"Stifled Lives at the Office"

"WHERE DOES THE TIME GO?" wonders one of the white-collar serfs who populate Believer editor Ed Park's debut novel, Personal Days. "Where does the life go?" In melancholy deadpan, Park narrates the days when "every straw is the last straw" in a company whose boom years are behind it.

The book's first third unfolds in first-person plural: Park's "we" comprises a shrinking number of bright young things who have begun to dim, day-jobbers who are no longer sure what dreams their jobs feed. This device (varied slightly in the book's middle) blurs the characters in the same haze of shame and depression through which they see one another. It's a dangerous stylistic tack, but Park pulls it off with sharp wordplay and a mind for the absurd. By keeping intimacy at bay early on, he also heightens the pathos of the book's final third, where — in a leaping epistolary confession, written on a "craptop" without a period key — a single character tells his own story and dignifies the stifled lives of his axed colleagues.

Rebellion in this office goes little further than FedEx-ing office supplies to your home, but 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."

"This is a parody," Orwell wrote after one of his own savage illustrations, "but not a very gross one."

—Josh Kamensky, L.A. Weekly

"Crows never forget a face..."

To test the birds’ recognition of faces separately from that of clothing, gait and other individual human characteristics, Dr. Marzluff and two students wore rubber masks. He designated a caveman mask as “dangerous” and, in a deliberate gesture of civic generosity, a Dick Cheney mask as “neutral.” Researchers in the dangerous mask then trapped and banded seven crows on the university’s campus in Seattle.

In the months that followed, the researchers and volunteers donned the masks on campus, this time walking prescribed routes and not bothering crows.

The crows had not forgotten. They scolded people in the dangerous mask significantly more than they did before they were trapped, even when the mask was disguised with a hat or worn upside down....

—NYT

(Via Jenny)

Baldfaced names

A review on GoodReads had a delightful slip:

Ok, when I first started reading this, I thought that it was the same as Joshua Ferris's book "Then We Came to The End" except that Joshua Ferris's story was better. Both are set in the modern work-place: lay-off fever has gripped the office and both are about the trivial details with which we become obsessed in our daily work days. But in the end, I think it's a dead heat: both books are very funny. Ed Harris's novel definitely improves with reading. By the last section--written in a kind of stream-of-consciousness way--I couldn't put the book down. But the funniest thing about this book? "The Jilliad." Keep your eye out for it.

Human tape recorder

You confess to a colleague that you're worried about your supervisor, who hasn't been very focused the last three weeks and has been coming in late to work. Later that day, like a game of office telephone, you hear a version of your story from a different co-worker, and it's not hard to figure out the source. The Tape Recorder takes your confidential conversations and plays them back to everyone in the office. The person's motivation is often to feel important or "in the know" rather than any malicious intent. --"What Kind of Office Gossip Are You?," MSN