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Hi everybody. So my name is Mac.
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My job is that I lie to children,
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but they're honest lies.
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I write children's books,
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and there's a quote from Pablo Picasso,
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"We all know that Art is not truth.
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Art is a lie that makes us realize truth
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or at least the truth that is
given us to understand.
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The artist must know the manner whereby
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to convince others of the
truthfulness of his lies."
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I first heard this when I was a kid,
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and I loved it,
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but I had no idea what it meant.
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(Laughter)
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So I thought, you know what, it's what I'm here
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to talk to you today about, though,
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truth and lies, fiction and reality.
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So how could I untangle
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this knotted bunch of sentences?
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And I said, I've got PowerPoint.
Let's do a Venn diagram.
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["Truth. Lies."]
(Laughter)
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So there it is, right there, boom.
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We've got truth and lies
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and then there's this little space,
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the edge, in the middle.
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That liminal space, that's art.
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All right. Venn diagram. (Laughter) (Applause)
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But that's actually not very helpful either.
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The thing that made me understand
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that quote and really kind of what art,
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at least the art of fiction, was,
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was working with kids.
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I used to be a summer camp counselor.
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I would do it on my summers off from college,
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and I loved it.
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It was a sports summer camp
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for four- to six-year-olds.
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I was in charge of the four-year-olds,
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which is good, because
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four-year-olds can't play
sports, and neither can I.
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(Laughter)
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I play sports at a four-year-old level,
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so what would happen is the kids would
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dribble around some cones, and then got hot,
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and then they would go sit underneath the tree
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where I was already sitting — (Laughter) —
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and I would just make up stories and tell them to them
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and I would tell them stories about my life.
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I would tell them about how, on the weekends,
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I would go home and I would
spy for the Queen of England.
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And soon, other kids
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who weren't even in my group of kids,
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they would come up to me, and they would say,
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"You're Mac Barnett, right?
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You're the guy who spies for the Queen of England."
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And I had been waiting my whole life for strangers
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to come up and ask me that question.
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In my fantasy, they were svelte Russian women,
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but, you know, four-year-olds —
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you take what you can get in Berkeley, California.
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And I realized that the stories that I was telling
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were real in this way that was familiar to me
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and really exciting.
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I think the pinnacle of this for
me — I'll never forget this —
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there was this little girl
named Riley. She was tiny,
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and she used to always take
out her lunch every day
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and she would throw out her fruit.
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She would just take her fruit,
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her mom packed her a melon every day,
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and she would just throw it in the ivy
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and then she would eat fruit snacks
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and pudding cups, and I was like, "Riley,
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you can't do that, you
have to eat the fruit."
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And she was like, "Why?"
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And I was like, "Well, when
you throw the fruit in the ivy,
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pretty soon, it's going to be overgrown with melons,"
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which is why I think I ended up
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telling stories to children and not
being a nutritionist for children.
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And so Riley was like, "That will never happen.
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That's not going to happen."
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And so, on the last day of camp,
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I got up early and I got a big cantaloupe
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from the grocery store
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and I hid it in the ivy,
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and then at lunchtime, I was like,
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"Riley, why don't you go over
there and see what you've done."
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And — (Laughter) —
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she went trudging through
the ivy, and then her eyes
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just got so wide, and she pointed out this melon
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that was bigger than her head,
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and then all the kids ran over
there and rushed around her,
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and one of the kids was like, "Hey,
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why is there a sticker on this?"
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(Laughter)
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And I was like, "That is also why I say
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do not throw your stickers in the ivy.
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Put them in the trash can. It
ruins nature when you do this."
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And Riley carried that melon around with her all day,
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and she was so proud.
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And Riley knew she didn't
grow a melon in seven days,
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but she also knew that she did,
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and it's a weird place,
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but it's not just a place that kids can get to.
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It's anything. Art can get us to that place.
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She was right in that place in the middle,
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that place which you could call art or fiction.
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I'm going to call it wonder.
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It's what Coleridge called the
willing suspension of disbelief
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or poetic faith,
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for those moments where a
story, no matter how strange,
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has some semblance of the truth,
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and then you're able to believe it.
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It's not just kids who can get there.
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Adults can too, and we get there when we read.
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It's why in two days, people will be
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descending on Dublin to take the walking tour
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of Bloomsday and see everything
that happened in "Ulysses,"
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even though none of that happened.
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Or people go to London and they visit Baker Street
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to see Sherlock Holmes' apartment,
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even though 221B is just a number that was painted
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on a building that never
actually had that address.
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We know these characters aren't real,
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but we have real feelings about them,
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and we're able to do that.
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We know these characters aren't real,
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and yet we also know that they are.
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Kids can get there a lot more easily than adults can,
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and that's why I love writing for kids.
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I think kids are the best audience
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for serious literary fiction.
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When I was a kid,
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I was obsessed with secret door novels,
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things like "Narnia,"
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where you would open a wardrobe
and go through to a magical land.
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And I was convinced that secret doors really did exist
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and I would look for them and try to go through them.
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I wanted to live and cross over into
that fictional world, which is —
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I would always just open people's closet doors.
(Laughter)
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I would just go through my mom's boyfriend's closet,
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and there was not a secret magical land there.
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There was some other weird stuff that
I think my mom should know about.
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(Laughter)
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And I was happy to tell her all about it.
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After college, my first job was working
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behind one of these secret doors.
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This is a place called 826 Valencia.
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It's at 826 Valencia Street
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in the Mission in San Francisco,
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and when I worked there, there
was a publishing company
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headquartered there called McSweeney's,
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a nonprofit writing center called 826 Valencia,
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but then the front of it
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was a strange shop.
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You see, this place was zoned retail,
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and in San Francisco, they were
not going to give us a variance,
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and so the writer who founded
it, a writer named Dave Eggers,
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to come into compliance
with code, he said, "Fine,
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I'm just going to build a pirate supply store."
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And that's what he did. (Laughter)
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And it's beautiful. It's all wood.
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There's drawers you can pull out and get citrus
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so you don't get scurvy.
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They have eyepatches in lots of colors,
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because when it's springtime, pirates want to go wild.
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You don't know. Black is boring. Pastel.
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Or eyes, also in lots of colors,
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just glass eyes, depending on how you want
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to deal with that situation.
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And the store, strangely,
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people came to them and bought things,
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and they ended up paying the rent
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for our tutoring center, which was behind it,
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but to me, more important was the fact
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that I think the quality of work you do,
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kids would come and get instruction in writing,
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and when you have to walk this weird, liminal,
fictional space like this to go do your writing,
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it's going to affect the kind of work that you make.
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It's a secret door that you can walk through.
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So I ran the 826 in Los Angeles,
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and it was my job to build the store down there.
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So we have The Echo Park Time Travel Mart.
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That's our motto: "Whenever
you are, we're already then."
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(Laughter)
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And it's on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.
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Our friendly staff is ready to help you.
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They're from all eras,
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including just the 1980s, that guy on the end,
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he's from the very recent past.
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There's our Employees of the Month,
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including Genghis Khan, Charles Dickens.
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Some great people have come up through our ranks.
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This is our kind of pharmacy section.
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We have some patent medicines,
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Canopic jars for your organs,
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communist soap that says,
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"This is your soap for the year."
(Laughter)
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Our slushy machine broke
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on the opening night and
we didn't know what to do.
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Our architect was covered in red syrup.
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It looked like he had just murdered somebody,
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which it was not out of the question
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for this particular architect,
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and we didn't know what to do.
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It was going to be the highlight of our store.
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So we just put that sign on it that said,
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"Out of order. Come back yesterday."
(Laughter)
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And that ended up being a better joke than slushies,
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so we just left it there forever.
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Mammoth Chunks. These things
weigh, like, seven pounds each.
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Barbarian repellent. It's full of salad
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and potpourri — things that barbarians hate.
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Dead languages.
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(Laughter)
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Leeches, nature's tiny doctors.
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And Viking Odorant, which
comes in lots of great scents:
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toenails, sweat and rotten vegetables, pyre ash.
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Because we believe that Axe Body Spray
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is something that you should
only find on the battlefield,
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not under your arms.
(Laughter)
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And these are robot emotion chips,
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so robots can feel love or fear.
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Our biggest seller is Schadenfreude,
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which we did not expect.
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(Laughter)
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We did not think that was going to happen.
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But there's a nonprofit behind it,
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and kids go through a door
that says "Employees Only"
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and they end up in this space
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where they do homework and write stories
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and make films and this is a book release party
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where kids will read.
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There's a quarterly that's published
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with just writing that's done by the kids
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who come every day after school,
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and we have release parties
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and they eat cake and read for their parents
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and drink milk out of champagne glasses.
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And it's a very special space,
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because it's this weird space in the front.
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The joke isn't a joke.
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You can't find the seams on the fiction,
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and I love that. It's this little bit of fiction
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that's colonized the real world.
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I see it as kind of a book in three dimensions.
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There's a term called metafiction,
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and that's just stories about stories,
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and meta's having a moment now.
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Its last big moment was probably in the 1960s
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with novelists like John Barth and William Gaddis,
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but it's been around.
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It's almost as old as storytelling itself.
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And one metafictive technique
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is breaking the fourth wall. Right?
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It's when an actor will turn to the audience
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and say, "I am an actor,
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these are just rafters."
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And even that supposedly honest moment,
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I would argue, is in service of the lie,
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but it's supposed to foreground the artificiality
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of the fiction.
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For me, I kind of prefer the opposite.
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If I'm going to break down the fourth wall,
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I want fiction to escape
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and come into the real world.
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I want a book to be a secret door that opens
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and lets the stories out into reality.
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And so I try to do this in my books.
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And here's just one example.
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This is the first book that I ever made.
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It's called "Billy Twitters
and his Blue Whale Problem."
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And it's about a kid who gets a blue whale as a pet
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but it's a punishment
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and it ruins his life.
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So it's delivered overnight by FedUp.
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(Laughter)
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And he has to take it to school with him.
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He lives in San Francisco —
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very tough city to own a blue whale in.
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A lot of hills, real estate is at a premium.
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This market's crazy, everybody.
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But underneath the jacket is this case,
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and that's the cover underneath the book, the jacket,
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and there's an ad
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that offers a free 30-day risk-free trial
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for a blue whale.
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And you can just send in a
self-addressed stamped envelope
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and we'll send you a whale.
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And kids do write in.
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So here's a letter. It says, "Dear people,
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I bet you 10 bucks you won't send me a blue whale.
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Eliot Gannon (age 6)."
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(Laughter) (Applause)
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So what Eliot and the other kids
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who send these in get back
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is a letter in very small print
from a Norwegian law firm —
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(Laughter) —
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that says that due to a change in customs laws,
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their whale has been held up in Sognefjord,
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which is a very lovely fjord,
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and then it just kind of talks about Sognefjord
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and Norwegian food for
a little while. It digresses.
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(Laughter)
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But it finishes off by saying that
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your whale would love to hear from you.
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He's got a phone number,
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and you can call and leave him a message.
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And when you call and leave him a message,
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you just, on the outgoing message,
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it's just whale sounds and then a beep,
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which actually sounds a lot like a whale sound.
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And they get a picture of their whale too.
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So this is Randolph,
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and Randolph belongs to a kid named Nico
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who was one of the first kids to ever call in,
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and I'll play you some of Nico's message.
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This is the first message I ever got from Nico.
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(Audio) Nico: Hello, this is Nico.
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I am your owner, Randolph. Hello.
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So this is the first time I can ever talk to you,
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and I might talk to you soon another day. Bye.
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Mac Barnett: So Nico called back, like, an hour later.
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(Laughter)
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And here's another one of Nico's messages.
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(Audio) Nico: Hello, Randolph, this is Nico.
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I haven't talked to you for a long time,
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but I talked to you on Saturday or Sunday,
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yeah, Saturday or Sunday,
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so now I'm calling you again
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to say hello and I wonder what you're doing right now,
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and I'm going to probably call you again
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tomorrow or today,
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so I'll talk to you later. Bye.
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MB: So he did, he called back that day again.
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He's left over 25 messages for Randolph
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over four years.
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You find out all about him
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and the grandma that he loves
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and the grandma that
he likes a little bit less —
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(Laughter) —
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and the crossword puzzles that he does,
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and this is — I'll play you one
more message from Nico.
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This is the Christmas message from Nico.
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[Beep] (Audio) Nico: Hello, Randolph,
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sorry I haven't talked to you in a long time.
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It's just that I've been so busy
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because school started,
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as you might not know, probably,
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since you're a whale, you don't know,
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and I'm calling you to just say,
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to wish you a merry Christmas.
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So have a nice Christmas,
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and bye-bye, Randolph. Goodbye.
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MB: I actually got Nico,
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I hadn't heard from in 18 months,
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and he just left a message two days ago.
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His voice is completely different,
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but he put his babysitter on the phone,
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and she was very nice to Randolph as well.
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But Nico's the best reader I could hope for.
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I would want anyone I was writing for
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to be in that place emotionally
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with the things that I create.
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I feel lucky. Kids like Nico are the best readers,
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and they deserve the best stories we can give them.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)