"Take This Job and Write It"

"Joblessness may be hovering around 10 percent, with some 29 million Americans out of work or searching for full-time employment, but there’s one group of people whose persistent alienation from regular employment has emerged as a particularly serious problem. I refer, of course, to novelists."

The New York Times Book Review's Jennifer Schuessler writes about Personal Days and other books about work.

Richard Russo on Morning Edition

Richard Russo, author of That Old Cape Magic, was on NPR's Morning Edition today, talking about his favorite office lit, from Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" to...Personal Days!

Listen here. (Whole show is here.)

What do you do?

Alain de Botton:

Beyond the page, work remains at the center of our identities. It is hard to have a conversation with a stranger for more than a few minutes before needing to ask, "What do you do?"—for herein lie clues not only to monetary status, but more broadly to one's entire outlook and character. The literary silence is puzzling and regrettable, for it denies us the chance collectively to honor the excitement of work as well as to reconcile ourselves (through laughter and tragedy) to its inequities. —The Boston Globe

We got your "ambitious new literature of the office right here," bub!

(Via The Elegant Variation)

Not for us

We might think of Kafka’s response to his friend Max Brod’s question about hope and whether there was any outside the world as we know it. ‘Plenty of hope,’ Kafka said. ‘But not for us.’

Where did Kafka learn to think like this? A case could be made that he found his training not in his intricate psyche or in his horrified commitment to writing – ‘the service of the Devil’, he called it – but in his day job at the Prague Institute for Workmen’s Accident Insurance.

—Michael Wood on Kafka's office writings, London Review of Books

(From Jenny)

A problem at work

I meet a friend who's bad-tempered and nervous because of a problem at work that's harrying him. From outside, from the edge of his desk, it's easy to measure the absurdity of this preoccupation about something that doesn't even touch him (vicariously living someone else's problem: misfortune of a good worker, of an honest manager). I wonder whether it occurs to him to suddenly consider the absurd, as a comparison with the cosmic, whether he sometimes takes a step back so the monster in front of his eyes turns back into the fly hovering in the air....

—Julio Cortázar, Diary of Andrés Fava (transl. by Anne McLean)

A Sentence From the Master

The nearly universal carpeting of offices must have come about in my lifetime, judging from black-and-white movies and Hopper paintings: since the pervasion of carpeting, all you hear when people walk by are their own noises–the flap of their raincoat, the jingle of their change, the squeak of their shoes, the efficient little sniffs they make to signal to us and to themselves that they are busy and walking somewhere for a very good reason, as well as the almost sonic whoosh of receptionists' staggering and misguided perfumes, and the covert chokings and showings of tongues and placing of braceleted hands to windpipes that more tastefully scented secretaries exchange in their wake. —Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

Forgetting

We do not actually do any work in the office anymore, other than trying to imagine what it would be like to kiss each other. We have been thinking about it so long we have forgotten what it is we should be doing. —Joe Meno, "An Apple Could Make You Laugh," from Demons in the Spring

Braving the rapids

The one at whose side I worked that summer was deep-set in family heartaches, and facially inhumane, but she sometimes came out from behind all that etiquette.

Eleven was the only clock word she liked. She would insist it sounded lilting and relenting to her.

For me, though, the hour itself—the work-shift one, I mean, and not its trimmer twin in late evening—did not slope toward anything better. I never budged for lunch, and I liked to do myself in a little. I would postpone a piss until I had to brave rapids, practically. (There was a vessel I kept beneath my desk.)

This was the property-management division. We were sectored off from the rest of headquarters by little more than particleboard. The job required the luxurious useless indoor fortitude it has always been my fortune to enjoy.

—Gary Lutz, "Years of Age"

Non-home

And in the same way that others return to their homes, I retreat to my non-home: the large office on the Rua dos Douradores. I arrive at my desk as at a bulwark against life. I have a tender spot - tender to the point of tears—for my ledgers in which I keep other people’s accounts, for the old inkstand I use, for the hunched back of Sérgio, who draws up invoices a little beyond where I sit. I love all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love, and perhaps also because nothing is worth a human soul’s love, and so it’s all the same—should we feel the urge to give it—whether the recipient be the diminutive form of my inkstand or the vast indifference of the stars.
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

(Via Selfdivider)