The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans: and Other Essays [Paperback]

Andrei Codrescu (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 1995

In twenty-six essays, Codrescu turns his skeptical, amused gaze to such topics as Plato's effect on American sex, the cultural meaning of Ed McMahon, baseball's literary underpinnings, his own conception in a Romanian darkroom, an cuisine under the Ceausescu dictatorship, as well as to larger subjects, including the suicide of communism, American culture and politics, and his adopted city of New Orleans.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

These essays by the sharp and ingratiating Codrescu ( Road Scholar ) rove all over the place, and readers should be ready to do likewise. The author, a Transylvanian-born poet, a longtime resident of the U.S. and a commentator for National Public Radio, takes up subjects just as incongruously diverse as himself in his 26th book. As his fans will be glad to find, Codrescu stays in character: he is passionate, informal, maverick and ragingly funny, unwilling to behave. "All the right-wingers have whiskers," he mutters sotto voce in "Black Water" about the Russian film director Yuri Mamin and his movie The Fountain. And in "A Kind of Love," Codrescu considers the muse of baseball. "There is some evidence," he offers mischievously, "that baseball was brought to America by Romanians. Transylvanian shepherds play a primitive form of stickball called oina that resembles baseball." The title piece, a chuckling love song to his home port, praises Dixie's Voodoo Blackened Beer, the city's above-ground Lafayette Cemetery, fig trees that flourish in the tropical heat, and stories that do, too.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

Essayist and editor, poet and professor, columnist, novelist, radio commentator, scriptwriter, translator, and all-round man-of- letters Codrescu (Road Scholar, p. 194, etc.) presents his latest collection of essays. The subject matter ranges from the mood in the author's native Transylvania (not great) to the mood in his adopted home, New Orleans (wonderful), and back to the food in Transylvania (bad). (Perhaps not since the great Aaron Lebedeff forsook the stage has there been such Romanian angst displayed this side of the Atlantic.) And there's more, of course: an obligatory ode to baseball; an offbeat interview with Robert Duvall, in which Duvall gets his due; and an unfocused, but affecting, talk about photography. A man of passionate insight and irony, Codrescu pulls it off with unrestrained style and pungent wit. He considers running for exercise to be a sacrilege: Running is ``an extremely serious response to Cossacks chasing you with whips.'' Occasionally, the reader may not know where it's all going, but would be well advised nonetheless to stick with the recondite ambiguities while the author reviews a movie that virtually no one has seen, or deconstructs a literary journal that next to nobody in America has read. The trip is worth it. Codrescu--never one to write for readers who, as he pegs them, ``know what to expect from writers who know what they expect''--has cobbled together another interesting and generally entertaining fabrication, displaying an America occasionally shadowed by his former compatriot, Count Dracula. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 199 pages
• Publisher: Picador (May 15, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031213570X
• ISBN-13: 978-0312135706
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,083,785 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Andrei Codrescu (codrescu.com) was born in Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania. His first poetry book "License to Carry a Gun" won the Big Table Poetry award. He founded Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Books & Ideas (corpse.org), taught literature and poetry at Johns Hopkins University, University of Baltimore, and Louisiana State University where he was MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English. He is a regular commentator on NPR's All Things Considered since 1983, has received a Peabody Award for writing and starring in the film "Road Scholar. In 1989 he returned to his native Romania to cover the fall of the Ceausescu regime for NPR and ABC News, and wrote "The Hole in the Flag: an Exile's Story of Return and Revolution." He is the author of books of poetry, novels, essays; the most recent are "The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess," (2009) "The Poetry Lesson" (2010) and "whatever gets you through the night: a story of sheherezade and the arabian entertainments" (2011), all published by Princeton University Press.