Miss Edith Does Not Have an MBA or Driver's License But Reads "Tepper Isn't Going Out" Anyway

Miss Edith, as a woman of the world (or at least, of her own world), has experienced a number of workplace environments. Yes: Miss Edith has even worked at a fancy women’s shoe boutique, selling ludicrously overpriced little slices of leather to ladies who lunch. Miss Edith did this for two weeks, saw her paycheck, and immediately quit. But she can honestly say she’s worked as a shoe saleswoman.

And Miss Edith has basically been in rather specialized forms of sales ever since. Most of all, it is Miss Edith’s experience that she sells herself; it is the persona of Miss Edith that seems to generate sales of the items at hand. Sales is about personality in ways that people do not always understand or realize. It’s about how conveying a certain kind of personality at specific moments. Miss Edith does not have an MBA (can you fucking imagine if she did? That would be unreal) but she’s been known to reel in customers like they were little silly fishies in a cool New Hampshire lake. She often thinks about this and has gone so far as to opine that MBA courses could do well to offer courses on Miss Edith. Certainly, with all the time they’re not using to study ethics, they could do worse than to study Miss Edith…

But she digresses.

The life of Miss Edith, Literary Vendeuse, seldom overlaps with her actual literary life, in the sense that she tends to not read so many books about sales or marketing. It’s been known to happen, though. A few years back I read some work by Paco Underhill, and actually found it rather interesting. I’ve read Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool. I have even read books by MBA types for MBA types, about sales, about business language, about increasing customer service. Frankly, it’s amazing to me that Miss Edith has actually spent time reading this shit – and, overwhelmingly, it is shit. But when one sells for a living, sometimes, one must read books one does not find actually entertaining. Not that I didn’t enjoy Paco Underhill – I don’t want to sound like I’m insulting him; I found his works light but interesting – Miss Edith doesn’t have any quibbles with Paco Underhill. But overwhelmingly, these books for business types are dreck to the nth degree.

A recent jaunt to the local library on a fine weekday afternoon led me to borrow six different books. There were two YA novels; two lit’ry fiction type of things, both on the light side; a recent book about women’s economic position in the U.S. today, and a work on the demise of the English language. The first title I began to read was Calvin Trillin’s popular novel of a few years back, Tepper Isn’t Going Out. I’ve long admired Trillin’s food writing, and may be the only person under the age of 50 who actually owns a copy of Floater. I read his recently-published-in-book-form tribute to his wife, Alice, when it was originally printed in The New Yorker, and was swept away by it like everyone else. (Miss Edith isn’t entirely hard-hearted, you know.) Basically, it doesn’t get much better than Calvin Trillin – so it was high time I read Tepper.

Tepper Isn’t Going Out is a novel about parking, a subject I don’t think about much because I don’t drive. But what I didn’t expect is that it’s also a book about sales – about lead generation. Are there other novels that discuss the nuts-and-boltsy aspect of the business world like this? I cannot name any. Has anyone any titles to offer?

If you do, please let Miss Edith know; she’s really most curious to read fiction that talks about the boring side of business; books about business that aren’t actually business books. And don’t give me Ayn Rand, friends. Give me something under the radar. Give me something that wasn’t written by some “it” boy interviewed in last month’s NYT Magazine. Surprise me.

I have enjoyed reading Tepper thus far and look forward to finishing it. Perhaps by the time I’m done I’ll have even greater insight into why the business world is as revolting as it currently is. But in the meantime, I’d like to recommend to MBA types (hello?) and those who work for MBA types but feel they deserve better (yes, you, sweetie) a short list of books that will remind you all that talking like an MBA is not, truly not, an admirable thing. “You’re an animal!” is not a compliment when said outside the bedroom. There is no good reason for speaking sentences that mean nothing at all unless you are Lewis Carroll. Remind yourself of what it’s like to be a person by exposing yourself to these books, which, yes, Miss Edith has actually read.

Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter’s Guide by Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway, and Jon Warshawsky


The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit: An A to Z Lexicon of Empty, Enraging, and Just Plain Stupid Office Talk by Lois Beckwith

Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth about Bullshit by Laura Penny

As the eminent Irish business man Bernard Black says, “Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes.”

Miss Edith Is Feeling a Little Cranky; Harry Potter Can Go To Hell.

There are many books that Miss Edith hears about, and she gets all worked up – nearly can’t sit still until pub date arrives and the book can fall into her sweaty little hands.

None of the Harry Potter titles have fallen into this category.

So don’t ask me if I’m excited about the new Harry Potter. I truly, truly, do not care. I read the first one a few years back and was bored to tears.

(I’m the child who didn’t like Narnia, either. I slept through the Star Wars movies my mother dragged me to as a child – yes, Miss Edith was once a child, though there is a legend that tells of her being hatched at the age of 14, holding an amber cigarette holder – and I’ve never read a word of Tolkien. Not a fan of “magic realism,” either, by and large. (There are a couple of exceptions to this, but I can’t remember any of them off the top of my head.) I like my fiction to be about real people I can identify with. And if that makes me small-minded, or limited, so be it. I never claimed to have catholic tastes.)

I felt bad because one of these kids’ fantasy book series that actually didn’t horrify me to my core recently led me to try to read a book for which I had moderately high expectations that were dashed on the rocks like so many clamshells dropped by seagulls on the Cape Cod coast. Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, author of all those books about the Baudelaire tykes, published a novel entitled Adverbs. I actually enjoyed the first of the Baudelaire books when I read it a ways back. I didn’t read Adverbs when it first came out, but I noticed it at the library recently so I thought, “Oh what the hell” and took it out.

The fact that I didn’t open it within three hours of borrowing it was a bad sign, to be sure. But I eventually did open it, and I read the first 50 or so pages. Today I intend to return it, unfinished, and I intend to not waste any guilty energy on that subject. I think it’s actually an accomplishment of sorts that I’ve reached a point where I can get rid of an unread book without feeling bad about it. Why should I spend time reading things I don’t want to read? I’m not in school. I have free will. I can re-read Paul Rudnick’s I’ll Take It over and over again – and do – and will choose that piece of clever fluff, any day, over Daniel Handler.

I did read Handler’s novel of opera and incest, Watch Your Mouth I believe it’s called, and wondered vaguely why this wasn’t a more recognized cult novel. But maybe I was thinking about it too hard. All I can say is, if you have no interest in Adverbs, don’t feel bad, but if you liked the Lemony Snicket books but want to go further with it, try Watch Your Mouth. Even if you don’t love it, at least it’s short. And there are no sequels.

Has anyone ever pondered how books with too many sequels might be sort of a bad idea? Like movies with too many sequels? This brings me to one grand literary exception I’d make to this proposal: the works of Eric Kraft, which are all marvelous in their own way. But Mr. Kraft is a subject for another day. In the meantime, I suggest that someone start work on a dissertation doing a close contextual comparison of the Harry Potter books and movies to the oeuvre of Sylvester Stallone.

Miss Edith thanks you for your time.