[1] I’m caffeinating myself, getting fired up to hand sell some books at @auntiesbooks this morning, thinking about the good work of @MisterCaine and @ravenbookstore and their zine, and let me tell you something about a certain algorithm used by a certain online book selling

[2] ziggurat. You will never, not even once, get outside of yourself with that thing. It only makes suggestions based on something you already know you like. Some of the best things in my life—books or otherwise—would never have come across my plate using that damn algorithm.

[3] I think of 10 year old me, bored, thumbing through wire racks of sale used books in the basement at Auntie’s—the ORIGINAL location, not the Liberty building—and saying to myself “Hey...I like animals. What’s this Watership Down thing all about?” Was I scarred for life? Yes.

[4] Have I read it twenty times over the years? Also yes. In a similar, algorithmless situation, I was in the stacks at @kulibraries picking books at random in the history shelves and using them to write short stories when someone coughed—the only other person in the stacks on a

[5] Saturday morning. That person? @rhoadsstevens whose work is amazing, and everyone should read. His purpose? Researching Italian puppets. Also to write fiction. His book recommendation? Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. Ever seen Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome? The screenwriter

[6] based the speech of the feral children on the speech of characters in Riddley Walker. Another algorithmless book memory I have is being a poetry student in a Centrum workshop in Port Townsend at age 17, and Sam Hamill, who drove me and two other poor kids from the east side

[7] all the way from SeaTac to Fort Warden in his pickup, by the way, because we had no other way to get there from the airport, took us into the stock room at @CopperCanyonPrs , squinted at each of us, having read our poetry packets, and threw a book at us that we needed to read

[8] and my book was the collected shorter poems of Hayden Carruth, and my point to all this is my poetry and fiction is an amalgam of Watership Down, Riddley Walker, and Hayden Carruth poetry, and the only way it exists is because of randomness in the universe and the heartfelt

[9] book recommendations of living human beings, and not that damned algorithm, and we are at a cusp point in history and may lose the random and the human forever, and we need it, so please go to an indie bookstore today and pick a book entirely at random, or ask another human

[10] to tell you the name of a good one. Thank you for coming to my TedTalk on Small Business Saturday. If I only trusted an algorithm to recommend things based on things I already liked I never would have tried sushi, or scotch, or have moved to China or to Kansas, or have tried

[11] swing dancing, or have adopted this rescue dog, and who would want to live in that colorless husk of a world?