Making art out of work
Pal and poet Jennica Harper has some 17-syllable excellence posted chez Bookninja this morning in a piece about recreational vocational haiku. Notice now how I will shamelessly poach a sample and slap it up here like it is a reflection of something brilliant I have written:
The sign on the door
says meeting in progress. But
this is not progress.
"Work literature" has been a common subject in the book-bloggy world of late, mostly as side-notes to reviews of Joshua Ferris's Then We Came To The End. A novel I haven't got in my clutches yet, but damn, if it doesn't live up to the hype, I'm going to rip it into tiny shreds and sell it in Ziploc baggies as rabbit-hutch bedding. Is the work novel uncommon simply because work is boring? How to write about the boring without illiciting more of same?
The sign on the door
says meeting in progress. But
this is not progress.
"Work literature" has been a common subject in the book-bloggy world of late, mostly as side-notes to reviews of Joshua Ferris's Then We Came To The End. A novel I haven't got in my clutches yet, but damn, if it doesn't live up to the hype, I'm going to rip it into tiny shreds and sell it in Ziploc baggies as rabbit-hutch bedding. Is the work novel uncommon simply because work is boring? How to write about the boring without illiciting more of same?
Perhaps because the Computer Programmer and his colleagues often come equipped with packages of safety not unlike the one possessed by Rodge Janney, Don DeLillo's elevated everyman in the opening pages of Mao II: "He's got a degree . . . and a tax attorney and a cardiologist and a mutual fund and whole life and major medical." Unless in the service of a character's demise, such privilege is not usually the fiction writer's best bet for capitalising on dramatic or romantic opportunity.Read more here, here and here.
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