Some gleanings

Levi on Donald E. Westlake's The Hook—and its sketch for his soon-to-be-published-for-the-first-time posthumous novel, Memory. (It's less complicated than it sounds.)

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At The Morning News, Robert Birnbaum talks to Arthur Phillips. Highlight of the conversation:

AP: [...] I read Ed Park’s Personal Days recently. A few years ago two separate novels came out about office politics and both [were] written in the first person plural. One of them was Personal Days. That was a wonderful book.

RB: Is he married to one of those Believer editors?

AP: I don’t know who he is married to.

RB: I look to you for some gleanings of New York book-world intelligence.

AP: What, am I Walter Winchell? The other book I liked, sort of the highlight of the year, was Cards of Identityby Nigel Dennis, which is from 1955. Ed Park recommended it to me because I had this Shakespeare play in my book. And I panicked and went out and read it and it has a new Shakespeare play in it. It is spectacular.

Song of myself

The exciting newish academic confraternity known as Post45 met this spring in Cleveland (I was slated to go and speak, but couldn't)—and now they have a forum on their website called "Contemporaries." Boston College's Min-Hyoung Song's piece, "Race and Racelessness in Ed Park's 'Personal Days,'" is uncannily good. (I'm biased, I know, but...)

His main focus is on the racial (and post-racial, and proto-racial) aspect of the novel, which most reviews ignored, and he articulates more or less what was on my mind in this respect (some very conscious maneuvers). The conclusions he draws are surprising and exciting (and in some cases aren't ones I necessarily had in mind, but which I totally buy). And especially thrilling is his defense of PD as a book—as a story told using the superficially simple technologies of the novel to deliver stuff that another medium couldn't. Very cool. (As I said on FB, it makes me want to write another novel!)

I'm excited for his book-in-progress, of which this will be (I think) a chapter.

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I'm thinking of a quote from Sherlock Holmes: "What one man can invent, another can discover."

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Min Song wrote the citation for Personal Days when it was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award—which reminds me that I'll be taking part in a panel at the Asian American Writers Workshop on June 16. The topic: "How to Get Your Book Published." I'll be joining novelists Ed Lin, Wendy Lee, and Monique Truong, editor Zohra Saed, and agents Kirby Kim and Jin Auh. More details here.

Nonmimesis

Genres often classifed as both nonmimetic and non-SF are actually varieties of science fiction that correspond mimetically to specific types of cognitively estranging referents....Slipstream—a relatively young subgenre that has emerged over the past several decades, with prominent examples including Don DeLillo's 1985 White Noise, the 1998 film The Truman Show, and Ed Park's 2008 novel Personal Days—is a type of science-fictional mimesis whose cognitively estranging referent is the partially virtual reality of living in a mainstream hypermediated and rendered half-surreal by technology. —Seo-Young Chu, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: A Science Fictional Theory of Reputation

White Noise? Heyyy—I'll take it!™

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Chu's book is pretty fascinating! (Where else could you read about Joe Haldeman and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha?) I don't know that anyone else has called Personal Days "slipstream"—but it makes sense. One of my first published stories was in Trampoline, edited by Kelly Link, a/k/a the Queen of the Slipstream:



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Now I'm thinking that titling my SF column "Astral Weeks" was also a way of saying I would cover "slipstream," given the first line of the song...



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I like this bit in the epilogue:

"As these allusions to the many 'chapters that might have been' are meant to imply, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Reputation is a fragment of a much larger hypothetical book containing an infinite number of chapters that correspond to an infinite number of cognitively estranging objects and phenomena."

I started this post a week ago

I. Jenny D on her new feline: "His name is Max, and he used to frequent a fruit stall in Brighton Beach."

II. Speaking of which: Over Xmas I reread—quite at random!—A Cricket in Times Square...and I just saw David Ulin's appreciation of it at the L.A. Times. I didn't know it was the book's 50th anniversary!

All in all, I enjoyed revisiting the book—though I did raise my eyebrows during the Chinatown scenes...

III. Dogs in New York: The New Yorker
on the NYC cult, ca. , around Charles Portis's great novel The Dog of the South

IV. Speaking of Portis: My friend in Little Rock, John Moran, alerted me to this tidbit in a local paper: one of its bloggers noticed that the film version of Portis's first novel, Norwood, is now streaming on Netflix!

Joe Namath and Dom DeLuise are in it...

Here's what I said about it in a footnote to my 2003 Portis piece in The Believer:

If the film of True Grit somewhat revises the book, the less-known screen adaptation of Norwood (Jack Haley, Jr., 1970), also scripted by Marguerite Roberts, scrambles both Norwood and True Grit. Glen Campbell (Grit’s LaBoeuf) here plays Norwood, and Kim Darby (Mattie) is Rita Lee Chipman; Mattie’s unacknowledged teenage longing for LaBoeuf (“If he is still alive and should happen to read these pages, I will be happy to hear from him,” Mattie writes at the novel’s close) becomes consummated in Norwood, or just about. Roberts’s Grit script shunted Mattie in favor of the bigger-than-life Rooster; for this film the screenwriter dilutes some of Norwood’s cool by revealing that Rita Lee has been made pregnant by another man before they meet—a significant, possibly feminist tweak of the original plot. (Incidentally, the contra-hippie theme that runs through Portis, made more explicit in Gringos, is elaborated in this film, most notably when Campbell-as-Norwood takes the stage after a numbing sitar exhibition. He sings a good-timey country number presciently called “Repo Man” to the uncomprehending, wigged-out crowd, until a more lysergically inclined combo unseats him.) As it’s unlikely I’ll ever have the chance to write about this film again, let it be noted that the date of Norwood’s theatrical release, a year after Midnight Cowboy won the Academy Award for Best Picture, lends Campbell-as-Norwood a certain Voightian frisson during the scenes in New York, where he sticks out like a Stetsoned sore thumb. Which makes the bit in Cowboy where Voight regards himself in the mirror and says approvingly, “John Wayne,” a sort of anticipatory gloss on Wayne co-star Campbell’s future appearance in Gotham. (The celluloid True Grit also spawned a 1975 sequel, Rooster Cogburn, starring Wayne and Katharine Hepburn.)

V. Speaking of New York: Doree Shafrir put together a list of her favorite New York fiction...Personal Days is in there between Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Richard Price's Lush Life!

SWEET: Actors Reading Writers December

This Thursday (12/2) at 7:30 p.m. at Three of Cups (83 First Ave. @ 5th St.) I'll be...well, not reading, but being there while actress Joya Mia Italiano reads from Personal Days! Other performers will do dramatic readings of work by Sonya Chung, Jonathan Dixon, poet Maya Pindyck, and—hold onto your chapeaux—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.)

Notes on the comic novel

I was enjoying Levi's meditation on James Wood's vision of the comic novel...even before he so luxuriously quotes from a little book called Personal Days!

Sideways here we come

Nice mention of Personal Days on this podcast about language, for PRI's The World—but what is an "un-Eating Sideways" moment?

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.

"Take This Job and Write It"

From the upcoming New York Times Book Review, Jennifer Schuessler on work novels:

With the arrival of postwar prosperity, the literature of working-class struggle gave way to the literature of middle-­class disillusion. In novels like Sloan Wilson’s “Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and Richard Yates’s “Revolutionary Road,” work isn’t a tool of social redemption but a graveyard of individual dreams — often, as in the case of Yates’s Frank Wheeler, the dream of being an artist. It’s a theme the literary novel hasn’t been able to shake. Blue-collar misery has continued to inspire powerful fiction, whether Raymond Carver’s stories about laconically depressed waitresses and mechanics or Russell Banks’s portraits of violently self-destructive millworkers and snowplow drivers. But these days, it seems, the really unhappy people are working in offices.

Take, for example, the characters in Joshua Ferris’s dark satire “Then We Came to the End” (2007), set in a Chicago advertising agency caught in the throes of layoffs and water-cooler paranoia, and Ed Park’s “Personal Days” (2008), which unfolds in a similarly depopulating Manhattan cubicle farm. In reality, these satires of late-capitalist office life have less to say about actual work than about the bureaucratic rituals and distractions surrounding it: the joke PowerPoint presentations, the endless forwarding of stupid YouTube videos, the proliferation of Orwellian corporate jargon. In this vision, a job may provide a kind of grim life-boat camaraderie, along with a paycheck, but the work itself is meaningless unto mendacious: a metaphor for the lies and illusions that underlie our economy, if not our civilization. In Ferris’s novel, the agency’s big last-minute assignment — to create a humorous campaign for a shadowy breast-cancer awareness group — is itself a joke. In Park’s novel, the company’s actual business isn’t worth specifying at all.

Heyyy—I'll take it!™

Exciting minutiae

A nice mention of Personal Days on the New Yorker's Book Bench! Lee Ellis writes:

Perhaps writing fiction about work in any meaningful way is challenging, but I don't think it's impossible. A few recent examples come to mind. The first is Ed Park’s "Personal Days." 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. As for stories that take on both cubicle and spreadsheet, check out Ben Marcus’s recent bizarre yet rewarding “The Moors” in Tin House, or David Foster Wallace’s “Wiggle Room” in this magazine (an excerpt from his third, unfinished novel "The Pale King"). I'm also looking forward to Sam Lipsyte's forthcoming "The Ask", which is getting quite a bit of attention. It's a book that in part deals with both the destructive and encouraging aspects of office culture.

Ummm, same paragraph with Ben Marcus, DFW, and Sam Lipsyte? Heyyy—I'll take it™!

(Side note: The Ask = even better than Home Land. Trust me™!)

Fresh from my Google News alert

At the L.A. Times, some of my favorite SF/fantasy/speculative reads of 2008...

...and at the Columbia Spectator, I get a little "mystical" talking about Personal Days.

Hsu-Park-Lim: An Eternal Golden Braid — Cha exhibit — holiday ideas

(From last Saturday's Page Turner Asian Am Litfest...that's Ken Chen, moderator/AAWW director, on the far left.)

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An interesting review by Jana Hsu (no relation to Hua I assume!) of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha exhibit "Earth," up at the Berkeley Art Museum; the piece mentions the recent Cha book Exilee/Temps Morts, to which I contributed an essay.

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Penguin Group authors were asked "what to give and what to get" this holiday season. I heart this hilarious Janice Lee suggestion:

Personal Days by Ed Park is The Office in book form: laugh-out-loud funny and perfect for so many people: your college-age nephew, your twenty-something friend in advertising, your thirty-something friend who's a full-time mom, your friend in his forties who just got laid off, and so on. In fact, I can't think of anyone it wouldn't be great for, except your friends without a sense of humor. Don't give it to them.

How Korean is it?

On Weds., July 1, I'll be speaking on a panel at The Korea Society ("New Currents in Korean American Literature: The Origin and the Distance") with Piano Teacher (not that Piano Teacher!) novelist Janice Y.K. Lee (whom I spoke to on the phone back in 1995) and Everything Asian author Sung J. Woo.

Ego-rebuilder

Nice (yet pungent) words from Richard Russo on PD (from a BEA panel with John Irving and Charles McGrath).

(Also: The Independent weighs in on PD.)

I've been putting this off for a while...

...but I'm going to take a break from blogging here, till the end of May or so. (Team Dizzies members are strongly encouraged to post, though!)

I'll occasionally update my website and the Personal Days blog, so please click through if you're interested in readings/appearances and other odds and ends. (Here's the tour schedule part of the site...I say "tour" because I'll be in Poughkeepsie!)

My Astral Weeks column will still appear in the L.A. Times, and I might crank out a Ghost or two.

Here's to the future!



xoxo,
Gossip Ed

(Photo: L.G. Thos.)

Preschool daze

I. Personal Days is a finalist for the PEN Hemingway Award!

(And my other book, Preschool Days, is also a finalist!)

Annals of furniture moving

My latest Astral Weeks column is up at the L.A. Times. This time around, I look at Benjamin Parzybok's debut novel, Couch.

It originally had an elaborate/crazy introduction in which I spot Parzybok's book next to mine at Barnes & Noble, but even I (apparently!) have my limits when it comes to self-promotion...Well, maybe I'll post that here at some point. (Or on the Personal Days blog?)

Missed opportunity: I should have mentioned the movie The Puffy Chair, Couch's direct predecessor in epic furniture-moving narratives!

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!

Built to spill

I. Sneak peek at the cover of the UK paperback edition of Personal Days, coming out next year from Vintage.

Here's a bigger image of a slightly earlier version, same concept:



II. And here are some photos from...Korea! PD finds its way onto the table marked "Bestsellers" and "Movie-Tie-In"(heyyy...I'll take it!) at the Kyobo bookstore:

The Beyond-Believer

At BoingBoing, Douglas Rushkoff has a lovely mention of Personal Days (along with Sara Ryan's The Rules for Hearts, one of "Two Fast Reads...with surprisingly enduring flavor"), calling it among other things a "black comedy about downsizing [that] brings an almost Beckett-like sense of reduction to the dwindling office."

I'm especially psyched by his mention of Elvis Costello's "Beyond Belief," the first track on Imperial Bedroom. It's a song about which I have had a couple of thoughts over the years!

1) I might have read this somewhere, can't remember, but: One fascinating thing about this shortish song is that the melody is constantly changing. Can you call the verses verses? The chords are very simple: D-G, D-F for the most part (with a G-Gm for the bridge and the single "chorus," see below); he (w)rings ceaseless changes out of this progression, his voice hunting high and low, as they say...

2) ...which led me to think of this song as E.C.'s self-conscious statement on his own songwriting prowess, which was arguably at its peak on IB. (The song's placement at the start of this album supports this view—a salvo of sorts.) He inundates the song with cliché in order to show how effortlessly he can move beyond it; wordplay and puns abound; he piles on hook after hook so that there is no single hook—the energy and invention never flag.

And to what end? Why squander it, spend it all, on such a short song (2m 34s.)? I think this is E.C. realizing the power of his talent (which will be on full if less furious display on IB), demonstrating it in superconcentrated form. "Just like the canals on Mars or the Great Barrier Reef, I come to you beyond belief," he sings at the end of the bridge. He's a force of nature.

But this isn't braggadocio; E.C. will also acknowledge the pitfalls of such a talent. In the outro (the closest thing to a chorus, the song's single repeated line), he anticipates criticism and also criticizes himself: "I've got a feeling I'm gonna get a lot of grief/Once this seemed so appealing, now I am beyond belief." (Here are all the lyrics.) It's as if he's both dazzled and exasperated by his own abilities.

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Other notes: Bret Easton Ellis's next novel is called Imperial Bedroom, which you could read about here if the L.A. Times would just not get rid of its articles...News of a new Pynchon novel...Levi Stahl on Anthony Powell on Barbara Skelton's memoir, Tears Before Bedtime (which gives its title to track 2 on Imperial Bedroom!)...Delusions of grandeur: I thought Andrew Gelman had invoked Nabokov and James Joyce (in talking about PD)—but no, he was referring to James Jones. Heyyy—I'll still take it!...Phil Nugent on the Biden-Palin debate...Steven Pinker in NYT: "Listeners who hear the Minnewegian sounds of the characters from ‘Fargo’ when they listen to Ms. Palin are on to something: the Matanuska-Susitna Valley in Alaska, where she grew up, was settled by farmers from Minnesota during the Depression."

Stock footage

Buffalo's Talking Leaves bookstore gets a nice salute from Three Percent, for stocking the new Dubravka Ugresic...and from The Dizzies, for stocking Personal Days! (Buffalonians, why not stock up on both?)

In other PD news (wait, was that last thing "news"?)—PD has been shortlisted for the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize! (Here's the Galleycat post, and here's something else, with more on the prize.)

UPDATE: In further PD news—and yes, that last thing was news—though the jury's still out on item #1!—GET TO THE POINT, PARK—I'll be reading at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, 9/14 at 5 p.m. on the Mainstage. (Website here; click "2008 events.") Once again I join Chuck Klosterman (whose debut novel, Downtown Owl, is coming out soon)...also reading: Charles Bock! I need to change my name so that it is "Charles" based? Maybe that is a joke I can tell before I start reading......hmmm.....