I am a Very Productive Entrepreneur: A Novella

by Mathias Svalina

In this joyful critique of a Randian, post-industrial society, Mathias Svalina comments on both the compulsive desire to make the inconsumable & the often intangible recalcitrance of our attempts to create something useful in a world increasingly characterized by a manufactured sense of lack, anomie & disaffection, where we are daily beset by 'a kind of numbness, a shadow of desire or fear offset against a blank world.' Svalina refuses this numbness & offers something else, something completely stunning, in its place.

Gabriel Gudding, author of Rhode Island Notebook

This is a subversive & necessary book: the quixotic entrepreneurial spirit of individualist American capitalism is revealed as an inherently poetic construct, one that rests on theater, liminality, imaginative drive, contradiction, & failure. I am a Very Productive Entrepreneur is poignant & brilliant; it's worth the investment.

Christian Hawkey, author of Ventrakl

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Politics, Business

67 pages, Paperback

First published July 4, 2011

Reviews

[Tom Willard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started this one business that stole ideas from Mathias Svalina.

I hired a private investigator who specializes in intellectual theft. He wanders around the same places as the artist, jotting down potential sources of inspiration. What could be better than having a private investigator show you the old homeless woman struggling with her shopping cart, a jagged crack in the asphalt on 43rd or a purple hued sunset on a Wednesday night.

What people want is to see the same things Mathias saw, find that inspiration and create the same work as Svalina, although different. Once people created the same work as Svalina, they hired private investigators to follow themselves around, noting items that inspired themselves so they could write the exact same story.

Seriously, what pisses you off about this book is it is so good it inspires you to write 100 similar stories.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Each of the prose poems of Mathias Svalina’s collection I Am a Very Productive Entrepreneur begin with the line “I started this one business…” These are micro-worlds where highly skilled technicians unlock clouds for a fee, hand out sugar-water to the parents of dead children, construct skyscrapers in a client’s likeness. While the narrator’s interest... Keep reading at nthWORD Shorts:

http://shorts.nthword.com/2011/08/rev...

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wildly imaginative and loads of fun.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one I'll return to again and again. Tough to pick a favorite but the opposite of blinders was particularly ingenious.

[Jason Kron · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friggin masterpiece.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

As is the case with many of the titles Mud Luscious produces, I find that what I truly love about Svalina’s book is the certain something that is felt but cannot easily be described. In Gabriel Gudding’s blurb on the back of the book, he lauds I AM A VERY PRODUCTIVE ENTREPRENEUR as “a joyful critique of a Randian, post-industrial society.” Although I cannot disagree with this statement, I find it is something much deeper that makes Svalina’s words come alive for me, which is to say this book is a living, breathing thing, mischievous as it is.

Full review at Specter Blog: http://www.spectermagazine.com/blog/f...

[DeWitt Brinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are obvious logic problems with some of these start-up businesses. Also, I think some of them couldn't really make you rich. A lot of these businesses would cost more money than it would make. I enjoyed reading his because I want to be rich someday. I duct-taped some of Drucker's parables into this. It worked.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zero stars for the actual BUSINESS ideas in this (now hard to find) book, AND YET Mathias is still a genius for putting them onto my brain screen. Cobra fangs spewing strawberry lemonade, cars that change color every night, and people who insert commas everywhere like IN OCEANS! This book is pure idea explosion and Svalina is probably a god in some parallel universe. Praise him.

[Trey Harris]

amazing, just as good as Destruction Myth. My favorites are probably obvious picks: skyscrapers in your likeness, glass of sugar-water for parents of deceased children, parts of me to the highest bidder, covered everything in gold, etc.

[Amanda E.K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mathias - I found this in a stack of books that City O City was getting rid of when they revamped the office. At first the title caught my attention, then I saw that you were the author, so I snagged it. What a beautiful, profound, unique and unexpected collection! You are endlessly creative, my friend.

[Brie Ballard · Rating 2 out of 5]

So, a few of these really spoke to me, but most did not. Win some, lose some.

[Charles Dee Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

If some one were to tell me, "I am an entrepreneur," I would place that person somewhere on a continuum that swung from chronically unemployed to shifty to the outright criminal. Because really, who would say that? Maybe an uncle, your mother's brother, who is always hitting your own father up for investment capital. Money that will never be seen again.

When I picked up Mathias Svalina's slender volume I am a Very Productive Entrepreneur, I had all those prejudices firmly in place. I expected amusing anecdotes about a perpetual loser, an expectation reinforced when I saw that each brief entry began with the statement, "I started this one business..." But I was wrong about Svalina's undertakings and his themes. Some of Svalina's entrepreneurial schemes are outrageously impossible -- his first involves putting padlocks on clouds. Some cater to our vanities, like his proposal to build a skyscraper in his client's exact semblance. There is the occasional, peculiar act of kindness: one company leaves long blonde hairs on the pillows of bachelors. Most often, from the initial proposal, i.e., "I started this one business that released dangerous animals into quiet suburban neighborhoods," he takes the reader in a few hundred words into unexpected and often unsettling territory. He proposes to retrofit your memories with pilot lights, so they will stay lit even when you are on vacation, when you are asleep, or when your loved one has been dead for so long junk mail no longer arrives in his name.

Svalina's entrepreneurial work takes place in a sorrowful world that continues to promise endless possibilities. In this world he is both the eternal optimist and the man who's seen it all. The one thing he is not, ever, is the voice of reason. He is the voice of imagination, which offers the only possible redemption for those of us who know that the voices of doomed lovers just may end up on old dollar bills eventually so crumpled that vending machines reject them.

[Roshan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first Svalina book I've read. It is a collection of flash fictions that have some similarity to prose poems. Every sentence begins with the phrase 'i started this one business', which leads to an absurd but visually 'pretty' concept. It feels like a long writing exercise. The broad concept of the book allows Svalina to touch on a wide range of abstract ideas and pretty visuals, and it continually returns to a vague critique of consumer culture. The language is very 'light', the approach is cute and accessible. I thought"I would assign this to a high school creative writing class" as I was reading it. overall it's serviceable and entertaining, but in general a lot of the pieces lacked depth. Every piece stumbles around looking for a point until settling on something it wants to say. I felt everything 'worked' more or less but in general the pieces felt unsatisfying.

[Gabe Durham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well shoot: Before MLP died, my book was going to get to stand beside this book, and I love this book.

I think about the seeingers (sp?) in here a lot.

Part of the success is that the businesses are so diverse. The gimmick persists throughout and yet is not exhausted.

Some writers seem attracted to organizing principles because they genuinely love organizing. "Look at my individual specimens, aren't they well-labeled?" Matthias S (it seems) is instead simply looking for a suitable container to pour his brainpower into, so there is none of that over-managed quality in here.

[Martyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is superficially about the stupidity and excesses of modern commerce and capitalism but it has so much more than that going on beneath the surface. It’s also about relationships, language and love and most importantly our desire to create something that will connect us and that will last in our consciousnesses for longer than the next ad break. There were many laugh-out-loud moments and many moments of genuine tenderness too, not to mention some arresting writing. A stunning achievement.

[Nick Moran · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most imaginative writers in the game right now.

This one reminded me a lot of more of Svalina's earlier DIAGRAM writings (http://thediagram.com/7_2/svalina.html) than Destruction Myth did. I mean that in a good way, even though both are great.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had to return the book. Will come back. Really enjoying it so far.

[Deb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loving this surreal and riveting novella (serial prose poem to my way of thinking). Love it. Love.

[Biscuits · Rating 5 out of 5]

What took me so long? Ties Cataclysm Baby as my favorite MLP release. Read this aloud.