ANDREI LIVE!
Sweden: March 15-19, 2013
March 16, 2013 (Saturday), 15:00 (3 pm) Littfest, 2013, Umeå International Literature Festival.
March 16, Discussion with Stefan Igversson on the Swedish translation of "The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess" (2244 Publishers); Poetry reading at Costa's, 8 PM. Contact: Erik Jonnsson: erik[at]littfest.se
March 19, 2013 (Thursday) Stockholm,The Romanian Cultural Institute of Stockholm, 20 Skeppsbron Talk, 18.30 hrs. A poetry reading with Swedish translations by Gunnar Harding and Dan Shafran from "So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2012." followed by a discussion with Dan Shafran and Gunnar Harding. Contact: eva.leonte[at]rkis.se
Dallas, Texas: March 28, 2013, Wordspace, Reading & book signing. Contact: Karen Minzer: wordspace[at]wordspace.us
Minneapolis: April 4, 2013, Talk of the Stacks. Minneapolis Central Library (300 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis). Free and open to the public. Talk, reading & signing So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems. Contact: kelsey[at]offeehousepress.org
Calgary, Alberta, Canada, April 19 (Friday) 2013. Spoken Word Festival, The Banff Cenre, Festival Hall, 1215 10th Ave S. Word Makes World: Writing Generative Verse: This is a poetry writing workshop that aims for the tender intersection of word-fertility with critical inquiry. We will write some exercises, but the stress will be on the particular attention that language requires to become incarnate. Helpful to this would be reading "The Posthuman Dada Guide," and "The Poetry Lesson," two short books. "The Posthuman Dada Guide" surveys the history of poetry's increasing urgency in a wacked world, and "The Poetry Lesson" is an amusing (and deadly serious) distillation of my years of teaching mysteries for a quarter of a century. April 20 (Saturday) 2013. Reading & signing “So Recently Rent a World” Contact: sheridwilson[at]shaw.ca
RECENT PLEASURES: New Orleans: February 20, 2013, New Orleans Marriott, 12 pm-2 pm. Keynote Talk to the Association of International Education Administrators (AIEA). Book signing. Contact: Dr. Deardorff: aiea[at]duke.edu
February 21, 2013, Thursday, 8:00pm, Gold Mine Saloon, 701 Dauphine Street, French Quarter, New Orleans. Reading & signing. For more info: www.17poets.com
February 22, 2013, Octavia Books. Reading & book Signing. Contact: Kelsey Shanesy kelsey[at]coffeehousepress.org for "So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems; and Gabriel Levinson glevinson[at]gmail.com for "Bibliodeath: My Archives (with Life in Footnotes)"
Seattle October 10-12, 2012, October 10 The Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair, in conjunction with the Book Club of Washington, is pleased to announce the return of Andrei Codrescu to Town Hall and Seattle. Friday, October 12 The Book Club of Washington, 6 pm: Social hour (no-host bar) 7 pm: Dinner 8 pm: Program. Menu: Grilled Alaskan King Salmon, Grilled Top Sirloin, or Wild Mushroom Ravioli
London April 16th, 2012 Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, London, Doors at 7.00, Tel: 020 7324 2570, Tickets £8 from www.freewordonline.com. Reading from "A Guide to My Archives (with life in footnotes,)" an essay about the digital future and how to live with it.
April 18th (Wendesday), The Horse Hospital, Colonnade, Bloomsbury www.thehorsehospital.com Reading with ANSELM HOLLO, TOM RAWORTH, and GUNNAR HARDING
AND RECENT OTHER PLEASURES:
Maintenant #90 - Andrei Codrescu
An interview with Andrei Codrescu by SJ Fowler.
It is hard to think of fitting superlatives that have not already been bestowed upon Andrei Codrescu over the course of his writing career, which spans five decades and two continents in a manner that almost no one else’s has. Since his emigration from Romania in the late 1960s, his work has lodged itself in the poetic consciousness of both America and Europe for its sheer edges - its energy, its voice, its deft wit, and like all great dadaists, at heart, he is the hardest of realists, a man who cannot lie to himself above all others, in his poetry or in his ebullient criticism, journalism and collected writing. A man whose oeuvre reaches back into the depths of Europe from the core of America, who has been peer to some of greatest writers of our century, where he now, as we roll into the 21st century, must take his own place. For the 90th edition of Maintenant, Andrei Codrescu. 
Photograph by Marion Ettlinger
3:AM: For my own personal ends, the legacy of your work and your thought on Western consumerist culture has been your ability to make clear the axiomatic negative totality at the heart of poetry (perhaps not just poetry – art, commentary, etc…). You’ve made it clear that you believe that a desire for totality – be it in meaning, in happiness, in governance (!) is impossible and so a poet must embrace the poem as always unfinished, and not attempt to use poetry as a medium for for orderliness. Do you think this a fair reading of a notion that has bound your work across your writing career?
Andrei Codrescu: Yes, but the negativity is a plenitude, an excess of sentiment. Dada and her dadaists said a big “no” to Western culture, and made of this paradox a generative art, a fountain of cultural action that calls itself anything but “art.” To put it another way, if you can’t experience the Nothing at the heart of what this Nothing generously spews, you cannot be a conduit for it. (And the Something that came out of it will congeal into a bad sample of statuary violence). The discipline of the overflowing cup is to practice the attention needed to enjoy fully the moment the cup runneth over, and then to dig it. That moment is usually a happy accident, or, as Ted Berrigan put it, “Great art is a great mistake,” So here you have another paradox: you can’t call it “art” because it’s too great for a puny label like that. For better prose on these paradoxes, see “The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess” ({Princeton, 2009), a book I wrote to look closer at the mechanics of the big NO, or YESYES, as Dada (ironically) calls itself in Russian and Romanian. (”Yes, yes,” as in, “sure, OK, yeah”) Poetry, to use another word I’d rather not use, but have used so much I can’t give it up now, is definitely an organ of disruption of all discourses that claim “cogency,” “coherency, “authority,” etc. It has ruined my life. (But I feel pretty great).
3:AM: Perhaps exemplified best in Road Scholar, the power of your critical commentary on the facile nature of much of contemporary Western culture and its place a kissing cousin to the repression of the Soviet style regime, seems to be drawn from a contradictory confluence of assured analysis, commentary and conviction and an equally powerful sense of bewilderment and loss. Do you think this is true?
AC: Yes, but only up to a point. Grownups in the Soviet fiefdoms were poor, afraid, undernourished, and treated like children or serfs who had to say yes, sir, to a bunch of power-drunk morons who watched them as well as they could. Our own (capitalist) indignities are inequality, overeating, financial and social anxiety, and fear of Dada who is watching us every minute. The common horror is Surveillance. The commies did the best they could with social organizations, schools, prisons, and camps, paranoia, censorship, and very bad technology. Compared to that, living in a glass house and running the occasional danger of being busted for drug-use or obscenity is a smaller horror. Now that they’ve added “terrorism,” though, a vaguely scary word like “art,” I fear that we’re in for a long psychological meltdown. Curable only by transfats and drug addiction. The loss is innocence, child wonder, Blake’s garden, nature loved in goofiness, spontaneity and surprise. Assured analysis, certitudes and certainties are obscene grownup protuberances.
3:AM: Your prolificism seems to be a fundamental part of your essence as a writer – the notion of relentless activity, of an endless engagement of writing, commentating, producing. It is exceptionally admirable. How do you conceive of your own energy of output?
AC: Not as an “ism.” In Romanian, my third native language, “ism” is in the middle of the word “cisma,” which means “boot,” or more exactly “army boot.” I associate boots and “isms” with the stink of my mother’s short-lived bofriend, an army captain whose stinking boots I could smell when I came home from school in 3d grade. And so with communism, capitalism, existentialism, prolificism… As for the production, I just make it like bees make honey: I think I’m fairly lazy, actually. If you spend a half-century writing and reading, it piles up. I just wrote a long essay, called “My Archives (with life in footnotes),” which is a sigh of gratitude and relief in praise of the internet for saving my weary back from dragging the hump of my heavy paper bullshit through the world.
3:AM: And having written nigh on forty books in forty years, what is your relationship to the finished book? Is it dead upon delivery, as they say, or do you have a sense of its continued life in that it may never be completely finished in your eyes?
AC: When I finish it I feel like I’ve emptied myself of all kinds of tics and horrors & amused myself in the process. A book’s like a one-year stand, it feels good in the morning, especially when the standee’s gone home. It’s finished and done for for me, but, unfortunately (happily) there come the readers, the glowing reviews, the fat money prizes, the naked fashion models, and the bed-chamber orchestras. Unless it’s the outraged ex-girlfriends, guys with guns, scribblers with overpicked bones, academics grinding axes, and crackheads with crabs.
3:AM: Do you think poetry has developed a notion that an excess of writing is somehow a lack? That there is a traditional, formal and constricting suspicion of writers who are effusive, as opposed to writers who are delicately withdrawn and lonesome in tone and manner? (It certainly seems that way in Britain)
AC: Yes, there is, but it’s easy to refute this notion with a look at our kin the musicians. Nobody blames them for jamming, putting out singles, lots of records, being on TV and radio, playing at birthday parties, etc. Being prolific and having a good time is how real artists do. The curmudgeons reflect their own insuficiencies: you produce too much for them, there is only so much they can absorb. The suspicious are stingy and small, they would like us to believe that their defects are virtues, and that their narrowed eyes make them aristocrats. There is also a suspicion by some so-called critics (who are only reviewers or tormented assistent professors) that if a writer is not voluptously suffering, the writing is not for them. The dying book-reviewer class of the fin-de-20th century, does not approve of writing that does not commit prolonged bouts of self-flagellation. To paraphrase Henry Miller, you can always find someone to share your misery, but it’s nearly impossible to communicate joy. You certainly touched a nerve here, because in the U.S., no less than Britain, the tiny pie of fine lit is sliced extremely thin by a few remaining influential critics and academics. We are waving goodbye to them as they shrink and melt under the waves of the energetic new century . Bye, bye, T.S. Eliot-skin-flakes, happy trails in hell Helen Vendler! You were heavy, we won’t miss you.
3:AM: You have advocated a collaborative energy throughout your writing career too, which is a greatly underappreciated notion in poetry, in my opinion. Did you always actively collaborate with peers or did it begin when you relocated to America in New York and San Francisco?
AC: Yes — the late 1960s were marvelous collaborative years! Ah, to be 21 in love with love, collaborating with lovely young geniuses like yourself, was a great big welcome to America for me. I kept at it, it’s fun, it’s sexy, it’s how you know that someone else knows (and tells you), and then you know what they know and make up new things so they can tell you that they know that but they know something else, too… There is a collaborative universe — unarchived and mostly unknown– of work from the Sixties of the late 20th well into ours. Collaborating is theatre, an activity as social and promiscuous as it gets. In New Orleans at the Gold Mine Saloon at Dauphine and Toulouse streets in the French Quarter we even wrote up our bodies and read each other into the morning. Bodies are fundamentally collaborative. Those stingy critics you mentioned would rather your body suffered confinement and painfully drained itself in slow drops on the page. Who are they kidding? This is a live world, it’s live because it collaborates. Ok, I’m getting worked up, but is there any wonderful thing on earth that isn’t made by fertilisation and embrace?
3:AM: And what affect did those years have upon the rest of your life? Your friendships with Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan – you have gone on to define your generation and those subsequent. Was it a period that left its mark on your writing specifically?
AC: I had the good luck to come on the scene in New York in the middle of a youth revolution. I was nineteen, America was nineteen… There was electricity, trains left for heaven every ten minutes. Allen was a big, generous, loving uncle full of wise advice for the foolish young. Others, like my father-brother figure, Ted Berrigan, were teaching the pop delight of the common objects to idiots like myself who carried the virus of metaphysics from Europe or Yale University. My contemporaries had halos of light and were pierced by Cupid every time they turned the corner at 2nd Avenue and St. Marks’ Place. Poetry was worshipped for its close connection to the gods, who were extremely numerous in those days, and also for its fearlessness. Death was a familiar, the generator of fashion. Photographers from Vogue crawled all over the Lower East Side in those days, looking for death’s latest rags. I had a permanent hard-on. I typed because I didn’t know what to do with my fingers when I didn’t have them around somebody’s waist. (In any case, the typing was generally in the cause of persuading somebody to let me put my arms around her with fingers splayed).That was plenty to keep me going in leaner times, like the Eighties. In the Nineties in New Orleans, love came back and ordered us to make poetry again.
3:AM: You have been a greatly energetic force in supporting and engaging with contemporary Romanian poetry. When one really considers it, the ebullience and intensity of the Romanian poets and poetic writers in the 20th century is almost unbelievable – the likes of Tzara, Celan, Blaga, Eminescu, Janco, Cioran, Cassian, Barbu, Pagis… How much do you see the influence of Romanian poetry emerge in your own concerns and work as the years pass?
AC: I left young, but I absorbed an immense amount of Romanian poetry, both approved and unapproved. I even read reviews of poetry books so I could read the quotes from the poets. In a place as boring, repressed, and culturally vacant as the provincial city I grew up in, poetry was like the Big White Way, it blinked like neon on Broadway. The Romanian poets you mention were geniuses because they couldn’t be anything else. There wasn’t enough of anything else to be, if you had thoughts and maybe loved music. Romanians turned a miserable history of national defeat into songs, a brilliant strategy for survival. Romania’s great poets are great only in the midst of catastrophe. The minute things get better, triumphalists, fascists, racketeers and other varieties of scumbags, turn artists into court jesters. Those guys I can’t read. It’s a bit like that now.
3:AM: And how do you see yourself in this tradition? Does it amuse you to think you might be considered a vital contributor to the Romanian canon perhaps precisely because your left the country so young and have shed so much light upon it from afar?
AC: I gave my condition of “exile” a tragic spin, certainly, in order to connect to whatever it was that made Romanians into poets. But I was a lucky exile. I landed in New York in 1966 in the middle of a revolution that made of “exile” and “alienation” the American esprits-du-jour. When I returned to Romania to “cover” the revolt-cum-coup in 1989 for radio and TV, I was welcomed. I was a link to the West, the world everyone dreamt of in Ceausescu’s dingy barbed-wired camp. I was translated instantly and celebrated. I’m not a very good educational tool, though, so when the first crush was over, people noticed my critical take on the West and my general air of insubordination. At present, I am in the canon because there was nowhere else to put me. Everybody is rushing around to catch the tail of the fading comet of Western lit. It’s too late for writers, I think, but Romanians make great computer engineers. They’ll catch up.
3:AM: You are the catalyst for the event taking place in a few weeks time in London, which is really a remarkable conflagration, perhaps happening only once for my generation to witness, with you and Gunnar Harding and Anselm Hollo and Tom Raworth. What are your perceptions of the event and its significance?
AC: Anselm Hollo is one of my very best friends. He is also one of the greatest, if not THE great contemporary American poet, and certainly the most underappreciated. In addition to his European sophistication and command of languages he translates from (Finnnish, Swedish, German, Russian) he has introduced American readers to a way of writing poetry in English that contains humor, irony, paradox, and other fine and nuanced ingredients. The reason for the inattention the constricted opinion-makers you mentioned before have lavished on Hollo’s poetry, is that humor is viewed by those people as especially suspect. In any case, Anselm Hollo has a cult, the Hollo Cult, a group of mostly poets who have launched a number of artistic movements, Actualism chief among them. As for the great Tom Raworth what can I say? He turned England on to Charles Olson, the New York Poets, the Language poets, and has delighted and pissed off the natives for decades. Gunnar Harding, who is translated into English by Anselm Hollo, should have gotten the Nobel prize instead of Thomas Transtromer. I don’t want to start a quarrel here where there isn’t any, but if you gonna give that prize to a Swede, would you rather give it to someone who was translated by Robert Bly or by Anselm Hollo? Psshhaw! I haven’t seen Raworth in three decades, I never met Harding, but I feel like they are family. The evening should be a trip.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWERSJ Fowler is the author of three poetry collections, Red Museum (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2011), Fights (Veer books 2011) and Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (AAA 2011). He is the UK poetry editor of Lyrikline and 3:AM. He is a full time employee of the British Museum and a postgraduate student at the Contemporary Centre for Poetic Research, University of London. First published in 3:AM Magazine: Sunday, April 8th, 2012. Broad Street Review, Philadelphia, March 7, 2013 http://www.broadstreetreview.com/index.php/main/article/andrei_codrescus_bibliodeath/ 
It all started with a stolen notebook.
Andrei Codrescu’s ‘Bibliodeath’
BY: AJ Sabatini 01.26.2013
Andrei Codrescu grew up in Communist Romania, where printed words were deemed more dangerous than bombs. Now he lives in a virtual world inundated with too many instantly disposable virtual words. Ah, but he has a solution.
Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life in Footnotes). Andrei Codrescu. Antibookclub, 2013. 168 pages; $25.00. www.antibookclub.com.
Requiem for the printed word
AJ SABATINI
Nearly everyone who writes for BSR has also written for print publications, and a number of us have written books or contributed to printed magazines and journals. Nearly all of us— as well as our readers— own books and have libraries full of everything from the classics and current works to special volumes that were important to us and others we just like to have around. No doubt we have our own personal archives, too: boxes and file cabinets with private collections of letters, notebooks, diaries or journals.
Bookshelves are us. So are visits to Philadelphia’s great book exchange— if only to find out-of-print books (my favorites are The Book Trader, House of Our Own, The Last Word, Bookhaven, Port Richmond Books and Brickbat). But the days of reshuffling tomes in our living rooms or making peripatetic ventures to bookstores— or even finding libraries close to home— are waning. Though I own many books, I also possess the complete writings of authors I value in files on my laptop.
You are, after all, reading this essay on-line. In fact, most of us are likely to search and read on-line as much as from paper and click our way through more books than we can read on our Kindles, Nooks and iPads. These days, teachers are accustomed to seeing students download texts and squint for the lack of animated images as they read Moby Dick or Remembrance of Things Past on their cell phone screens (dictionaries are OK).
Most young people live in a virtual universe; the rest of us are virtually virtual, no matter if we think otherwise or try to resist.
When writing was dangerous
Each day, books, articles and everything else printed throughout human history are scanned, digitized and committed to official and unofficial archives. The original documents, rightly regarded as treasures, are kept far from human eyes, fingers and breath. On the flip side, of course, billions of pages are accessible to the public as entities in a vast, ever expanding archive— for now.
These developments weigh most heavily on writers, especially if, like Andrei Codrescu, they’ve lived through a century in which owning books and the very acts of reading and writing not only held the promise of knowledge but also the possibility of creating an inner life and career.
Codrescu, whose voice you might have heard over the years on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” is a poet, novelist, essayist, editor, anthologist, (retired) college teacher, and founder (in 1983) of the journal, Exquisite Corpse (on-line since 1996). His literary life began in the 1960s in Sibiu, Romania.
“I was a secular Jew in a Christian Orthodox world that was officially atheist,” he relates, living in a country with “registered typewriters, forbidden copiers, a place where writing was deemed more dangerous than bombs.”
Salvation in poetry
He sneaked into a Russian Bookstore (the Communists were “book people,” he reminds us), bought a notebook and began the “archive of my young mind,” not knowing that by 2012 he would find himself handing over his oeuvre– and thousands of other valued and sometimes rare printed texts— to become archived and digitized at Louisiana State University, where he has taught since 1983.
Codrescu lost his first notebook, or it was stolen, and it becomes a leitmotif for his reflections on his life and writing, the fate of his– and all— books. Bibliodeath, then, is a sort of a philosophical autoeulogy and, like Codrescu’s other work, equally erudite and rambunctious, speculative and alchemical, personal and probing.
As a poet, his prose is a deft raven of intelligence, wit, real and occult flights. Lamenting that all of his life’s writings are by now in hard drives and The Cloud, he realizes that technology “has turned me into an upside down pyramid whose tip writes this.”
Notes in the margins
This 147-page book measures 6 ½”x 9” and is printed on a soft, light yellowy paper, with wide margins and 142 footnotes running alongside and underneath and around Codrescu’s treatise. The notes allude to his other books and amplify his ideas with allusions, anecdotes and facts. These range from asides on typewriters and the history of Spell-Check to his remark that, as he lies forever in his tomb, Lenin’s head is stuffed with newspapers of his time.
For Codrescu, “life and writing are one” and he is agitated at what seems to be the unstoppable disappearance of the tangible, embodied acts of writing— and traces of the human beings who write— into near invisible electronic bits of binary code stored who knows where and under what laws or regulations and, increasingly, accessible through intermediaries with good will, ill will, profit or power as motivations.
But perhaps it always has been so. People write to be more than themselves and for a future that’s shaped by writing (think of the U.S. Constitution). “The truth, however,” Codrescu insists, “is that the Archives is the intrinsic reason for performing the act of writing, which is already an Archive by the time it leaves the hand.”
Poetry as salvation
Poetry, especially, is the realm where intangible and transcendent meaning of language and writing resides. Poetry asserts its own ambiguity and otherness and calls on the imagination of readers to discover its revelations through words as song– hence its danger to authority.
The task– Codrescu ends on a affirmative note— is not to hope for either dystopian or happy endings, but to create new works, new forms and new narratives comprised of the unarchived, unarchivable and forms that are impossible to archive… in effect, poetry, as it always has been.
As an example, Codrescu recalls his stolen notebook— the unarchived and undigitized one, which he never wants to be found, urging that it and other poems become “hiding places for thieves, or they’ll become blueprints for archival machines.”
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Down & Out.com: Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life in Footnotes)
ANITBOOKCLUB, 2013
January 2013
Imagine there’s a very intelligent literary person with three lifetimes worth of strange and dynamic personal experience. He has a point he’s trying to make, but this point is actually too complicated, too dense, and even at times contradictory and confusing, maybe even to the writer himself. And either because of that (or vice-versa), he has a tendency to go on tangents, probably because to him arguing a point, like a Congressman up at the podium on C-Span, is dull and simple. Sometimes these tangents lead to further tangents and sidebars—basically whatever he remembers and wants to discuss in that moment of time. Until finally the writer seems to say, “Wait, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, the death of books.” And that’s pretty much the experience of reading Andrei Codrescu’s hilarious and thought-provoking Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life in Footnotes).
Codrescu’s new memoir is divided into two sections: the text, which pushes the book forward, and the footnotes, which sometimes last several pages at a time, and go into further details, telling anecdotes from the author’s life. The text for the most part is full intellectual gold with Codrescu’s many and varying poetical philosophies and theories, which range from the application of inflation and hybridization theory to the value of art, the similarities and differences between an archivist and a collector, and the future of public libraries.
But there’s no meditation more prominent in this book than Codrescu’s musings on poetry. On what makes a poet, a poet. On how it’s a poet’s job to humiliate its own language to see what it’s made of. How it’s a poet’s duty to “poke holes” in: “reality, flawlessness, reason, certainty of any kind, and languages(s).” How poets are canals for truth, revolutionaries against injustice. How they are superheroes, born with super clarity. In everything Codrescu approaches, he wears the armor of a poet, attacking his subject without fear. His language is complex, layered, with rich symbolism and metaphor. I often had to sit with his sentences to decipher all of the meaning. For example:
Imagination is masturbatory, the projection of self into virtual worlds shaped like bodies. Even the occasional projection of this sexualized shape into other forms, sheep, let’s say, is imprecise and funny. (Not to the masturbator, of course.) Religion, including the religion of poetry, has capitalized Imagination to mean that a dreamer can be a demiurge (“un pequeño dios”), but the physical limits of how many projections a “self” can produce end with the body. The imagination of machines is infinite . . .
Of course with the title Bibliodeath, it would be thought that Codrescu would have a straight-forward opinion against the digitization of information. But, in typical Codrescu fashion, his views are more complex than would be anticipated. From his role as a poet, a novelist, a literary magazine editor, and professor, he goes into great detail about how his writing life changed through technology. For example, its evolution (or devolution) as he slowly let go of his notebooks for his first typewriter, word processor, and then his computers and “memory sticks”, which “look[ed] like lighters, just when [he] was trying to quit smoking, and [he] often tried absent-mindedly to light a cigarette with a 2 GB stick containing all of [his] writing.”
Yet, far more awe-inspiring than Codrescu’s already very awe-inspiring ideas, are his anecdotes. The poet’s stories from his life, his personal archive, about his first writing workshop in communist Romania, about moving to New York and frequenting the Café Figaro, roller skating through the stacks of the Detroit City Library on mescaline and ending up in the hospital, his student “One”, who tried to circle all of the number “one’s” or the number “1” in all of the poetry books in all of the libraries he could find in the world. About starting one of the 20th centuries most important literary magazines, Exquisite Corpse, and watching its pages die, to exist only on a computer screen. To anyone interested in literary history, Bibliodeath is sheer joy. It is such a fantastic mix of the personal and prophetic, the intimate and the universal. If it’s Codrescu’s dense ideas and language which prevent you from turning the page, it’s his stream-of-consciousness stories, with rapid fire details sometimes so intimate you don’t even understand them, which make you not be able to turn them quick enough.
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