WEBVTT

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[APPLAUSE]

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Ooh, look at you.

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I hadn't looked
back for a while.

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This place has filled up nicely.

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Mathias Svalina.

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I had brunch with Mathias about
a week ago, maybe a little less.

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He told me the best introduction
I could do would be a roast.

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So here goes.

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Mathias Svalina is a
craven capitalist who

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sells you dreams to make money.

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[LAUGHTER] Do you know how
lucrative a dream delivery

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service is?

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Well, you're going to find
out when you see this guy.

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You know what Mathias
said to me at that brunch?

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He said, "Who gives a
shit about poetry books?"

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[LAUGHTER] And this guy has gone
on to publish eight of them.

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[LAUGHTER]

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The most recent one
of which is called

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Thank You Terror, which is
a beautiful and tender book

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about a beautiful
and tender world.

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God damn it, Mathias.

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It's impossible to roast you
because you're so singularly

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unique, and I
admire you so much.

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Because you've not only created
a new genre, "the dream,"

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but a new form of
publication and distribution,

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and in doing so, found and
forged new ways of creating

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community.

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For more than a decade, Mathias
has operated a dream delivery

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service, something
that he calls, quote,

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"a nomadic literary arts
project of permeable dreaming."

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It began in Denver, which
was his hometown at the time,

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and has taken him two
cities across the US.

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And as Tyler alluded to
for a month at a time,

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he bicycles through the near
dawn hours to hand deliver

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surrealist prose poem dreams in
pink envelopes to subscribers

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within a 4-mile radius
of his home base.

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He once told a reporter
at the Denver Post, quote,

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"It feels like what
I'm born to do,

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write these weird
little things."

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The dream delivery
empire, and here's

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where I get back to the
roast, because clearly he's

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a craven capitalist and now
a colonizer of all the dream

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territories, has taken
him to at least 11 cities

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and now includes dream walking
and audio tours, as well

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as dream prompts,
even dream beasts.

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How could you?

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[LAUGHTER]

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He's been involved in
collaborations with the Denver

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Museum of Contemporary
Art, the Poetry

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Foundation, the U
of A Poetry Center,

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Austin Modern, Tucson MOCA,
and the Just Buffalo Literary

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Center.

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He has said, quote,
"A lot of what

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I do every day is collect as
much as I can of the world

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and churn it back out
in these dreams, which

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is more than making a poem.

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It's a practice and something
that's a little holy."

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In his new book
he writes, quote,

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"I'm picking lives
from the grass

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and pasting them
together into a prayer.

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At a time when our
interdependence has never

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been more apparent, when the
capitalist drive for competition

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and accumulation has
proven one of the greatest,

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if not the greatest,
threats to humanity,

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here's one small alternative.

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Instead of looking for
a publisher or an agent,

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maybe you write
dreams, ride your bike,

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create some before unimagined
possibility for a stranger who

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will open a pink envelope and
discover something new about

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the place they live
or themselves."

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Matthias Svalina is
an anticapitalist

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who creates dreams and
doesn't care about money.

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He's a dream delivery
person, a dream carrier,

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and the last words in his
latest book are, thank you,

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you are loved.

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Please help me to
welcome Matthias Svalina.

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[CHEERS, APPLAUSE]

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