Top of the pops

In The Atlantic, James Parker looks back on the decade's Top Pop Culture Moments—you know, Radiohead, Grand Theft Auto, Jackass the Movie, and:

2008: Personal Days by Ed Park. The debut novel from the editor of The Believer captured the precise moment in U.S. office culture before everybody got fired. Cleverer than Office Space, shorter than Then We Came To The End, this excellent little book sits gloating atop the ash-heap of corporate history.

1-1-1-1-1

I once had a laptop at my old job. It was heavy. Only the 1 key worked. I sat at a meeting with only that key working and managed to get to Blogger and read through the blogs of the day to keep myself entertained. Moral of the story: you don't need a working keyboard to use a laptop. —Livin' the Dream

First-person corporate

"With Jonah’s e-mail to Pru Park manages nothing less than the articulation of a peculiar narrative point of view — first-person corporate — which, incidentally, he marshals throughout the whole of Personal Days to astonishing effect, giving new impetus and texture to Dilbertian anomie. One detects in Jonah’s remarks resonances with Tret’iakov’s biography of the object. But, whereas Tret’iakov wishes to point a way toward overcoming workers’ alienation, Park simply characterizes such alienation in terms consistent with the nature of work in the early 21st century. If Tret’iakov imagines a novel without a hero, Park imagines one without a reader." —Anton Steinpilz, "Building the Mystery: Social Media as Collective Epic," at Generation Bubble

Into the mystic

I talk to the Columbia Spectator about Personal Days, and opine: “Language is never static.”