Sunday, October 16, 2011

I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur by Mathias Svalina

Mudluscious Press, 2011. This book is at once hilarious, heartbreaking, and decidedly important in our very real, very odd (sometimes terrible) world of consumer madness. It is according to my definition, very amazing. I AM A VERY PRODUCTIVE ENTREPENEUR contains short chapters / poems (however you like best, to think of them) each detailing a different business started by the speaker. But nobody here is selling t-shirts or coffee. These businesses sell the fantastic, the almost-unimaginable, and the before now un-commoditized things to a hungry capitalist world:

“I started this one business that
employed generous looking, kind-hearted looking
people to walk by you & smile warmly at the exact
moment when all you can think about when you see a
building is how tall it would have to be to ensure that
the fall would kill you.”

The products in this book are the things we want but can’t have—the “solutions” to our very human problems and feelings that an exploded entrepreneurial culture has tricked us into believing we need, and can buy:

“I started this one business that gave
the parents of deceased children a glassful of sugar-
water each morning as they left their houses.


We could never make the sugar-water sweet enough.”

As a means of commenting on it, this book uses a razor-sharp and beautiful imagination to participate in our problematic capitalist detachedness. It will make you think about things you know, in a way you didn’t know to think about them.


 READ THIS AWESOME BOOK!