Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"One of our most prodigiously talented and magical writers."--Bruce Shlain,
The New York Times Book Review "A spell-casting book to be savored and shared, to sipped like a strong afternoon tea and remembered like a poetic vision."--Houston Chronicle
About the Author
Andrei Codrescu has been on National Public Radio's
All Things Considered for over ten years. He is the author of numerous books, including
Road Scholar, Zombification and a new novel,
The Blood Countess. He is a professor of English at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.
Table of Contents
I: Live Acts
Against Photography
Adding to My Life
Not a Pot to Piss In: My Life as a Pot
Whose Worlds Are These?
Platonism or Why the World's Fucked Up
II: Television and War
Happiness of the Mass-Media Man (with asides on Death)
Ed McMahon: The Sweepstakes of Fat
Cavemen Cry: Film Noir
The Theater of Operations in the Drug War Widens: Dispatches from the Front
No Tacos for Saddam!: Memories of the Gulf War
Torture and the Dream of the Bourgeois
III: The Suicide of Communism
Romania Today: A Bad Novel
Writing Without the Enemy: The First Postrevolutionary Issue of România Literara
How My Secret Twin Saved Me
Black Water: Some Thoughts on The Fountain by Yuri Mamin
Robert Duvall as Stalin: The True End of Communism
IV: Culture and Sport
The Word Made Trivial
The Unsurveyed Arts, the Unsurveyable Artist
A Kind of Love
Am I Fit to Live?
V: Where I Hang My Hat
The Prisoner of Pork
Vegetarian in the Sky
In the Rio of the Senses
Looking for the Blood Countess in the Bowels of the Empire
Se Habla Dreams
The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans