posted by schemer at 12:18 PM
Monday, March 14, 2005
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ABOUT SCHEMES AND GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION
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10 Comments:
A '1984' style office. This is a really cool story, its suprising how much is told in so few lines. I though it strange to link the 'civilized' office environment with base sexual needs. Perhaps the office needs to be introduced in the first few lines; i envisioned the wifes at the meeting, but later it seems they are only present in bed.
Thanks for your comments, Richard. I can see what you're saying about the wives being introduced at the early stage, perhaps blurring the lines between the personal life and the office environment a little too much. As for offices and sex: my own take on the whole thing I think.
I'd like to point out that I think offices are not sexy, but fairly perverse places.
well the ultimate perversity in an office is the affair with the secretary/telephone girl. Or sleeping your way to the top. Or sexual harrasement? Why didn't you include these ideas? If the office is such a sickening place (fightclub/consumer culture stylee) then why is that not explored? I can see a contempt for something in the office, yet it seems to be directed towards the groups of officeworkers being sheep prettymuch, and when an individual enters the herd they are threatened. If this is the point you are drawing towards then the officeplace is not 'perverse' it is natural. Our desire to succeed is not something against the norm. Maybe you should expand on your statement. Also a majority of affairs are committed with a fellow workperson, perhaps this would go against your comment that 'offices are not sexy.' I would be interested to know what you think.
Hmmmmm... it's not really about any of that, though, is it? And any debate about boning secretaries draws away from the actual story. Within any story there are possible arcs that remain unexplored. For whatever reason.
Hmmmmm...what is it about then?
A pedant speaks! It's not perverse, as such, to have an office affair: perversity is an act which transgresses (a) society's code of sexual norms.
I'd read group think as a meta-version of the individual-in-the-herd story, something about the fetishization of the different, as well as something about male self-deceit. Well, I would if I was interpreting. But I think that we have a ruse of some description on our hands...
I don’t know what the ruse might be, but for me ‘Group Think’ looks like a suggestion of the possible consequences of the homogenised, highly polished personas many of us - students, academics (as most Schemes contributors are) included - seem to take on in order to hide our fears/inadequacies/self-doubt. As if being human is simply too messy, we create a surface of confidence through daily routines of self-satisfied rhetoric, as the group does. The voices of the wives add to the pressure built up in such a system of public self-assurance, where social lies are internalised as truths (apparently their main concern is with orgasms – understandable; everybody’s getting great sex and getting it frequently, aren’t they?) Where do our fears go to hide when we smother them over like this? Perhaps they do come out in self-loathing, nervous breakdowns, psychological disorders, clubbing each other with office chairs…
the role of pedant has already been adequately filled, so i'll rally with the masses on this one and stick to happy, cross-eyed speculation.
firstly i'll be a shit and say i thought this piece seemed out of place in its format... it either wanted some decocting to be made into a poem (kind of hard, flat lines of semi-prose mirroring the mental environment) or some beefing out to make it more of a short story. it seems to occupy a kind of uncomfortable middle ground between the two...like a synopsis somehow.
secondly i liked it quite a lot as an idea, and regardless of the above criticism, thought it worked well at creating the mood and building the whimsical (yet deep-seated) inferiorities of the people portrayed. i especially liked it when the office workers made jokes about the main guy's sexual problems, attempting to temporarily side-step their own fears on the subject.
it's always difficult to be honest with this kind of thing, and i always feel like i end up sounding either morose and constipated or in some way intoxicated.
i think, with regards to the theme of the piece, i agree with amy above, that it illustrates well the way we hide our humanity constantly... and are even threatened by those who show glimpses of it.
i suppose that's why i liked this piece - it showed the cracks appearing in a persona (albeit an exaggerrated one) in a funny way, without being cheap about it or excruciatingly predictable (just the mention of fightclub made me start cracking knuckles).
anyway
this thing is really getting moving now. 9 comments!...
3 cheers for jennifer.
Hi,
I liked the whole concept of conformity versus individualism. I also liked the way the blank, almost dull (although not), writing style reflected the minds of the speakers. One thing I didn't really agree with - more of a personal thing than anything - was where you said that 'productivity was down' because the person was being individualistic. I always like to think individualism increases productivity. The link between uniformity and sexual pleasure also seems a bit weird - isn't the exotic/danger type aspect more exciting than the familiar? What do you think?
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