My core texts, as of now

I hope I'm never clutching for something to read in the debris of a wrecked ship, en route to a desert island, but now I know which books and records I would take on a weekend-long underground arts Monastic Retreat (see following post) - at least when I leave myself about fifteen minutes to make my picks before I leave for work:

* Charles Mingus

* The Meat Puppets

* Thomas Mapfumo

* High Atmosphere

* Buraky

* Fela

* The Hangups

* The Soft Boys

* Husker Du

* the dBs

* Ronnie Lane

* The Incredible String Band ...

and among the writers ...

* Robert Walser

* Roque Dalton

* Nazim Hikmet

* Victor Serge

* Rainer Maria Rilke.

These are the fragments I have shored against my ruin, to ragpick a phrase from a St. Louis poet whose birthplace is now a pawn shop.