Andrei Codrescu

The American Dissident
A Literary Journal of Critical Creative Writing
In the Samizdat Tradition of Writing against the Machine
A Forum for Examining the Dark Side of the Academic/Literary Industrial Complex

Critical Reviews

Andrei Codrescu—New Orleans, Mon Amour For other reviews, consult BookReviews.

Twenty Years of Writings from the City. Andrei Codrescu. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 2006. 273pp.

CAVEAT: NEW ORLEANS CAN BE A DANGEROUS CITY… especially for those without a lot of money to throw around. After all, it is the murder capital of the USA. But that is my disclaimer, not Codrescu’s. Recently, I was mugged—kicked over and over while on the ground by three vicious, soul-less black thugs, though in Baton Rouge. New Orleans looks even worse for that kind of thing. Codrescu doesn’t seem to comprehend what it might be like to be mugged by dawgs in broad daylight. “In New Orleans, it’s okay to be robbed on the streetcar,” he writes nonchalantly in “Robbery Approved.” Well, Codrescu, as a two-decade long, politically-correct National Public Radio commentator and MacCurdy Distinguished Tenured Professor of English at Louisiana State University, evidently has a lot of money to throw around.

“This transplanted Transylvanian with the bateau-mouche mustache always manages (in his consideration of All Things) to create a craving for the subversive—something that is much needed in these days of ‘friendly fascism’,” blurbs Lawrence Ferlinghetti. But who are the friendly fascists in the established-order literary milieu? Don’t they include the likes of Codrescu and Ferlinghetti himself?
“These sweet and sour satirical gems make for fine filling between the fragments of our lives,” blurbs Spalding Gray. Perhaps of your life, Mr. Gray, but certainly not of mine! “A charming rascal, Codrescu coos to his prey, lulling you into a kind of dreamy complicity before neatly slashing your throat,” writes The Oxford American. Coos like a pigeon, perhaps, but lulling me, not at all, rather irritating me. Codrescu slashes nothing and nobody in these essays, with the exception of the easy targets David Duke and President Bush. To be fair, however, “Letter Home,” written in the early Nineties, could be considered somewhat risky, if in fact it were published back then. “The citizens of Metairie, like their Duke, are clean-cut Americans who voice their beliefs in tones as well behaved as their postage-stamp lawns,” writes Codrescu.

In reality, the blurbs seem to mirror the flowery vacuity found in the writing, and indeed the author does have a particular flair for penning fancy, fluff-filled sentences, the kind NPR seems to love for evident reasons. Codrescu’s intelligence shines in that respect. Unfortunately, that intelligence tends to serve the machine, as opposed to fighting subversively against it. “Let your life serve as a counterfriction to stop the machine,” had written Thoreau. Codrescu does a fine job as an oily lubricant, not as a counterfriction. Unsurprisingly, not one essay in this volume reveals the intrinsic corruption, professorial et al, at Louisiana State—a risky topic indeed for somebody stuck on the LSU nipple. Yes, Codrescu does “create a craving for the subversive,” because of its utter absence in this book.

The essays in New Orleans, Mon Amour are of the creative non-fiction, safe and friendly variety. Risk, for the most part, is essentially and predictably absent. None of the essays attack the severe problems affecting the city of New Orleans; none of them attack those responsible for those problems. No uncomfortable truths or observations are uncovered and underscored. Passion and indignation are all but absent, which is why the essays are apt to please the well-off and well-insulated—the university and Chamber of Commerce crowd—and certainly the tweed-jacketed and beret-capped writer and poet throng of the “friendly fascism” literary milieu.

A poet correspondent, John Knight, from Metairie wrote me recently regarding New Orleans: “The city gives me the creeps at dawn and dusk, as well. I've seen blood on the sidewalk from the night before. I look over my shoulder even at noon.” But comments like Knight’s are absent in Codrescu’s book. Instead, voodoo, angels, pirates, writers, and coffee constitute the principle themes and points of discussion. Is it not a travesty to push such myths, considering the crime-infested situation of New Orleans and the people who have to live in it? As for the coffee theme, we discover why: “Adé is the owner of my favorite café in New Orleans, Café Brazil,” writes Codrescu. “Adé has never let me pay for coffee or drinks for all the years I’ve been coming to his establishment.”

All writers know what they should not write about. Unfortunately for democracy and America, Codrescu not only knows, but heeds. Thus instead of truth teller, Codrescu chooses the risk-free, facile road of myth pusher and hackneyed extoller as in “ghosts and pirates are as thick as the morning fog on certain days in New Orleans.” Sure, but on most days, common thugs, not “ghosts and pirates,” lay in wait for citizen prey. Codrescu pushes, like Bukowski and others before him, the macho myths of booze and whores… while our democracy becomes less and less recognizable as a democracy.

“When writers come here they talk about smelling everything because New Orleans is a town where the heady scent of jasmine or sweet olive mingles with the cloying stink of sugar refineries and the musky mud smell of the Mississippi,” writes Codrescu. Well, when I was there recently all I could smell was the stench of stale beer and all I could feel was the suds and piss-soaked sticky pavement under my feet. But then again, I don’t live in a nice place overlooking the Mississippi like Codrescu. In all fairness, however, the French Quarter is indeed unique—an architectural marvel. Just don’t talk to anybody and don’t give eye contact to anyone—that’s the advice people (not Codrescu) who know the city tend to give to strangers who don’t. It would make a wonderful bumper-sticker slogan, though the Chamber of Commerce would surely disapprove.

In New Orleans, Mon Amour, the author includes all the names and places associated with the Crescent City, as if he were writing a bourgeois’ intellectual companion to Fodor’s New Orleans. Codrescu is a name-dropper to say the least, dropping names of poets and other literary figures, right and left, as if to remind us that he too is a poet and literary figure… the kind that likes to push the glorious myth of the poet and writer, which of course tends not to be the comfortable academic-type à la Codrescu, but rather the boozing, whoring ilk à la Bukowski. “I can see him [Fitzgerald] coffee in hand, standing in his robe on the little balcony, wincing from last night’s gin, looking down on the little houses of the dead, wishing he was one of them,” writes the author. Codrescu’s is the kind of literary celebrity worship apt to please our intellectual elites.

In “Poetic Terrorism,” Codrescu seems easily to dismiss his own poetic passivity: “The manifesto [distributed by Assault Poetry Unit] declared that ‘the era of poetic passivity is over,’ an egregious statement in a city where passivity, poetic or no, is a sacred institution, especially in the summer. We are so passive here that we never even shoo the flies…” Creates a craving for the subversive? Codrescu’s facile (high-brow witty) dismissal of more serious-minded citizen-poets (e.g., those of Assault Poetry Unit), who actually dare counter herd poets is typical of the latter who feel threatened by individuals indifferent to careerism, speaking engagements, grants and tenure.

Finally, only four of the roughly 55 essays were written post-Katrina and do not say much at all, except the old politically-correct mantra that Bush is the demon—not very original. Reading these essays, one gets the impression the author leads a relatively conflict-free, ivory-tower existence—far from the bleak realities of the Crescent City. Imagine that young doctor reading this book—the one who was shot four times by young mindless thugs and whose wife’s murder provoked a massive march of outrage recently in the city. “Frightened citizens now see their city as a stalking ground, roamed with impunity by teenagers with handguns—an image that may not be far off the mark, experts here say,” noted a recent New York Times article. Interestingly, businesses dependent on tourism pressured the city not to go forward with a proposed curfew. They can be reassured that Codrescu most likely is on their side. New Orleans, Mon Amour constitutes an example of cozy, creative non-fiction, which is why I do not recommend. Tough, personal experience essays on real life in New Orleans are needed, not Codrescu’s All Things Considered.

—The Editor