Steal Stuff From Work, by Jasper Pierce
Description
A red or blue paperback and black hardback. Steal Stuff From Work, by Jasper Pierce, is a novel about bad waiters who take things too far.
Links
- Joel Gillespie interviews Jasper Pierce in Smile Politely
- Order new on Amazon
- Order used an Abebooks
- Review by Megan Milks in American Book Review
Reviews
We might consider Steal Stuff From Work an anti-capitalist manifesto in novel form, a call to arms whose urgency is dampened only by the malaise that washes the narrative. Debut novelist Jasper Pierce has created a world defined by worker dissatisfaction and its attendant resentment, recognizably ours but pushed a notch out of realism and into the realm of the neardystopic . That this near-dystopia hews so closely to social realism is telling, and shows a novelist hitting his mark with a strong indictment of the US labor system.
Dramatizing the plight of various characters stuck in menial jobs with no benefits or health care, the book extends this realism into the speculative, imagining what might happen if such laborers united—and revolted. The results are mixed, making for a more complex argument than simply socialist revolution as easy fix.
We follow Kemp as he moves from job to job, his fragmented narration effectively mimicking the fragmentary nature of a life lived in part-time, the uneasy feeling of losing one’s identity to multiple meaningless, disposable jobs. How to maintain some semblance of personal dignity in the capitalist workplace? Following Kemp’s logic, you steal stuff from work. He explains his MO early on:
I’ve had jobs every day of my life since I was eight. My spirit had just about been hammered flat. Working took its toll on me, until the day I started taking my toll on it. I had become so exhausted and demoralized that by the end of the day I was no longer taking any of myself home from work. So I started taking some of my work home with me.
As Kemp moves from job to job, from dishwasher to server to telephone book distributor to bookseller to Web designer to bed-and-breakfast lackey, he swipes, or helps others swipe, the following : steaks, alcohol, a mounted black bear, gardening tools, books, records, a city bus, a hotel room, the obligatory toilet paper, and more. He collects jobs; he collects things stolen from jobs.
When he finds himself reunited with his old friend Jasper, who has made a home of his workplace , a Rent-a-Room inside the mall where Kemp distributes phone books, a revolution is hatched. Or rather, an already hatched revolution swells, as it’s really Jasper’s brainchild from the start, with Kemp putting aside his apathy to help make his friend’s vision reality. Jasper is more elusive and transitory than Kemp, his politics more radical; if this were Fight Club (1996) (and the two texts’similarities are worth noting), Jasper would be the Tyler Durden to Kemp’s anonymous narrator.
Together, Jasper, Kemp, and their cohorts found Steal Stuff From Work Day, concentrating on spreading word to disgruntled employees nationwide in preparation for the November 11th holiday. Kemp builds a website where he uploads SSFW business cards to be downloaded and printed by their network of Kinko’s employees. The group plans and pulls off (or doesn’t quite) pranks like making CDs and playing them in stores that sell CD players. “When it explodes,” the mastermind explains, “the employees go to turn off the music and find a label on the CD with a note about Steal Stuff From Work Day.” Through these kinds of schemes, the group is able to organize and execute a day of mass-scale vocational kleptomania.
Through relating these schemes, too, the novel acts as a how-to manual for the reader, its title functioning as much as a command as a description of the events its covers contain. A number of schemes are offered up as ways to blast holes in the system, ways to unite the masses. There is a note of caution, however, as the pranksters don’t always win. People get hurt. There are fires. Injuries. Citywide calamity.
As all this goes on, Jasper, Kemp, and their crew are squatting in a farm-turned-commune guarded by stolen police cars. Kemp, the apathetic foil to Jasper’s radical socialist, asks himself whether this new situation is much better. Disillusioned with the community he has helped create, Kemp wants out, and quickly leaves to fend for himself. While the novel at times veers anxiously close to Adbusters didacticism, Kemp's sustained ambivalence about the movement he's founded keeps it from reachinghe's founded keeps it from reaching that point.
As well, Kemp's contradictory ethics are questionable, making him somewhat unreliable and thus more complex as a narrator. "I'm principled," he says. "I never steal from coworkers or customers, only from the job itself." Despite these self-proclaimed principles, he can't help but steal wine from a friend, and vegetables from the farm. Kemp's politics are earnest, but his principles breached. Who is the enemy? It's no longer clear: his kleptomania overpowers his ideology.
The novel enacts a revolution whose conse- quences remain ambiguous at the close of the book. Whether or not Steal Stuff From Work Day is a feasible solution to the problem, the problem exists: humans as workers are undervalued. The novel's great strength is its ability to proliferate parables describing this problem, and Kemp's rhetoric fre- quently sears. While his more ideologically driven moments occasionally come off as overwrought, their sheer earnestness forgives the melodrama. Structured as a progression of short vignettes, his narration is interspersed with shorter, more urgent passages rendered in italics and often using the collective "we" to abstract Kemp's story to a more universal problem. "What was wrong with us that we couldn't pay for childcare, tuition or a trip to the dentist?" he laments. "Given every chance to become middle class, we had fallen flat."
Steal Stuff From Work Day provides an oppor- tunity for the employees of the world — and by this time, the organization has made a global impact — to seize power and resources. And it works — or seems to, at least partially. The aftermath, according to tele- vision and newspaper accounts, is part apocalypse, part new world, with neither version winning out. When, in the last few passages, the point of view shifts from Kemp's "T" to second person and finally to third-person limited, there is a confusion of per- spective that seems intentional. Where throughout the novel the reader is asked to do a good bit of work filling in gaps left when jumping between scenes and temporalities, here the reader is left with a number of irresolvable ambiguities. This is less irksome than it is fitting, for, by the end of Steal Stuff From Work Day, few people, Kemp included, know what has happened. The revolution has taken place. Now what?
Milks, Megan. "Vocational Kleptomania." American Book Review, vol. 30 no. 4, 2009, p. 19-19. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/abr.2009.0110.
Steal Stuff From Work: An Interview with Author Jasper Pierce by Joel Gillespie, published in Smile Politely 2008 October 13.
Once in a while, a book comes along that makes a real impression that lasts long after you put it down. Steal Stuff From Work, new from Jasper Pierce on Spineless Books, is a great reflection of our current state of affairs, and a signal of what may be to come. Kemp, a light-fingered dishwasher at an upscale Seattle restaurant (as well as an employee at other menial jobs), steals from his employers while trying to keep his life in order. When a theft goes wrong, he loses his restaurant job and organizes others for a National Steal Stuff From Work Day. Things spiral out of control, on both a personal and societal level. It’s a moving and disorienting tale of extreme commitment that springs from roots of extreme apathy.
After the jump, Jasper Pierce volunteered his ideas on being overworked and underappreciated, his book’s roots in Champaign-Urbana, and the potential for revolution in the United States. Stick around and check it out.
Smile Politely: I really like the line, “A stitch of sleep before the alarm clock reopens the wound.” Exhaustion seems to be an ongoing theme in the book. Were you sleep-deprived during the writing of the book, or was that just a recollection of past experiences with exhaustion?
Jasper Pierce: The novel depicts characters who hold multiple part-time jobs, working more than forty hours a week, with no security or benefits, who still cannot make ends meet. Thus, exhaustion.
SP: The book is set in Seattle, but you’ve worked in Champaign-Urbana. What are some similarities to businesses or people in the book to their counterparts in real life?
JP: The restaurant Eisenhower’s as a setting is modeled after Kennedy’s, back before it became a tasteful golf course restaurant and was housed in Sunnycrest mall, dark and windowless, with an authentic aura of creepy malice. The owner Allen Strange is a conflation of numerous notoriously abusive, unpleasant, or incompetent restaurant owners in the twin cities, including Ray Timpone, Pal Bock (of the Original Pancake House), and Allen Strong (of the Courier and Silvercreek, among numerous other ventures). This part of the book wrote itself.
SP: The dialogue in the book is great, really snappy, with a lot of fantastic one-liners. Like, “That’s your rent money. You need that to buy beer with.” Was the dialogue made up out of whole cloth, or did you store away some gems that you’d heard?
JP: I made it up, but working as a waiter for many years I absorbed the quick, sarcastic rhythms of restaurant workers. Waiters and waitresses are caustic when out of earshot of the customers, in contrast to the polite, servile face they may present in the dining room.
SP: What’s been your experience with socialist and anarchist organizations? Are you a student of any particular political or social philosophy?
JP: I’m a socialist, with faith in the ability of ordinary people to manage their own government and economic institutions, and with a belief that the purpose of those institutions is to provide for the basic needs of the people. I am not affiliated with any organization at present and vote Democrat by default, sometimes with mild enthusiasm.
SP: The ending of the book reminds me a lot of Invisible Man, where the nameless protagonist is holed up in a room full of light. Was that an intentional parallel or, if not, do you think it’s a comparable situation?
JP: The character of Kemp could not ride out the consequences of his beliefs and becomes permanently alienated both from society and his former friends. The parallel to Ellison was not intentional, but kudos to you for making that connection—it’s most flattering.
SP: What is your background? In the book, the narrator’s mother is a professional strikebreaker and his father owns restaurants. Were you trying to say something about the necessity of proper parenting, or rather, something about the lack of conformity passed down and therefore less complicity?
JP: Kemp’s alienation from his workplace and the world began at home. His parents treated him like an employee, a liability, or an asset, regarding him as an uncertain economic investment rather than a human to be loved unconditionally.
SP: Was the character of Cy (a waiter whose competence is matched only by his kleptomania) based on a real person, and if so, what is that person up to now?
JP: Cy was originally based on a guy named Cy who lives in New Hampshire, but became infused with the mannerisms of Louis, who is a professional waiter at an upscale steakhouse in Cincinnati.
SP: “I wondered what kind of glue would hold the city together when money stopped working.” What do you imagine would be the glue?
JP: It would have to be compassion. Otherwise it would be blood. I believe people are hard-wired to care for and respect one another, though, as we mature, this programming gets overwritten with greed, ambivalence, cowardice, fear, and self-interest, which are all characteristics rewarded by this economic system.
SP: “Money is at most paper, no more than a bribe and threat, an imaginary negative number.” No question here, just really liked the line.
JP: :)
SP: I really liked the preventing information highway robbery announcement. Have you had jobs that passed out crap like that, except not as self-awarely? What the hell?
JP: Never have I worked anyplace with that level of self-awareness, but that memo makes explicit a characteristic of many office jobs I have held. Underachievers are valuable assets, posing no threat to the managerial class.
SP: What is the most interesting thing that you’ve stolen from work?
JP: Myself.
But the important question is not what but why. Why would you be tempted to steal from work, if you would never steal from a store or from church or from strangers? Because the work you do has no human value? Because your boss doesn’t appear to work or even know how his business is run and yet has bought many antique cars with the revenue his laborers generate? Because you have more charm and fire and education and work experience than the neurotic managing editor who assigns you his grunt work? Because there’s something innately offensive about making $10/hour to park Lexuses for New England assholes whose dogs get better health care than you? Because you got paid minimum wage to remove asbestos from a greenhouse in July? Because you were meant for something better? Because we all were?
SP: I also saw a lot of parallels to Fight Club, even in the female character passed back and forth between the main characters. Did you ever consider Jasper and Kemp being two sides of the same personality?
JP: Not as such. They both grew out of my personality to some extent, but were also modeled on real people. The characters, to the best of my ability, were meant to be complements to one another: mutually exclusive personalities, in other words.
SP: Was this set in the present-day? There really weren’t a lot of clues that I recognized. What do you imagine Kemp is up to now?
JP: The novel is set in 2011, though this is not revealed. This future world is the same as the present day, if trends (such as rising gas prices) continue. Although this is far from clear in Steal Stuff From Work, a deadly virus is unleashed on Steal Stuff From Work Day, stolen from a lab, and a plague sweeps the world. Kemp is likely to be one of the survivors, because of his total isolation in the secret hotel room. He will be one of those who gets to rebuild society, whether or not he is up to the task.
SP: Do you think there’s any potential for actual revolution in the US? Do you consider the book more of a cautionary tale, call to arms, or a bit of both?
JP: On the path we’re on, social collapse seems inevitable. There is potential for revolution in the U.S.—that’s how our country was founded. The book is a call to arms. One of the reasons it is set in Seattle was to honor the Seattle General Strike of 1919, which still stands as a model of what a united population could accomplish.
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REVIEW BY IAIN MATHESON
If iter_ability_ marks/divides and exceeds from the start (sic:)) then iter_ation_ - caught in a lop-sided reversal of act into potential,made a sub-transcendental asymptote - never comes,can never come. Repetition then must stand a kind of difference.
I gabble this mantra to make myself feel better about opening another /mail with apologies for the delay.:)
I think _Steal Stuff From Work_ is a little masterpiece. I'd like to concentrate on pp. 44-.
From p. 55 a generalised redistribution - initially individual--anarchistic,tendentially (as Machiavellied by Cy's spectacular theft of a grand piano pp. 48-50) (only) a gesture: constrained by (available) stock and by financial and as it were political prudence i.e. constrained by objective pro-fetishism/exploitation - phases (freed of the first constraint but not the second) into a high-potential reformist activism; but once put beyond _both_ constraints i.e. massified: converted into (a tactic of) destruction _as opposed to destructuration_ it (said redistribution) phases once more into a lawless/feudalised (= honest:)) (neo-)capitalism - retrieving (the violent _phenomenon_ of) property relations by way effectively of a dominating/principal commodity fetishism (this the constitutive mis-recognition of capitalism itself: the homeostatification of feudal fetishism (exchange-value)),implicitly fusing the previous forces means and relations of production into an/_the_ instrument of production in a new infrastructure _itself_ - finally - the neither formal nor real subsumption by capitalism of (what counts today as) (radical) _reality_). Of contingent dialectical necessity then said redistribution's truth is _non/apocalyptically_ to _destructure_ _nothing_:
STAGE 1 2a 2b 3
PAGE REFERENCE ...p.44 pp.48-50 pp.55-59 pp.62/64-
DIEGESIS ...William's Cy's the the
Kinko's piano meeting janitor/
email theft William's
dis-
illusion;
general
dis/
integration
COMPOSITION Redistribution Gesture Reformism Neo-capitalism
(individual-- [expressive (collectivist: [contingent--
anarchist: immediacy] pre-rational) necessary
formal)/ term;
gesture contingent
[latency] dialectical
mediacy]
/ |-------------------------------X--------------X
MODEL X
|--------------X
Note the difficult logic of all this establishes not the contingency but the necessity of our 'dialectical mediacy'.--No doubt it is finally in something like these terms that we should understand both capitalism's 'ghostly' resilience(s?) and the historical lesson of the American Revolution,perhaps the only (founding) event by which capitalism's '''identity'''/_system(s?)_ was/were exposed - precisely in and by being assumed in practice.)
Still there hides in 2b's warmth and in the difficult logic of the shift from 2b to 3 the transcendental blueprint of an im/mediate/interstitial utopia: reformist praxis _lived_ (thus as a pre-communism) _i.e. outwith any (constructive)
attempt to render this pre-communism (strategically) explicit by way of destruction_,_outwith (as the first Wittgenstein might say) any attempt to _speak_ a(n only) showable/_. Because a more-than-reformist praxis carried out under the same conditions could yield yet more than a _pre-_communism.--Is that the real lesson of _Mai '68_?
Bibliographic Details
Published 2006-09-01 by Spineless Books. ISBN: 9780980139235 . Distributed by Ingram.
Binding: Cloth, case laminate, or paper$11.11
Cover art by Scott Westgard.