Star fee

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

(Again from Malty)

D'oh!

"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?

“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

New Yorker comic for the virtual corkboard.


(From Joe)

Rage against the macheese

"[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

"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...

Visible Tweets

RTST means...

"Routines to Savor Time," from Love Your Layoff

Tall cotton

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!

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"

Summer 2009 Café Arts

I'll be kicking off Café Arts' Summer 2009 series on Monday, May 4, with a talk on "The Amnesia of Influence."

It's at PicNic Market Café, 2655 Broadway (101/102 streets). The event starts at 6 p.m.

(More information here.)