...also might be beer?

...I think I spilled coffee on that copy of Volume 2 back in 2005.

The Pierre Joris- and Jerome Rothenberg-edited 𝑃𝑜𝑒𝑚𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑀𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑒𝑛𝑛𝑖𝑢𝑚 is hands down my favorite collection of poetry. It’s massive, in two volumes — a total of a 1,684 pages.

Reading all the way through it was one of the formative events in my poetry-writing life.

I was already writing poetry before that, but the exposure to Kafka started me down a surreal path I'm still exploring nearly three decades later.

Fun fact! It was actually Anne Rice who wrote that, in a foreward to a collection of Kafka's stories. But altogether very accurate one way or the other. Kafka's short stories were definitely an influence on my decision to study poetry once I got to university.

More accurately, this is an Anne Rice quote, but she wrote it in reference to Franz Kafka (as in she describes Kafka’s oeuvre using these words).

Personally, Kafka’s short stories were a major motivator in my choice to study poetry at university. I still get chills when I read “The Bucket Rider.”

I do wish it were web-based, or at least easier to sync across multiple laptops/phones/operating systems... but for my first stab at long form fiction (I just notched 3,500 words in two days)...

...it'll do.

It's a perfect encapsulation of everything AI, whether virtual or in an embodied robot:

1) it's expensive
2) it barely ever works
3) and even when it does it needs a human to clean up after it

…in which case, The Kids™ of the future will be asking “What’s GPT?” the same way The Kids™ of today might not know what “blockchain” means.

Unless it turns out to be a bubble with nowhere near the return on investment that’s getting poured into it, then the economy tanks, and the paid AI turns into a siloed dumpster fire like Facebook, while affordable AI goes the way of Friendster because no one will be willing to pay for it anymore.

I’ve got my “Grève Générale” wildcat t-shirt ready and accessible, just in case.