Tonight I e-mailed with old friend Ed Park (author of the fantastic office-novel Personal Days) and also I shot some photos at the National Book Awards 5 Under 35 event, where Joshua Ferris, author of another office-based literary staple, Then We Came to the End, introduced one of the "emerging" readers. I no longer work in a stereotypical American office, and, I admit, sometimes I miss it. If you miss it, or are in the midst of it, you'd do well to pick up both books. Each is brilliant, in its own way.

All that said, look at Hey, Hot Shot! entrant Rylan Steele's work. The piece above, Office, is just sterile enough to imply that there is a force -- other than the workers -- in charge of the space. That the offices in his depictions operate, like most offices, on a mix of logic, nonsense, and mysterious directives from afar, is obvious. Everything is a little too neat. A little too well-lit. About as eerie as I imagine my old offices would be if I visited them now.

Ms. Bekman reminded me of one of the best (the best?) office poems ever: Theodore Roethke's Dolor.

Dolor

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,

All the misery of manila folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,

Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,

Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.