blogvember 1: the memories that grip me and pin me down

2025-11-01

this post is part of a series: blogvember 2025.

1. the memories that grip me and pin me down

about the title: lyrics to “silence” by pj harvey. it doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of this blog post.

a baffling introduction.

hello, world. this morning i was reading excerpts from the november issue of the baffler. titled after words, the thesis of the entire issue is built on the notion that we are in a post-literate society, a new orality: driven by an anti-intellectual elite through the medium of television, while an anxious and hyper-aware youth are broadly recalcitrant to engage with literature. the undercurrent behind all of this, of course, is none other than our new societal collective frenemy¹, chatgpt, which even i am tiring worrying over.

now i’m blogging this as i’m watching game 7 of the world series (go jays!). television’s tantalizing talons are everywhere, truly. but earlier, i was sitting in the cafe, and i found it hard to focus. i imagined i looked quite agitated, struggling to write even a single word in my diary by hand, gasping as if a fish out of water. but really i’m just quite tired these days.

that’s when i decided that i would spend november doing a challenge! some people write a novel. others grow out a beard or abstain from all sorts of vices. but it was this passage from the baffler article that really stood out to me, summarizing walter ong’s perspectives on orality versus literacy:

Oral culture was “aggregative rather than analytic”—full of redundancy, traditionalist in disposition, and embedded in the “human lifeworld,” rather than allowing abstract thought. Therefore, it was conservative and traditional, against innovation and any departure from the long-established norms of agricultural life. Repetition, cliché, and formulas are essential, as in Homer with his repeated phrases such as “swift ships” and “wine-dark sea.” With writing comes precision, analytical rigor, deliberate word choices, analytic remove from life, and abstract thought.

i’m biased but i think that we lost something when blogging became supplanted by social media. i’m not going to pretend that most blogging was some sort of great art. no, it’s the opposite: blogging is this sort of meandering medium-form text that really no longer exists!²

things i liked this week, volume whatever: The Chair Company

all this to say, that i will seek to blog every day of this month. about something. it could be short, it could be long. all i am asking for myself is some sort of variance, just not the same thing all the time.

but since it’s day one i want to give myself a freebie: The Chair Company, written by none other than Tim Robinson.

if you have seen Tim Robinson’s other works (like i think you should leave or friendship) i feel like the first two episodes of this show felt very superficially like friendship to me, in a bad way. like friendship, the chair company centers on ron trosper, a suburban office executive who wears frumpy clothes. like friendship’s craig, ron is also insecure and anxious about his social status, within his workplace and his family. and like the world of friendship, the world of the chair company is one that is ordinary and banal in the eyes of its protagonist it becomes scary and hostile.

or is it? i feel like the chair company is much nicer to its protagonist. ron, despite his flaws, occasional short temper, and paranoiac tendencies, is a good person. he strives to be a good dad, to be there for his wife and children. in the tradition of many workplace comedies like the office (us), because we see ron exist in this world out of the office, we are more likely to sympathize with him. but because we see it at the start, it doesn’t come off as cheap or forced like it sometimes did with the office, while we still get to see a lot of workplace comedy hijinx (there’s a particularly fun gag involving a highly territorial office party planner in episode 3.)

so the chair company is part-workplace comedy, part-heartwarming dad story, but what makes it special? the plot that ties the two together: the investigation into the titular chair company, the one who made the chair that collapsed disastrously on ron’s big day in the first episode, the one that convinced ron that there’s some sinister force in the world trying to ruin the life of ohio’s foremost suburban mall developer. it’s this plotline that sees him buddying up with mike santini (joseph tudisco) to investigate this sinister force that seems to just grow increasingly surreal from episode-to-episode. or maybe none of this is happening and all of this is just an excuse to have a good time hanging out with his newfound buddy: we’re never quite sure what is going on.

so to catch you up, the show is part-workplace comedy, part-dad story, part-severance-style existential mystery, part-buddy cop story, and possibly part-hallucinatory folie a deux. and it didn’t take itself particularly seriously in any of this (why would it? it’s tim robinson we’re talking about here!) which is to say that none of it was clicking for me.

that is, until episode 3, where he investigates a mysterious company called red ball market global.. he finds a number, calls it, gets put on hold to a surprisingly catchy but monotonous corporate anthem (it’s so catchy it’s now the soundtrack that plays in my head when i see something that smacks of neoliberalism). And all the meanwhile he is browsing and trying to make sense of their fundamentally meaningless website, a big prime juicy cut of insipid corporate copywriting—all with the finest buzzwords piped fresh out of a datacenter slopped all over. while on hold (for 5 hours), he shoots the shit with mike, who is clearly his friend now, and in a moment of vulnerability, ron says to mike: “That’s the problem with the world today. People make garbage, and you can’t talk to anybody.”

and i think that’s what really ties together the chair company: the sincerity behind the whole show. i can forgive so much about it, because it is such a sincere work, and that is so rare to see a work of media in 2025 wear its heart on its chest like that. it’s true, we live in a world of impersonal slop. the naecdote to that might get a little weird and even alienating. but as long as it doesn’t harm anyone, it’s worth it.

ok that was it for today! i will decide what to blog about tomorrow. bye for now!