Self-help books, or poems you should read if you want to bone me:

Allen Ginsberg – “Howl”, “America”, “Transcription of Organ Music”, “A Strange Little Cottage in Berkeley”, “Sunflower Sutra”, “In Back of the Real”

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer – “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”

Herbert Marcuse – “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology”

Charles Bukowski – Pretty much any poem, but especially “How is your heart?”

Jack Kerouac – On the Road

William Blake – Songs of Innocence and Experience, “The Gates of Wrath”

William Carlos Williams –  Spring and All, Kora in Hell

H.D. – Trilogy, focusing on “The Walls do not Fall”

John Ashbery – “Europe”, “The New Spirit”, “As one put drunk into the packet boat”, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass, also “Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass” (The preface draws directly from Wordworsth, Blake, and Emerson. Something every poet should read and take seriously).

Chelsey Minnis – Bad Bad. Silliman once said on his blog, he couldn’t see what Minnis would be writing in 20 years. I think that’s more of a good thing than a bad thing.

McSweeney’s – any issue. I think it’s starting to get to the point where McSweeney’s isn’t cool any more, but if you are bored by fiction, McSweeney’s is a good alternative source. It’s generally an entertaining read, but it does get a little repetitive.

Watchmen – Don’t even see the movie, it’s trash. This is the only graphic novel I have read, but damn, it’s a good one.

Wittgenstein – Philosophical Investigations. Probably good to read his Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus first, you can find it online.

I’ll put more up later.