Clothes; that was easy. Books; there's no way I'll be able to bring along even ten percent of what I want to, so I settled for a desert-island, personal canon, my...key texts: Nabokov, Woolf, Borges, Brillat-Savarin/Fisher/David, Montaigne's Complete Essays, some more essays, and T.S. Eliot. Stray bits: Calvino's Winter's Night, Queneau's Exercises in Style, Harry Potter Vol. 1 (from J) and C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity (from T). All of which I fully intend to read/reread. Weight (including fat load of Harvard mailings and handbooks): 12.7 kg.

However, with music; each additional CD is a negligible burden, but each CD omitted or forgotten is going to make me incomplete. So in goes all the jazz which I can't live without, Ella, Billie, Django, Chet, ACJ, the SNZ extended family and bands of non-key members (excluding the Zippers themselves of course). In goes all the corny chansons francaises, the squeaks and scratches. In goes Mado and J's Pons-Contes-Edda, Ariodante, Galli-Curci (who looks like an embalmed ostrich on the cover), Cecilia's sotto voce Se tu m'ami. In goes the Chen Xiao Dong box set from WK and HY. And what of the music of my adolescence? From that period I'm taking only

The Bends
OK Computer
Stone Roses, self-titled
Joni Mitchell's Hits
Portishead live

Where are my female singer-songwriters? Where's all the Blur? This is telling. I can't listen to Tori anymore without a severe sense of disorientation (except for her novelty B-sides: Frog On My Toe, Purple People, Merman). And so I ferreted around for a compilation, dread word, that crystalline essence of chart action and commercial appeal, and I found CRUSH, "40 sweet and sour tracks", circa 1997. A sample:

Saturday Night, Suede
Champagne Supernova, Oasis
Oh Yeah, Ash
Lovefool, Cardigans
There She Goes (the original)
Something Changed, Pulp

So I'm taking this; my token gesture, to preserve something of the complete ebb and flow of my musical inclinations. Of course, there's lots more embarrassing stuff in mp3s on my laptop.