“as a human being living amidst a civilization’s collapse”: Mathias Svalina talks about his new book & gives away money
I’m pleased to present the following interview I conducted with Mathias Svalina, author of one book of poems, Destruction Myth (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), & one book of prose, the newly released I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur (Mud Luscious Press).
To celebrate the release of I.A.A.V.P.E., Mathias has decided to give away money.
One dollar to be exact, but a very special dollar…
To win, post a word from the dictionary in the comment box below. Mathias will randomly select one of the words as the winning word. To the writer of the winning word, Mathias will write a unique business plan on a dollar bill, which the winner can then showcase (or spend) to commemorate their first dollar earned.
Contest ends Friday at noon.
I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur (2)
I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur
by Mathias Svalina
Mud Luscious Press, 2011
67 pages / $12.00 Buy from Mud Luscious Press
Rating: 8.0
Mathias Svalina’s I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur has a very simple conceit: in a series of vignettes, an entrepreneur describes the outlandish businesses he’s started, and, occasionally, their reasons for not working. Thus, we learn of enterprises to turn everything into gold, to put blond hairs on the pillows of single men, to allow children to remain children forever, to retrofit memories with pilot lights and to slip old notes inside of used books by invisible employees.
1 Comment
August 23rd, 2011 / 12:17 pm
August 23rd, 2011 / 12:17 pm
I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur
I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur
by Mathias Svalina
Mud Luscious Press, 2011
67 pages / $12.00 Buy from Mud Luscious Press
Rating: 8.7
When I received Mathias Svalina’s novella, I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur in the mail, I didn’t quite know what to expect. I tore open the padded manila envelope and found myself staring at a green and orange cover with the words “a novel(la)” printed on it. Ok. Then I did a preliminary flip through of the book and didn’t see a novella at all. The book seemed to be filled with short poems, prose poems and pieces of what some would call flash fiction. Ok. I was hoping the book wasn’t going to be some failed attempt at “experimental fiction.” But, coming from Mud Luscious Press, I wasn’t exactly surprised that this book was, at first impression, well, weird. J.A. Tyler and his Mud Luscious Press have been putting lovely oddities into the world for a few years now, and I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur stayed the Mud Luscious Press course, and did not disappoint.
11 Comments
August 18th, 2011 / 12:44 pm
August 18th, 2011 / 12:44 pm
Round this–
A new major book review section is about to open, at… the Wall Street Journal?
Jeff T. Johnson’s got an essay on “The New Hybridity” at Fanzine.
Castro thinks Ahmadinejad should stop slandering the Jews. You can add that to the list of things Castro and I agree about.
Mathias Svalina has been writing Book Proposals for Broadway Books. From “My Year on a Moving Sidewalk”:
This book will be popular among readers who enjoyed such books at Mary Roach’s Stiff, Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars & the City of Portland, Oregon’s downloadable pdf “SIDEWALK REPAIR MANUAL: How to Repair and Maintain a Sidewalk.”
Bianca Stone has a new chapbook coming out. Someone Else’s Wedding Vows is now available for pre-order from Argos Books.
Tender, imaginative, wry and wise, the poems in Stone’s first collection take the reader from the bottom of the ocean to the orbit of the moon. In between, the geography of the heart is mapped lyrically and unexpectedly.
Not a lot to complain about in that description, is there?
At the Faster Times, Kyle Minor absolutely loses his shit over Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird. I stopped pretending I could follow what he was talking about somewhere toward the middle, but the upshot seems to be that he likes her book very, very much.
And finally, as if you needed me to tell you, the launch event for Richard Yates is at BookCourt tonight. It begins in about ten hours, which means that I am going to leave my house in a few minutes to head down there and claim a seat.
2 new from Brave Men
Wantttttt…
Now Available for purchase from Brave Men Press
front
THE BLACK EYE
Brian FoleyBrian Foley has had poems appear or are forthcoming in Typo, Fou, Glitterpony, No Tell Motel, Sixth Finch, and others. He edits SIR! Magazine and was recently selected by Pam Rehm for the Academy of American Poets prize. He lives in Massachusetts where he attends the MFA for Poets and Writers at Umass Amherst.
Cover is letterpressed with black ink on red paper.
Printed in a limited edition of 150.
22 pages.$9
GIANT Review: Mathias Svalina’s Destruction Myth
Published by Cleveland State University. $15.95, 83 pages.
[NOTE: The author of this review discloses a high personal regard for the author of the book under consideration.]
The first forty-four of the poems in Mathias Svalina’s Destruction Myth are called “Creation Myth”—that’s all of them except the very last one, which happens to be the title poem. It would be easy enough, and also probably correct, to read deeply into the title, locate there the thematic and/or philosophical and/or theoretical matrix that centers and informs the work. One could go off on the whole thing about how all creation is in some sense a destructive act (even ex nihilo creation requires a rending of the nothingness that exists prior to thingness), or, better still, how even as creation is ongoing and ever-renewing, we can never escape the essential fact of destruction: the limitless variety of creation, for all its glory, can never not be overshadowed by the singular fact of destruction, the final and re-unifying change that awaits us all. But to be perfectly honest, I’d rather not get into it, because there are few things duller than diligent, well-intentioned exegesis, and a book as big-hearted and bonkers as this one deserves better.
5 Comments
January 25th, 2010 / 12:31 pm
January 25th, 2010 / 12:31 pm
Mexican Getaway with Julia Cohen & Mathias Svalina
All poetry power-couples should be required to have dueling(/dualing) blogs. As JC has mentioned on her blog before, her parents are retired to sunny Mexico, and so she and MS went down from Denver to spend the holidays in the not-snow. His slideshow is here. Hers are here, here, and here. Also, his new (debut full-length!) collection, Destruction Myth, and her chapbook, For the H in Ghost.
Here are photos they took of each other.
Oh, and here’s Mexico-
Good deal.
Mathias Svalina’s The Hospital, by Nathan Young
This beautiful little collage video is a section of Mathias’s book-length poem Above the Fold. Another section is available as the chapbook The Viral Lease from Small Anchor Press. Feel that.
Weekend Reading
Gawker went to the National Book Awards and got a whole bunch of big lit-names to sign a copy of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, which they are now auctioning off for charity. It seems to be part of a campaign to get the book short-listed for the 2010 fiction award. That’s this year’s fiction winner, Colum McCann, in the picture.
I always forget The Atlantic exists. But then they’ll bring out Christopher Hitchens to talk about Arthur Koestler, and it’s like, oh yeah, those guys. Though to be fair, if it wasn’t for Arts & Letters Daily, I’d have never known.
Julia Cohen’s got a video of Seth Landman (ed. Invisible Ear) doing something I don’t understand.
She also mentions that Mathias Svalina’s debut full length, Destruction Myth, is now officially out. Expect to hear rather a bit more about that book in this space in the near future.
Joshua Cohen’s memories of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Fall 2009 online issue of Rain Taxi, including a review of Evenson’s Fugue State and a look at Zizek & Milbank’s The Monstrosity of Christ.
Also, Glenn Beck is in a fight with the Anti-Defamation League because they called him “fearmonger in chief” in their new special report, “Rage Grows In America: Anti-Government Conspiracies.” Basically, the report is exactly what you think it is, only longer. If you go to Crooks & Liars, you can hear Beck on his radio show, flipping out and daring the ADL to name anyone who has been a better friend of Israel than he has. Not sure what that has to do with domestic American politics, but–oh wait, yes I am. Dear ADL, maybe if you supported something like an even remotely sane Israel policy, instead of taking all your talking points from the pro-violence right (the Kissinger/Lieberman/Dershowitz school) you wouldn’t find yourself in bed with fucktards like Beck in the first place. Well good for them for putting the report out, at any rate, when its come down to siding with Abraham Foxman or Glenn Beck, it’s dark days all over the land.
Quick roundup & then I’m outta here
By this time tomorrow I’ll be at JFK airport, probably getting grilled about my associations by humorless Shin Bet agents. That’s right, kids, they’re sending me to Israel, so this is your last mess of links to my regular obsessions until at least the 15th. Keep my side of the bed warm, wouldja?
MOBYLIVES announces new occasional feature on “unusual book events given by something other than the usual suspects” to be written by MHP-author Zachary German. I’m not sure what any of that means, exactly, but Zachary’s first post is about Dennis Cooper’s conversation with Tony O’neill, which took place at the Bryant Park Reading Room the week of BEA. Also, Time Out New York digs Ugly Man. Also^2, Dennis posted some really good vintage gay porn on his blog yesterday.
Pieces from Mathias Svalina’s “Play” are now available at This Recording. Other pieces from “Play” are available in the current issue of The Cupboard Pamphlet. A future issue of TCP, btw, will feature Joshua Cohen, who has an essay in the current issue of New Haven Review (heads up it’s a PDF): Hung Like an Obelisk, Hard as an Olympian: An alphabet of English-language literature in Paris.
A few weeks ago Dave Eggers gave a talk in NYC wherein he promised to personally email a reassurance that print isn’t dead to anyone who wanted one. He didn’t count on that promise getting leaked to the web, and then being flooded with emails. So personally sort of fell out of the question, but he did send a pretty amazing mass email out, about the future of indie publishing and newspapers. Someone else on this site should/will spend some more time parsing what he said, but in the meantime, Gawker has the full text of his letter.
Finally, the NYT asks “Is Slam in Danger of Going Soft?” There are two possible answers: First, obviously, is “who cares?” The more nuanced approach, however, would be to say, “well, if the Times is covering it now, then the answer must be ‘yes–two and a half years ago.’” Either way, there’s really no good reason to click that link.
Later, kids.
Spoils of the Chapbook Fair
Regular readers remember that last week I blogged about the CUNY Chapbook Fair, and how I was going to be there promoting the Agriculture Reader / X-ing Books, and generally seeing what there was to be seen. Well, I saw it, and even brought some of it home.
I think my favorite things of all were two chapbooks that I traded for, both written and made by Elsbeth Pancrazi, who was working at the Small Anchor table because Jen Hyde is still in China. These weren’t SA books though, they were the work of Elsbeth’s own hand, and she traded me two practically greeting-card-sized pieces of wonder for one of my own poetry chapbooks. (I actually know Elsbeth a little bit, because we work together on the PEN/America editorial board, but I had not idea she was involved in the world of micro-presses, chapbooks, et al.)
The first book, “stars and thumbs,” is two series of prose blocks, printed in white on black. The book reads in both directions. “Stars” is illustrated with images borrowed from a book by the amateur astronomer, Ian Ridpath, and “Thumbs” is illustrated with photopies of the author’s own hands. I found one piece from “Stars and Thumbs” online here, but sadly there’s no illustration. I guess if you’re intrigued you’ll have to buy/find/trade for the real thing. As if that wasn’t enough, Elsbeth also gave me “poem about the city resembling an anthill,” which is smaller than your average postcard, but has a pint-size postcard of Oregon’s Mt. Hood attached to its front cover. The whole thing is a masterful piece of design, and the single poem contained within it isn’t exactly a sharp stick in the eye either. Here’s a link to one of Elsbeth’s other ongoing projects, “The Autobiography of Flapjack Sally,” and here’s another picture of the anthill book unfurled-
Google Searches & Maurice Blanchot
At his blog, Mathias Svalina’s many screen-captures offer a better argument for Flarf than it ever dreamed of making for itself.
And over at his blog, today Dennis Cooper is all about the amazing Maurice Blanchot.
My speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world, that it has suddenly appeared between me, as I speak, and the being I address: it is there between us as the distance that separates us, but this distance is also what prevents us from being separated, because it contains the condition for all understanding. Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to attain; it exists in words as the only way they can have meaning. Without death, everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness. (Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 323-24)
Holy Sh*t file: “A radiocative cut in the earth that will not stay closed”
First of all, a big & hearty hat tip to Mathias Svalina for this- he was a real sport when I dicked around with iPod, and then he sent me this amazing and terrifying link to this essay by Tom Zoellner in Scientific American:
Click through anywhere above to get to the full article, which is itself an extract from Zoellner’s new book, Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock that Reshaped the World, which is just out now from Viking. The SF-Gate seems to have liked it. Oh, and here’s Zoellner’s own website.
More fun with Mathias Svalina’s iPod
It’s really obscene that I still have this thing in my possession. Well, supposedly I’m going to see him tomorrow at a reading at Pete’s Candy Store, so I figured I should make the most of what time remains. Today instead of focusing on a letter, I’m going Onion-stlye and SHUFFLE IT. The little machine tells me it’s got 11387 tracks on it, so this should be pretty good. Seatbelts on?
Fun with… Mathias Svalina’s iPod
Probably most of you know Mathias Svalina as half of Octopus. Well, unlike other-half Zachary Schomburg, Mathias made the mistake of coming over to my house and drinking beer with me. He also made the mistake of leaving his iPod here. Then he went to Nebraska for a week. Then I went to Atlanta for a few days. Now other stuff is happening, but the upshot is that I’ve had his iPod for at least two weeks now–maybe three? It’s just been sitting on my desk. And we keep emailing about setting up a time to get it back to him, but we never seem to be able to meet up. So I finally decided I should make the most of my time, and share some of the highlights with you.
Partisan hack blogs press release of press he likes: Special Octopus edition
Today, I will be your Bill Kristol.
Dear Octopus Fans,
We have five announcements to make:
1. Eric Baus’s Tuned Droves
2. Shane McCrae’s One Neither One
3. Open Reading in April for full-length manuscripts
4. Subscriptions for 2009-2010
5. T-Shirts
[details on #s 1-5 after the jump, and at the very bottom: a picture of Bill Kristol getting nailed by a pie -JT]
Home Video Review of Books, Vol 1, Issue 2 now live!
by Julia Cohen & Mathias Svalina. This issue has home video reviews of:
Kim Hyesoon’s Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers
Lisa Jarnot’s Night Scenes
Dan Machlin’s Dear Body
Brett Price’s Trouble with Mapping
John Taggart’s There are Birds
Ara Shirinyan’s Your Country Is Great
Brandon Shimoda’s The Alps
Joel Chace’s Matter No Matter
Jon Godfrey’s City of Corners
Jen Tynes’s Heron / Girlfriend
Anne Heide’s Wiving
Anne Boyer’s Art is War
Darcie Dennigan’s Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse
Allison Carter’s Shadows are Weather
Mark Cunningham’s Body Language
