Let’s Get Physical: What's So Great About Working in a Cubicle?

By Margaret Wheeler Johnson, AlterNet. Posted June 13, 2009.

Crawford is a fan of Zen's "democratic poetry" and says his own book has "similar aspirations." He doesn't think it's fair to fault Pirsig for using "language that New Age-y people took up shortly thereafter." Unlike them, says Crawford, Pirsig was engaging with serious philosophers, from Copernicus to Hume.

Still, Shop Class is not Zen. Crawford does not invite the reader to take a sojourn from the everyday in order to have a conversation about truth. His chosen metaphor is not the journey but the journeyman, the tradesman who makes his own way using knowledge he has acquired from working with physical materials.

Shop Class is about facing reality, and this is the part that is likely to get under people's skin. "What will alienate some will thrill others," says Mobley. "This is a polemic. The goal is to change lives." Mobley also thinks the book will strike readers on a personal level, as it did her. "I felt this applied to me. Anyone who's ever felt, 'WTF am I doing in the workplace?' will."

Back at the Roosevelt Hotel, looking at his cover options, Crawford has come around to his publisher's final choice. They were going to go with a picture of him in his shop surrounded by bikes and tools.

"It was a little too specific," says Crawford, who feared readers would think it was a how-to book. Instead, they've chosen a shot of a lone bike, a red 1967 BMW R50, leaning up against the wall of a shed. "Initially I thought, 'Really?' It seemed too blank. I was worried that it would look like a travelogue. But now I think it works."

Crawford has mixed feelings about the buzz that has been building around the book. The New York Times Magazine is going to publish a 5000-word excerpt ("I'm told that's a pretty big deal," he says ingenuously). The book also received a starred review from Publisher's Weekly, and made the "highbrow/brilliant" zone of New York magazine's Approval Matrix.

"I feel like I've been sort of … anointed this voice in the culture by people who, if they'd seen me two years ago when I was just fixing motorcycles would have said, 'What are you doing with your life?' "

But it takes more than big ideas to make a book big, and Crawford is uncomfortable commodifying himself to sell copies. Penguin has planned a multicity tour that Crawford is approaching with trepidation. He doesn't like speaking extemporaneously; he likes to think carefully about how he presents his thoughts, to control the narrative. One way he has dealt with this is insisting that some interviews be conducted via e-mail. He will not answer questions like, "Are you this funny in real life?" or even, "How did you become a writer?"

At the center of Crawford's argument is the need to turn away from the self. One of the aspects of manual work that he values most is the way it forces the individual to cope with external reality.

"A carpenter faces the accusation of his level, an electrician the question whether the lights are in fact on," he writes in Shop Class. "Such standards have a universal validity." In his own trade, Crawford has to deal with the fact that elderly motorcycles "truly are a pain in the ass." They have their own needs and limits, and they won't run until specific conditions are met. Furthermore, what ails them is not always obvious. Frustration abounds. "Old bikes don't flatter you," Crawford remarks, "they educate you." In the shop, in other words, narcissism doesn't stand a chance.

Fortunately, Crawford's humility doesn't diminish the force of his argument -- or his confidence in his ideas. He uses humor but doesn't revel in the "dark absurdism" of Office Space or The Office. "Absurdity is good as comedy but bad as a way of life," he writes.

Yet, despite the cogency of his arguments and his down-and-dirty sensibility, Crawford comes across as a sort of innocent, especially when it comes to sensing how others will perceive him.

For instance, it doesn't appear to have occurred to him that female readers could take issue with the way he talks about women in Shop Class. He compares the overly emotional, nonconfrontational dynamic of the modern office to that of a clique of girls in which it is hard to know where you stand, "because of the forms and manners of sisterhood." Elsewhere, he writes that Volkswagens, which he used to work on as a teenager, "tend to get passed around like cheap whores, and it is rare to find one that hasn't been pawed at."

Mobley admits that some have criticized her for not excising these passages, but she stood her ground. "That's the way he sees the world," she says. His attitude does seem to stem from a genuine, traditional, almost chivalric view of male honor. In a rare burst of romanticism from this self-described stoic, he writes, "People who ride motorcycles have gotten something right, and I want to put myself in the service of it, this thing that we do, this kingly sport."

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