The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans : and Other Essays - Hardcover

Codrescu, Andrei

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312093543 ISBN 13: 9780312093549

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1993

Synopsis

Biting social commentary from a popular radio journalist offers a displaced European's view of the current state of America in elegant essays that are incisively witty, sometimes soothing, and always trenchant and intelligent.

About this title

About the Author

Andrei Codrescu teaches writing and literature at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

Reviews

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.

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312093543
• ISBN 13: 9780312093549
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 199