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.

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Heather D. Kehoe crafts scenes that are sort of absurd. Observational and humorous, her work puts life-sized paper dolls in real-life, and often suburban, scenes. I tend to like a lot of suburban-themed work. I don't like it at all, however, when I comb through entries and see multiple instances of not-so-hot imitations of any of the suburban greats. "The poor man's version of..." sometimes becomes a game, a tired trope (as do the oft-entered shopping carts and empty swimming pools - ugh). Kehoe's work, however, is original in scope. And, in the photo above, she uses little green army men, an icon I tend to like. (See some old Ryan McGinness.) It isn't clear whether she crafts these dolls herself, or if she procures them and places them in her scenes. It doesn't much matter. They help her tell her stories either way.

My first reaction: for real?! Bist meshugge?* My second reaction: this looks good and is hilarious.

Upon reading HHS entrant David Eric Davis' statement, though, I'm not sure that he was going for funny. He writes,

"I make art to uncover that which is messy, primordial and preconscious in me. In sharing what I find, I push past my own notions of what is dirty and shameful. For this body of work, I collected the lint and hair from my navel for ten years and photographed the most figurative specimens using a high-resolution scanner. The resulting images, each a massively magnified record of one day's harvest, suggest fuzzy, biomorphic figures with luminous bodies and swirling flagella. The specimens are a direct record of my existence and represent the unique signature of my body. Free from interference by my thinking mind, they are the product of automatic felting. 'Pipik' (or 'pupik') is Yiddish for bellybutton. 'Contemplating your pipik,' or 'navel-gazing,' means being turned inward, disengaged from the world."

Oy. The work looks good, even if the explanation is a bit literal.

*Translation: Are you crazy? (David, I speak some Yiddish.)

P.S. Another Yiddish phrase about belly buttons, in case you were looking for one: "A shaynem dank dir im pupik" = "Much thanks to your belly button." Or, "thanks for nothing."