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October 24, 2022
Christine Sneed's Playlist for Her Novel "Please Be Advised"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Christine Sneed's Please Be Advised is a brilliantly inventive and satirical office novel told through interoffice memos.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"Like Calvin Kasulke's Several People Are Typing, this is a timely, witty, and thoughtful satire of the absurdities of corporate existence, one with numerous memorable characters and absurd setpieces reminiscent of David Foster Wallace's corporate lampoons."
In her own words, here is Christine Sneed's Book Notes music playlist for her novel Please Be Advised:
Office Memorandum
Date: 18 October 2022
To: All Book Notes Readers
From: Christine Sneed, Writer & Quality Control/Official Donut Taster, Quest Industries
Subj: Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos Playlist
Having been invited by Largehearted Boy to provide a playlist for my novel-in-memos, Please Be Advised, I had to take a quick break from my new job in Quest Industries’ QC department where my primary role is donut taster.
While writing Please Be Advised, I taste-tested a substantial number of donuts, and although some were of questionable quality, which necessitated a second test-donut to ensure the first hadn’t been an anomaly, I enjoyed the experience heartily.
If you’re curious, my favorite donuts were the ones wearing a shaggy coconut toupee—the bigger, the better. Forget the sprinkles, the custard, the jelly. Coconut 4evah!
Please Be Advised focuses on a fictional Chicago corporation, Quest Industries, which was inspired by a few of my former office jobs, beginning in high school in the late 1980s with a collection agency where I was paid $3.65 an hour to do secretarial work and cover for the comically fast-talking receptionist, Edie, when she took her breaks. I still remember the skip-tracers and the other staff there fondly. When a coworker’s husband called, I’d hear their German shepherd barking in the background before I transferred the call. The dog missed her, her husband said.
Pursuant to this memo is my playlist for Please Be Advised. (Coconut donuts and an Americano are the recommended pairing, sugar + caffeine = office fuel.)
“Bang the Drum All Day,” Todd Rundgren
This was the first song that came to mind when I began to think about what might embody this novel’s tone and ethos. Rundgren’s exuberant 1983 screed against office drudgery is an anthem for ennui-assailed corporate employees and malcontents everywhere, and certainly some of the characters in Please Be Advised would have it in heavy rotation on their MP3 players.
“Money for Nothing,” Dire Straits
I remember seeing Noam Chomsky interviewed for the documentary Manufacturing Consent—I think it was in this film that he said capitalism, and its requirement that workers sell large portions of their lives to businesses that pay a stingy hourly wage, was in his view a deeply immoral system, and it ensures the deck is forever stacked in favor of the owner class (“Money for nothing…get your chicks for free.”) This resonated with me greatly: How could I, making a paltry wage at most of my jobs, well into my 30s, ever hope to get ahead? In my late teens I realized I wanted to be a writer, and so it turned out I was living a kind of double con: working poorly paying jobs and gambling my life on writing! Nonetheless…my thought has always been: Maybe one day I’ll write a critically excellent book that will also make me rich! That is a dream, certainly, many of us writers hold dear. In Please Be Advised, I address wage slavery in several memos—the Quality Control department, for example, pays its tiny staff salaries of $22,500/year.
“Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” Meatloaf
Judith Kemper, Quest Industries’ Vice President of Marketing, would be furious if she knew “Paradise” is in this playlist because she hates Meatloaf records so much that at a karaoke night at her favorite bar in Lisle, Illinois, she once bribed a server to sprinkle two crushed Ativans on the nacho plate of a man who kept requesting Meatloaf songs. Judith’s enmity aside, this song ranks right up there with the best of the way-too-long, angsty pop ballads of the last forty years, and one of my college roommates loved it, so here it is. (My favorite moment in Meatloaf’s career, however, wasn’t musical—it was his star turn in Fight Club.)
“When Doves Cry,” Prince
Prince is a presiding spirit at Quest Industries, for one, his song catalog was a favorite at Judith’s karaoke night, and an obsession of new Quest employee Chantal Watkins’, whose story of personal triumph describes the evening she and two friends encountered His Royal Badness outside a shawarma slinger’s in Manhattan. Soft-spoken Prince pulled up in a purple limo and bestowed a compliment Chantal would never forget. She was so startled by this encounter, she managed to drop a pile of greasy French fries on her new suede boots, but it was worth it.
“Manic Monday,” The Bangles (written by His Royal Badness)
I still find this song irresistible, and it made the dread that almost always descended on Sunday evenings when I worked in an office five days a week a little less onerous. Lower Level Management at Quest knows employees are often stricken with Sunday-evening dread, and in an effort to obtain a clearer picture of what ails their colleagues, they create a wellness survey. Sample questions include: How many of us are sex addicts? Who suffers from restless leg syndrome? Are you a peeping Tom? The survey is sent out so hopefully. They are aiming for full participation! (You can imagine what happens to these hopes.)
“Erotica,” Madonna
Speaking of star turns, when Hal Hanson, a candy-addicted accounting clerk, shares his story of personal triumph with everyone at Quest, he chooses to describe the day he worked as an extra when a Will Ferrell production came to town. Hal was outfitted in a dress, high heels, and a long-haired wig, and by the end of the day he’d sweated through the dress and wig so thoroughly, the wardrobe mistress let him keep them. On the way home from the set, he stopped in at a local bar and enter their weekly drag queen contest. Hal, who doesn’t have an ironic or insincere bone in his body, knew he was outmatched but tried with all his heart.
“Partita in A Minor, BWV 1013,” Johann Sebastian Bach
This Bach composition was chosen by Bobbie Kramer in Accounts Receivable when she decided on a whim tried out for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Her frenemy from college, who had plagiarized a paper Bobbie wrote for their Faulkner seminar and slept with Bobbie’s boyfriend, also auditioned for the CSO. Bobbie couldn’t help but gloat when she was chosen for the orchestra and her loathsome frenemy was not. Ultimately, she wasn’t able to accept the offer the CSO made because the pay wasn’t as much as she’d hoped, and her husband had just knocked out all his teeth in a bungee-jumping accident and needed more attention than usual. Regardless, she was thrilled she’d made the cut and bested her old frenemy.
Lankybox: “The Donut Song!”
Quest Industries has an official donut policy, which one of the junior attorneys at Gounes and Flinderman LLC, Quest’s legal representatives, conveys to all employees early in the novel. There is a strict no-hoarding-at-your-desk and no-reselling-office-donuts-to-children-and-tourists-on-the-street policy in effect and anyone who thumbs their nose at it risks excoriation by President Bryan Stokerly, Esq., company leader and holder of a BFA in Fiber Arts.
Christine Sneed is the author of Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos (7.13 Books, 10/18/22) and the editor of Love in the Time of Time's Up (Tortoise Books, 10/4/22), a short fiction anthology, to which she is also a contributor. Her four previous books include two novels and two story collections, the most recent are Paris, He Said and The Virginity of Famous Men. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, the New York Times, O Magazine, New England Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, New Stories from the Midwest, Glimmer Train, and many other periodicals. She has received the Grace Paley Prize, the Society of Midland Authors Award, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, among other honors. She teaches for the MFA programs at Northwestern University and Regis University.
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