executive complimented him on his productivity and offered him a full-time position. “I was just floored,” Roth told me. “I couldn’t imagine anybody doing less than I was doing.” Not only did Roth turn down the promotion, he quit his job. —Saki Knafo (a/k/a the Greatest Journalist in the World), "Soul Reviver," NYT Magazine

V. At the LAT, Dzyd Carolyn remembers the late Forrest Ackerman...She also links to the Book Design Review's rundown of the year's best covers...It's perhaps not inappropriate for me to say that the Personal Days cover should have been on that list?!



It's even more eye-popping as an actual object...Perhaps it's time to get a few copies for gifts? (Click here for wild PD contest info!) Buy the book of which the aformentioned Paul Constant writes, "Every word belongs exactly where it is."

Frazzled, efficient

Really Good Short Story

Chris Adrian's "Why Antichrist?," in his new collection, A Better Angel. I can't even describe it. It is too great.

Claire Barliant...

...has a website.

Don DeLillo...

...blogger? At The Onion, "D.D." on the Republican National Convention:

Here in Minneapolis, a woman with a clipboard, frazzled, efficient. She reads from a printout to a group of staffers a change in schedule from the coordinating committee: the station wagons arrive at noon. In the Free Speech Zone, a man dangles from a wire, the famous performance artist from New York. Everywhere, security: badges, metal detectors, small plastic cards with magnetic stripes. Police, silent in riot gear, truncheons like humming, efficient software. Someone says: "So she was technically never the actual Miss Alaska?"

Refreshments

"If anyone has the blues over the hard times and trembles for the present and future prosperity of the United States let him make a tour of the great shops of the city on one of these bright and deliciously cool September days, and however deeply financial pessimism may have crept into his soul he will experience of refreshment and will become firmly convinced that all hope is not yet lost." —The New York Herald, 1893

(Via MUG, quoted from Gilded City, by M. H. Dunlop)

What if she had said 'The Believer'?

The History of Literature

There's Joyce, Nabokov, and then nothing for a while...oh and then Park. Heyyy—I'll take it!!!

Portland Bulletin

Dzyds Paul and Deb and others read tonight at The Cleaners!

Dizzies News Service

1. Dzyd Ben reports (in Los Angeles magazine) on a fatality at immigrant detention:

Until 1996, immigration law used a telling term to refer to noncitizens who can be legally denied residency in the United States. They were not only excluded, although they were that, too; they were “excludable.” The idea still prevails. They provide an opportunity for exclusion, for the nation to define itself by what it is not. Victoria Arellano was almost perfectly unwanted: not just a Latina, but an immigrant; not just an immigrant, but illegal; not just gay, but transgender; not just transgender, but infected with HIV—and an addict to boot. She did not merely slip through the cracks of the system. The system, cracks and all, was built with her in mind.

2. Michael Chabon at the DNC? Listen at the NYRB site...

3. Real buffalo in New York State. (Via Dzyd Susan)

4. Ten minutes of dissolute stumbling, fake Chinese accents, and tap dancing? Sure! James Cagney, "Shanghai Lil," Footlight Parade (Via Dzyd Brent)



5. And the PD reviews keep coming...This perceptive one is from (irony!) the L.A. Weekly. Here's some of it:

[A] battle cry rings between the lines of Personal Days: an angry defense of language against its murder at corporate hands. Park performs riotous burlesques with e-mail misspellings and corporate clichés; his characters hear double-entendres in computer error messages ("You are almost out of memory") and invent new words like "deprotion," for "a promotion that shares most of the hallmarks of a demotion." The novel may even remind you of Orwell's "Politics and the English Language."

Heyyy—I'll take it!

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for August 19, 2008

I. Levi on the brutal charms of Richard Stark.

II. Not quite sure how I got here, but...has anyone read Broch's The Sleepwalkers? (I seem to remember that it was a touchstone for William Rubel, the Stone Soup editor who published Crippled Detectives, or maybe just Broch in general.)

III. Personal Days is reviewed at my hometown paper, The Buffalo News, where much is made of Queen City underdoggism and a former classmate.

IV. Talked yesterday with D.T.M. Hua up at Columbia; he said, "There goes Chuck Bass," and I chuckled, thinking he meant a student dressed à la the dark prince of Gossip Girl. But no—it was Chuck Bass, or rather the actor playing him!

More here; apparently, on the show, Columbia is a stand in for...Yale. (I wonder if/hope there's fanfic in which Blair and Rory from Gilmore Girls are classmates...)

V. When I got back home, Linksmeister General Thos. informed me that GG was filming in his neighborhood...

VI. Thought: E-mailing about Gossip Girl sightings is like the titular character e-mailing about Serena/Blair sightings.

VII. On vacation, so light/no posting here for a while! (Though some random posts will crop up...I've adjusted them to appear in the future...so...it'll be like I'm still here, posting!)

A new 'Outfit' — The Eyes of Mao — Cubicle Opera

I. A welcome distraction: Three Richard Stark novels, just out from U. Chicago Press. Without planning to, I started with the third one, The Outfit—maybe not a good idea, but the first chapter grabbed me and has not yet let go! You will read this so fast you won't need a bookmark. (Note to self: Save that line for future review?)

Bonus: Part of The Outfit takes place in Buffalo; the wife of the Outfit head lives here. (Did Westlake know Queen City native Lawrence Block already, back in the early ’60s?)

Dzyd Levi (who works for the press) directs me to an interview he and a colleague conducted with Westlake (who wrote the Stark books pseudonymously). Sample gem:

I’ve always been a catholic reader, but also a bit of a sponge, taking on characteristics of what I’m reading, if I’m not careful. If I read too much Anthony Powell, my sentences gradually become longer and longer and less and less gainly.

(Only Westlake I've read previously: God Save the Mark.)

II. Dzyd Rachel has another ponder-worthy piece up at the Poetry Foundation, this time on Mao's verse. Sample goodie:

Although Mao dismissed intellectuals as dumb and disloyal—only those whose feet are “smeared with cow-dung,” he announced, are capable of true art—he could never quite wean himself from the joys of his scholarly existence. He was always neurotic and insecure about his own intellectual abilities, even in comparing himself to his own secretaries. According to one of Mao’s biographers, Jung Chang, Mao slept on a large bed partially covered in piles of books a half foot high, so that when he woke up he could immediately roll over and begin reading. When his vision faltered in old age, he ordered the construction of two factories to print books with characters large enough for his eyes.

III. Nice PD review in Philadelphia City Paper! "This absence of novelized work makes a book that restricts itself to the 9-to-5, like Ed Park's cubicle opera Personal Days shine all the more. Park points out that those dead, stressed hours make up a separate reality..."

IV. Speaking of work novels and Stark, I'll link again to Levi's post on how the Stark novels are work books...There's a scene toward the end of The Outfit that's amazing not because of its violence (as are many of the brutal scenes herein) but because we could be listening to a consultant filling the boss in regarding sloppy management: "The organization is getting too highly organized."

V. More PD news, from our correspondent on the Continent, Dzyd Christine:

No PD sightings in Europe so far (I thought it would be fun to send you one, but alas), but when chatting with the ladies at Shakespeare's in Paris yesterday I asked if they had it, and they said they used to have a few, but if it was good they'd order more. I assured them it is, and they did (!). Very sweet.

"That's what they say about the summer..."

The National Post has a summer reading pick...Personal Days by Ed Park!

And The Stranger's Paul Constant writes: "[P]ark's love of language elevates the novel to that rarest of levels: the vocabulary becomes almost another character in the story. Every word belongs exactly where it is."

Heyyy I'll take it...

See Ed (moi) read on Thursday, July 31, at KGB!

Un palazzo incastrato

In un palazzo incastrato nell’unica strada semideserta di Manhattan, ingombra di giornali spinti dal vento come «granchi giganti», un gruppo di impiegati consuma le proprie giornate nel terrore di perdere il posto.

EH??

Yes! Personal Days is coming out soon in Italy—perfect for your* Italian-speaking brother-in-law! The title there is Maledetti Colleghi. More info at the Fazi page.

In other PD news...a new review at the Independent...I talk vaguely about success at Time Out...the Selfdivider finds Pessoan resonances in PD; I love how he sees The Book of Disquiet as office lit—that's inspired!...(Another book "written" on slips of paper: Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus.)...I'm reading next Thursday (7/31) at KGB—my last reading of the summer (unless someone asks me to read again!)...don't know if I'll read from PD or The Dizzies??? Or Chinese Whispers??? Or the interview in Triple Canopy??? Or if I'll just read David Berman poems again?...Realized that I HAVE NOT YET LINKED to the video of me reading at Google...but I should, right? I'm too self-conscious...(I haven't watched it myself, though I did watch about half of the Jennifer 8. Lee talk, it was great...she goes to a village in China whose sole/main purpose is to train people to work in Chinese restaurants in the U.S.)....OK I'm going to link to the video of me...ED NOBODY CARES...

—I care.
—Who said that?
—It is I, Edward 9. Park, your superego.
—WHATTTTT???





-------------
* = "my"!

Somewhat Self-Serving Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for June 27–29

I. Personal Days gets covered in the New York Times Book Review! Mark Sarvas's thoughtful review invokes Unamuno, makes comparisons to Bellow and Beckett and Bloom (Molly)—heyyy, I'll take it!—and says:

[W]itty and appealing...[A]nyone who has ever groaned to hear ‘impact’ used as a verb will cheer as Park skewers the avatars of corporate speak, hellbent on debasing the language....Park has written what one of his characters calls ‘a layoff narrative’ for our times.

But don't settle for my bracket-happy synopsizing...read the whole thing—it's very good (I'm not biased)!

II. Hmmm, does Sarvas read The Dizzies? I started reading Harry, Revised and found this compelling evidence on page 2:

He does this a lot, this strange circular thinking, Harry the Ouroboros, watching himself watching himself watching, often emerging many minutes later, foggy-headed and thick-tongued as if waking from a deep sleep.

Case closed!

III. Sick of Personal Days? Want some different Ed Park fiction for a change?

[Readership: Wha?]

The web-only, Canada-based Joyland, a "hub for short fiction" that officially goes up on July 1, has a terrific old-newsletter look...and an excerpt of the chipper, vertiginous, interminable novel in progress known as...THE DIZZIES!

Read "Trilobite and Isle of Wight." (You can find other dizzying excerpts in The Fanzine, BOMB...and a forthcoming issue of a free New York periodical, to be revealed soonish!)

IV. To add to the pinch-me-I'm dreaming-ness of this week: The new Time magazine picks "Three First Novels that Just Might Last"...including ye olde Personal Days—heyyy, I'll take it!

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for June 24, 2008

I. Douglas on the Portland Ukefest:

There is a cultural chasm between people who pronounce “ukulele” yoo-koo-lay-lee and people who pronounce it oo-koo-leh-leh, roughly corresponding to the divide between people who prefer “fun” and people who prefer “authenticity.”

II. Mazel tov to Dizzies Team Member Izzy and "the Citizen"—


I love this picture!

—Photo by Dzyd Jen!

III. A small but nice notice for PD in The New Yorker...what's the pull quote? "Comic and creepy"?!

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?”

IV. Today on his Finer Things Club radio show, Dizzies Team Member Hua is joined by one of the more interesting fellows we know—"Vocoder" Dave Tompkins! Here's what Hua has to say:

Join us from 1030am-noon as the great Dave Tompkins hectors the airwaves with a sure-to-be unforgettable mix of inscrutable vocoder jams, suicidal soul ballads, "random rap," John Carpenter, 80s grooves, and a Russian electro single from 1982 credited to "Udytu and his Male Harem."

Tune in here.

V. Pauses that refresh:

"The semicolon allows woozy clauses to lean on each other like drunks for support." —Dzyd Paul, Slate

"Keeler's overuse of the comma stopped even me—a comma-lover of the first rank—dead in my tracks." —Levi on Harry Stephen Keeler's The Box From Japan

VI. "Books like [Roberto Bolaño's] 2666 take on the biggest themes their authors can imagine, and these themes are so large that it takes serious novelistic real estate to even establish them on paper." —Conversational Reading

VII. I apparently can't shut up these days—all this week I am talking to Jason Boog about Personal Days.

VIII. And finally—what would a TTOPG (Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus) be without...and Ouroboros?



This comes from the frontispiece of William Gaddis's The Recognitions, accompanying this interview at Splice Today (?!) with Gaddis sage Steven Moore, who put together the indispensable A Reader's Guide to William Gaddis's "The Recognitions", now available online, how do you like these comma splices, I could keep doing this forever you know...? (Via Other Ed.)

Toward the end, it was like completing a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, trying to fill in the gaps that were still missing. Only then did I write to Gaddis and tell him I'd annotated about 90 percent of it, and wondered if he still had a list of sources that I could use to finish up. He said he didn't. I learned later he was very pleased with the book, and wrote me a six-page letter filling in some of those gaps. Looking back, it was the greatest intellectual adventure of my life.

IX. I know that The Recognitions was an important book for the young EP (or do I mean the young PG?), but now realize that ARGTWGTR was maybe equally important—in the writing of Dementia Americana especially, which was written on two levels it seems, as if begging for annotation! E.g.,

And was that his son, listlessly pitching pennies with other dead-end kids in Howard & Sonia, a sitcom about a horror writer's doomed marriage in 1920s Brooklyn?

—a reference to H.P. Lovecraft's brief departure from bachelordom! Which of course I annotated, ten years later...! I'm just going to annotate all my unpublished books now!