Andrei Codrescu
photo by Marion Ettlinger |
B I B L I O D E A T H
| 
| ANTIBOOKCLUB, November 29, 2012
Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life in Footnotes) surveys the evolutionary relationship between language and technology by examining my own career as an American writer for more than four decades. I fell hard for the siren of Poesy in Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania, and carried this precious gold bug to the U.S at the end of 1960s. I founded Exquisite Corpse, a Journal of Books & Ideas in 1983 from sheer boredom at the desiccated discussion of literature in the U.S., then landed a great gig commenting on anything that went through my warped mind, for NPR's All Things Considered. I was also a bookseller, a chaired professor, and a speaker on a variety of subjects that would have killed me if I'd known anything about them before I looked into them. Even then, and even amid the marketing hoopla of my more successful books, I kept faith with poetry and thought about the survival of our literate world, thinking made suddenly urgent by the transformation of print and the triumph of new media. The archival enterprise, in particular, became a concern with big consequences. Told in the guise of two memoirs (one in the main text, and one in footnotes), Bibliodeath comes supplied with a magnifying glass for the failing eyesight of the Love Generation.
|
S O R E C E N T L Y R E N T A W O R L D
NEW AND SELECTED POEMS: 1968–2012
| 
| COFFEE HOUSE PRESS, December 11, 2012
So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems
FOR FOUR AND A HALF DECADES, Andrei Codrescu has been a vivid presence in our literary life. He has written novels, essays, and reportage; made films; taught literature; produced regular commentary for radio and newspapers; edited a literary journal-- but he is foremost a poet who has made this art the bedrock and standard for all his writing. So Recently Rent a World: New And Selected Poems, 1968-2012, is a selection of his decades’ long dalliance and adventures with the muse, with a hefty addition of new unpublished work. The New York Times Book Review has called Codrescu “One of our most prodigiously talented and magical writers,” The Los Angeles Times has proclaimed him, “a modern day De Tocqueville,” The Houston Chronicle noted that he is “among the most astute contemporary observers of what William Carlos Williams called ‘the American grain,’ while simultaneously joining playwright Eugene Ionesco as one of Romania’s great rememberers of dictatorial things past,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti said that he “creates a craving for the subversive—something much needed in these days of ‘friendly fascism,’ Kay Boyle called his work “a cause for celebration,” and The St. Petersburg Times commented that “If Andrei Codrescu still lived in Europe, he’d be a public intellectual, consulted by presidents and ministers on issues of education, economics, and possibilities of pleasure. But since he is now a resident if the United States, he has to content himself with being a cult figure. America hasn’t melted Codrescu.He’s as solid a voice as we have.” Andrei Codrescu was born in Sibiu, Romania in 1946, and emigrated to the United States in 1966. Author of forty books, Codrescu has edited the literary magazine Exquisite Corpse, and his provocative commentary is featured regularly on NPR’s All Things Considered. He currently lives in the Ozarks near the Buffalo River National Park.
|
Recent reviews, interviews
Cave Dwelling Retirement
Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life in Footnotes)
Book Slut Interview
New Pages Review of Bibliodeath
WLPR Review of Bibliodeath
Bacon Review Interview
Foreword Reviews Bibliodeath
Krikus Reviews Bibliodeath
Revista Vastra Revista Cultura Bibliodeath Publishers Weekly Bibliodeath http://scifiportal.eu/meeting-with-andrei-codrescu/ Sweden http://www.screamingpope.com/2013/03/bibliodeath.html The Toronto Star The Poetry Lesson The Toronto Star Sheherezade New Pages So Recently Rent a World New and Selected Poems
*
ANDREI CODRESCU: KING OF THE TALKIESreview by Kenneth Warren
Book Review: So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems: 1968-2012 Andrei Codrescu. Coffee House Press, 2012, 408 pages, perfect bound, $22.00.
“There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the work of creators, issued from a real necessity in the author, produced for himself. It expresses the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which laws wither away.”
—Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto”
“The structure of the sacred in the human consciousness is built on the structure of synchronicity, as opposed to the diachronic structure of radical historicism.”
—Mircea Eliade, “The Sacred in the Secular World”
“That’s just talk, not Logos,
a getting down to cases.
I take it as simple particulars that
we wear our feelings on our faces.”
—Ted Berrigan, “New Personal Poem”
“I am a cross and the idea
Is to burn twice at the four tips.”
—Andrei Codrescu, “to my heart”
Andrei Codrescu is today the great American poet of intercultural encounter, absolutely exceptional in his capacity to elucidate with analytical power, emotional sensitivity, and lyric force the most revealing points of tension between ethical and imaginative perceptions in a world under the gun. With sympathy for eruptions against authority, Codrescu has infused child-man rebellion and passionate desire into the many poems of self-recollection that are now presented with incisive comment and context in this 408 page collection entitled So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems: 1968-2012 (2012). A Jewish exile from Communist Romania, Codrescu arrived in the United States in 1966 with an otherworldly grip on myth and politics. His imagination was enjoined to reveal not only the double-cross of realism and idealism, which had arisen in his homeland of authoritarian mystics, rabid nationalists, and radical materialists, but also the autonomous reality of poetry as the underground counterforce to police state repression.
To the question of earliest influences, Codrescu recalls: “Before I knew English, my ideas of poetry were formed by Lucian Blaga, Tudor Arghezi, Geo Bogza, Benjamin Fundoianu, Ilarie Voronca, Eugen Jebeleanu, Villon, Baudelaire, Tristan Tzara, Gherasim Luca, Nazim Hikmet, Nellie Sachs” ("Andrei Codrescu - Poetry & Interview with Mihaela Moscaliuc." Connotation Press: an Online Artifact (Issue VI, Volume IV: February 2013). Web. 12 Feb. 2013). Here, Codrescu’s sources suggest a complex sensibility steeped not only in lyricism and Dadaism but also in Christian and Jewish mysticism. So far as Codrescu’s Romanian inheritance is concerned, it is clear that Tristan Tzara, the Jewish Romanian Dadaist visionary instigator, is his comrade in the revolt against logic; Mircea Eliade, the Romanian Orthodox historian and philosopher of religion, is his comrade in the sacred primordium. From the beginning, then, Codrescu’s voice has been pledged to a sacramental act by which the de-sacralization of poetry through Tzara might be joined to a re-sacralization through Eliade. A playful techno-messianic subjectivity thereby speaks through Codrescu’s assimilation of Jewish Romanian and Romanian Orthodox sources into English language poetry:
the translation machine on mount athos
has multiple portals for mortals and one for eternity
it comes and goes on its self-devouring path
leaving behind critical self-sufficiency to doom posterity
it won’t be doomed boom boom can you believe
just how much work it is to deconstruct a world
that was read by everybody in their own language
though there are many languages and not one for you
ubu dada yahoo bing google wiki
in the kingdom of the one syllable
check the weather it comes from the outside
(“one syllable”, 60)
With a real feel for the Aeolian outgas of religious acts that animates common life and poetic imagination, Codrescu gravitated to the New York scene that had constellated around Paul Blackburn’s commitments to the spoken word and the tribal field of talking poets. In order to learn English, of course, Codrescu had to pick up the vocal gestures of others. From interactions with New York poets, most especially Ted Berrigan, Codrescu would discover the linguistic space for perfecting at the very heart of America’s new oral poetry a dynamic personal art, which could masterfully honor a history of Romanian Jewish trauma twisted around the Patriarchal double-cross.
“Nothing shocked my Romanian metaphysical sensibilities more than Ted Berrigan’s absolutely insistent attention to the seemingly trivial” (“Introduction,” Alien Candor: Selected Poems 1970-1995, 1996, 13), Codrescu once declared. Although Eliade’s phenomenology of the sacred provided Codrescu with a bullet-proof defense against flat-lining the imagination into “the seemingly trivial,” he generously concluded with respect to Berrigan’s practice: “Of course, this wasn’t the case, as it became apparent on further reading: he was employing ‘non-poetic’ language because, amazingly, few American poets had” (13-14). Nevertheless, Codrescu’s metaphysically charged apprehension of the rules for poetry had already crowned his sense of “‘non-poetic’ language.” Therefore he could modulate “the seemingly trivial” with fidelity to Old World convictions about the verticality of consciousness and the esoteric tip of the imagination. In short, he was equipped to take it higher.
the conscious and the unconscious
are languages in a state of translation
and their respective losses
are the gods (168)
In other words, he was possessed by fantastic, quasi-religious, supernatural chops.
All sound is religion.
Language is merely a choir boy in this religion.
Sometimes a bishop wind rattles the windows,
Still, I must speak the most intelligent language available
While I have this typewriter knowing full well that tomorrow
I might be able to welcome a color Xerox machine into my studio
And with it there will be a revolution in my life.
(“sunday sermon”, 217)
He could see “the translation machine on mount athos” (60); he could imagine “the gods” (168); he could grok “the self must/be full of the English language” (232).
Consequently, the “chatty abstraction”—ascribed to “New York School Poetry” by Eileen Myles, who recognized “the limitations” within a poetics of self-abnegation (“Long and Social,” Narrativity, Issue 2.Web 12 Feb. 2013)—is transmuted through Codrescu’s oracular sacred prism.
i kiss his green hand
it tastes like my eyes, I see through my kiss
a line of prophets, all blind.
some blinder than the others in the dark green
of his hand, crossing his lifeline
to life.
(from: ‘leadership”, 106)
Codrescu presents an essential “lifeline” for gauging the evolution of American poetry. “I tried to find a bridge between the dark metaphorical music of my first poets, and the pop insistence on the actual, physical world that was the passionate poetics of my new friends” (97), Codrescu notes with respect to his early personae poems. Now it is easy, with So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems: 1968-2012 in hand, to see how Codrescu’s “bridge” through Berrigan offers a “lifeline” that differs substantially from the abstract and impersonal tendencies which have captured imaginations in the wake of Zukofsky. To be sure, the two opposing currents which propelled the New York School—the impersonal work of Zukofsky and the personal play of O’Hara—become fully illuminated under Codrescu’s captivating advance from Berrigan, whose 1972 Vort interview with Barry Alpert still marks a crucial fork in the road for American poets:
In fact at the time we had a great contempt for Zukofsky. It was impersonal. We had Frank O’Hara and a tradition on back through Apollinaire, and we thought that Zukofsky and all the people that were talking about Zukofsky were rock-heads. We were sort of enlightened later by Aram Saroyan and Clark Coolidge who all came out of Zukofsky in a certain way, and who had a lot to show us when they came out. We were the rock-heads in a way but we didn’t have much to take from Zukofsky. We were a little too flippant for that. No, I think the man is very respectable, a very respectable poet, but I think he’s dull and a sort of nit-picker in a way that Aram Saroyan isn’t, although everybody accuses him of being one. Maybe I’m too close to Zukofsky in one way, and a little young on the other hand to really get him. I get it out of Aram Saroyan and Bob Creeley.
(quoted by John Latta, “Notebook (Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Pierre Reverdy, &c.)”, Thursday, October 18, 2012. Web. 12 Feb. 2013)
While the impersonal work lineage extended from Zukofsky through Coolidge to the Language Movement, with its Marxist inspired labor theories of poetry, the personal play lineage extended from O’Hara through Berrigan to Codrescu, whose “translation machine on mount athos” (60) could preserve “language” through the “sound” of “religion” (217).
Nothing characterizes the playful Dionysian aspiration in American poetry better than the drive to negate the patriarchy and become the crowned, conquering, always mouthy, and quite often drunk consort of the Great Mother. Codrescu’s poetry unfolds, quite marvelously, in relation to this playful Dionysian aspiration whose style of consciousness clusters around such oralist poets as Kerouac, Olson, O’Hara, and Berrigan—all of whom were groomed through Roman Catholic conditioning to honor masochistic experience. What makes Codrescu’s poetry so interesting is that the collective historical conscience that binds him to Jewish identity does not stop him from submerging himself in the poetry of ecstasy, lunacy, and punishment that Dionysus had visited upon these Catholic precursor poets who so powerfully shaped America’s oralist playbook.
Eventually though, the whole humiliating sweep of masochistic compulsion at the oppositional edge of American poetry becomes evident to Codrescu, whose “blue jew notes” recognizes Sylvia Path’s famous entanglement with the Jew and the Nazi in “Daddy”:
a blue jew
a horny jew
a jew with blue balls
an old boston jew
where the snow is blue
the blue-cheese burger
overdone by the black-blue
short order cook from benares
with the blue elephant inked on her ankle
the sky is blue in benares
the snow is eggplant blue in boston
oh blue jew blue jew
the books are dusty and blue
you read them all when they were new
oh daddy Sylvia outrhymed you (13)
In “tristan tzara the man who said no” Codrescu grasps again the masochistic tension that bears “humiliation and elegance” through poetry:
sensibility was not what spelled doom
but rather forelocks and insouciance, palabras y cadavros,
the toasts made ten years before in a cocteau moment.
humiliation and elegance were best of friends for ages.
there were rabbis in the crowds entertaining the slaves.
no one laughed at anything he couldn’t kill.
(unless he laughed so hard he couldn’t and then he was drunk.)
what we must do now is to conduct the study
of that certain laughter no longer known to us
who laugh without suffering as if laughing was funny.
we’ll begin in 1899 when public hangings were thinning out,
long enough to allow for flounces, wit, and mercy.
class, we’ll use recordings from the very first chortle
thought worth recording by mr. Edison for mr. chaplin. (395)
For Codrescu the struggle to retain an archaic subjectivity that can hustle-bump ideology is concentrated in “tzara’s laughter” (396). His surface concerns, which include democracy, identity, individuality, language, paternity, pluralism, religion, sociality, and technology, speak to core ethical dilemmas that can be more humanly calibrated through feeling that generates Old World respect for beauty, children, mystery, love, and nature:
The shadow in my blood will model for a fee.
And yet a lake of absent possibilities has risen
To the chin of the folk, and the waters keep rising
For what could be a model drowning.
I conversed with the drownees. What they said
Turned my love for myself into syllables.
Will I be a model for my son or only endless buzzing?
(from “model work,” 234)
Codrescu occupies the vital spot in the ‘I’ matrix—where poets are possessed by dispositions that speak lyrically to a world of common dispossessions and imaginative possessions. By way of the book’s title, he wryly acknowledges the force of zombie capitalism on the great ontological narcissism that drives the poet to do the voices and usurp the surplus of the other. “The urge to invent poets seized me often, whenever I heard a ‘voice’ articulating what I didn’t think was ‘me,’ but it had its own personality” (145), he explains in a note.
With License to Carry a Gun, his first book published in 1971, Codrescu emerged armed-up for America’s counter-cultural revolution. In kinship with battle-scarred sub-sub personalities, Coderscu staked himself to Rimbaud’s claim that “I is an other.” As Codrescu’s Romanian otherworld fell into the American underground during the Sixties, he found his tongue. “My first poems in English were written as if I was taking dictation from three different faces of zeitgeist: a jailed Puerto Rican activist, an angry protofeminist, and a crazed Vietnam war veteran,” writes Codrescu. “The personae were still partly Romanian, speaking with the mystical accents of my early poetry idols” (97).
Codrescu hacked his way past the great hulking Personalism of Whitman and the scrawny Personism of O’Hara with the needy code of the mystical outcast. He took the talking stick from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, too. As Puerto Rican prison poet Julio Hernandez, he blasted away the famous phase taken from Charles Dickens' novel Our Mutual Friend by Eliot—"He Do the Police in Different Voices.” He sang of brotherly love for the sake of America’s imprisoned English as a second language multitude:
i’m careful with my dreams of death,
they should not slip into my comrades’ nights,
take the place of their erotic dreams
—a real jailer is needed for this—
paolo sleeps with his mouth wide open,
mario’s left hand hands from the bed.
i could be free if I let go for a second,
put death in their dreams.
oh dogs of silence,
i need you, senor (102)
In a New York minute, Codrescu’s ballistic imagination was soon firing with Julio Hernandez into Melville’s universal brotherhood of man.
melville knew me as rapists know all about virgins
but he wasn’t me, blind.
there is an invisible sphere made of love
that is color. Its roots are in the east,
they’re of black blood
where Africa kills the negro waiter in white shoes,
where fish grow blue in sugar trees.
melville’s place on earth is a furious mouth
where brotherhood is tested by removing light,
removing eyes.
It is a gift to me from human sugar trees. (103)
Shot through the poem is dark matter grasped thematically as imprisonment, masculinity, race, and sexual identity. Audacious claim, compassionate regard, sculpted self-presence, and Surrealistic tinge generate “a gift.” Sweet, sexual syrup drips through the cellblock.
With Codrescu, self make-over pulls from below.
Codrescu’s songs of brotherly love delineate a fecund cultic tension between the Jew and Gentile, too. The bleeding edge where difference, history, and sensation are liquidated by the totalizing firepower of intuition is evident in Codrescu’s gunplay:
Mystically I live on two planes at once.
Magically I am the two holes of a double-barrel gun
threatening to blow me into space.
This is almost true
The church, the state, the typewriter, the police
Are about to kick me out of the world
(from: “a programme for the double-barrel life when it hits”, 153)
Similarly the magical quest to break from the law is expressed in “the differences”: “I am St. John the Baptist, my work heralds the birth of / Jesus” (188).
With savage medieval fangs and mystical tendrils, Codrescu propels a convergence of “the gods” and poetry. Taking aim at the common structure embedded in the human psyche, Codrescu codes his ouevre in religious terms. This approach to poetry is intended to pressure the residue of magic and prejudice deposited in folk traditions and encoded in “the differences.” Again, impact of Eliade’s identification of spiritual existence with the imagination, along with the Orthodox tradition’s insistence of human universalism and Christological manifestation in the human artistry of the icon is powerfully registered upon Codrescu’s construction of personae.
America’s days of rage are assimilated into a numinous, touch adverse orality spoken by the shell-shocked soldier: “don’t touch me, / I am your holy mouth” (115). As Peter Boone, “an ex-beatnik who became a mystical fascist in Vietnam” (114), he writes in “gist”:
america is healthy. i am healthy
in the body of christ
the fall of melted metal builds
my spheric soul.
i go first.
my body’s laid flat
on the copper table
and pounded up thin like a sheet
to pick up prophecy. (120)
Codrescu continued the great work of eating his medieval Christian shadow “in a self-published mimeograph collection called (like a later collection), The History of the Growth of Heaven by Calvin Boone, OSD (Order of Saint Dominic)” (145). In “Dear Editors,” Brother Antoninus is called through Calvin Boone to Codrescu’s agape feast:
The Monk is American, he is wheat-treated Bethlehem steel
out of Brother Anoninus’ unsaid brotherlies,
all the wasted brotherlies…
He is presently a New Hampshire Monk
of the Dominican Order of Monks,
he is fat. May the blessed Willows pray on his lousy
attempts to the writing of his soul.
Find him care of the Lord’s dear
Andrei Codrescu, 3779 25th Street,
San Francisco 94110.
What those numbers mean is no less
than the World,
may Peace answer your knowledge of me,
Calvin Boone
New Hampshire (147)
Codrescu’s poetry abounds with magic beans, meta-historical rhythms, and synchronic jolts, which fuse individual and collective experience to the sacred language of the gods. With timing buckled up to the theophanic imperative, Codrescu marks in “new market” the shift in collective attention from metaphysical to virtual domains:
create
twelve facebook gods, name them
after the months
à la revolution francaise
assign each of them to OCD friends
born in them or temperamentally suited
to the choleric Anusis the melancholy Ursina etc.
provide each god with a daily sura
and a lesson for every hour
meant to replace horoscope and toothbrush
for friends who then go forth to friends
suited to their gods (21)
Poetry is Codrescu’s creation myth; it charters a universalistic spiritual community that honors singular brothers, unique individuals, and irreducibly socialized mothers for their generous deposit of transpersonal potentials in active language. Not surprisingly, Codrescu’s wide range of perceptive cultural productions—NPR radio commentary, ABC Nightline television reportage, editorship of the literary magazine Exquisite Corpse, screenwriting and starring in documentary film Road Scholar—are registered across nearly all media. In all likelihood, Codrescu’s availability and well-deserved success over profane airwaves and popular platforms have impeded the critical reception of his first-rate poetry. As So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems: 1968-2012 proves, there is far more to Codrescu than a sardonic tongue flapping for the NPR gatekeepers of “the smart thing to do.” Among the thinning herd of poets still determined to live by the mouth, Codrescu is indisputably the King of the Talkies.
Bibliodeath by Andrei Codrescu. Antibookclub (IPG, dist.), $25 paperback (168p) ISBN 978-0-9838683-3-0
Celebrated Romanian novelist, essayist, radio commentator, and poet Codrescu scribes this eulogy-cum-paean of the printed publication. In tribute, Codrescu narrates his personal memoir as essentially archival and entangled with its textual production. He recounts an illicitly borrowed typewriter in Soviet-occupied Romania, handwritten poems copied by lovers, postcards written for posterity, marginalia, and the recent entombment of his various scrawls and snippets into an official archive. This official archive has its doppelgänger in a dispersed archive including his first journal, long-lost and still mourned, a twice mislaid government file, a stolen manuscript, disseminated letters, never-realized novels, and correspondences vaporized on crashed hard-drives. What becomes of this inherently written life when this multifarious cache is reduced to a spectrally digital library, condensed to the virtual, when all texts are read illuminated on the same screen? Codrescu’s various hyperbolic and absurd edicts respond to the alleged death knell of literature at the hands of e-reading, yet the main tenor of the book is a jubilant fête for the diverse and rich history of linguistic technologies and the concomitant literary movements. Lucid, clever, and lyrical, Codrescu’s delightfully distinctive prose extols a linguistic productive life as he commemorates this vertiginous moment in which the textual world flows from printed form to digital existence. (Nov.)
*
December 3, 2012 BOOKSLUT: Review
Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life in Footnotes) by Andrei Codrescu
ANTIBOOKCLUB
ISBN: 978-0983868330
168 pages
Reviewed by Josh Cook
Andrei Codrescu was asked to contribute an essay about his relationship with archives to a book about private libraries. Instead, he wrote his own book, one that exploded the very concept of "archives." He examined the intellectual, cultural, political, and artistic shards and shrapnel flung by the explosion, and rebuilt a complex but complete conception of the systems of information storage that contain our every action. Bibliodeath is really two books, an exploration of "archives" and a story of how Andrei Codrescu lived with and through arrangements of words on bound paper, both told in his unique Dada-inspired erudition and both touching on broader aspects of our relationship to the written word.
As with all considerations of writing and technology, Codrescu prefaces Bibliodeath with his take on the death of the printed book. I'm suspicious of arguments predicting future human interactions with technology, but Codrescu doesn't proselytize for one medium or another, so much as offer oceanic imaginations for the reader to bathe in while coming to terms with the idea of "archives," and how that idea is changing with the development of digital archives. In his preface, Codrescu isolates one of the most important and neglected aspects of the print versus digital debate: the relationship between objects and significance. "The desecrated sacred book can only be a book. Holy texts... exist in every format but there are no riots over the removal of such a text from an electronic library, and there never will be. One can insult a book on the internet and cause a reality-based riot, but no such demonstration is possible if an individual or even an organization removes a sacred text from its devices" (emphasis in original). As abstract as Bibliodeath gets and as concerned as it is with digital and even metaphysical recording techniques, Bibliodeath is a story about how we invest objects with meaning, how we turn objects like books and notebooks, rings and roses, into stewards of our ideas, our emotions, and sometimes even ourselves.
In Codrescu's personal story, we meet two of his stewards: his original poet's notebook and a book of poetry by the Italian poet Renata Pescanti Botti. He bought his poet's notebook when he was a teenager forming his identity as a poet in Soviet controlled Romania, where the writer's workshop passed judgment more on writers' fitness as citizens than on the quality of their work. The notebook was a receptacle for Codrescu's transformation, and when he lost the notebook after immigrating to New York -- shifting it into another kind of archive -- it was like leaving behind scraps of molted shell. Codrescu wrote his own poems in the blank spaces contained in Botti's collection and lost that personal palimpsest too. This steward was eventually returned and published in a transcript and facsimile edition. The stewards offer another version of the "archives," and telling their story requires telling much of Codrescu's own story of fascism, immigration, identity, and poetry.
Most of the personal story is told in footnotes. In recent storytelling, the footnote has become a way to confront the reader with the complexity and alinearity of life. Footnotes show that life branches off, sub-divides, and wanders. But in Bibliodeath, the footnotes often fill the page. There is one described as "A Chekhov Novella" that is about seven pages long. What happens to the organization of a book when there is as much (or more) footnoted content as there is content? What do you call a footnote that devours the leg it bases? When footnotes take over, we are confronted with a not-quite-paradoxical idea; an accurate assessment of the content of our lives will reveal more noise than signal. Laid out on the page, there will simply be more words in the branches, sub-divisions, and wanderings than in the story.
Running through it all, or perhaps unifying it all, or perhaps being the point of it all, is Codrescu's unique erudition; his unabashed joy at the way words can be brought together into images and ideas that have significance even when they don't accumulate into our expectations of sense or storytelling. "I was the child of a minotaur and a printer," "They didn't understand that content disappears at certain speeds, leaving behind only color and motion, just like style in literature dispenses with content inside books" (emphasis in original), "I was an 18th-century scrivener tormented by rain, lust, and tuberculosis, hoping to be vindicated by the future," "I slid into the posthuman like a fly holding on to the flypaper it believes keeps it from falling." For readers who enjoy Codrescu's style, the elation of certain arrangements of words is the philosophical underpinning for those arrangements. The complex, abstract, and sometimes obtuse ideas catch up with the elation a moment later, as one catches one's breath, a drawing into the intellect of its particular oxygen.
Through this erudition, the exploration of "archives" touches on many different ideas and topics, both organized into the conceptual space of the footnote or in the natural course of fully exploring an aspect of the "archives" itself. The multitude of identities in the multilingual immigrant. The progression of the typewriter in literature. The conflict of spellcheck. One additional topic drew my attention: for me, Bibliodeath is as much about putting words on paper as it is about the paper holding the words.
"This instrument was the intuitive force I needed to explore the world of the sacred; the instrument itself was writing, it looked like a line of verse," "The result, poetry, is a collaboration between the demon who possesses the poet and the intelligence that studies it," "In this sense, the writing life is the life that cleans up after itself, it dredges the refuse that refuses to go away, and it orders it in neat lines for disposal," "And that had been poetry's purpose all along: the typesetter who first invented verse by breaking the continuous line of print had created storage space for the future." Taken with his last two works, The Poetry Lesson and Whatever Gets You Through the Night, Bibliodeath is the third volume in a single work about writing. The Poetry Lesson focuses on poetry, Whatever Gets You Through the Night on storytelling, and Bibliodeath on the fundamental physical actions of the writer and the relationship between the writer and the objects written on. If I taught a writing course, I'd assign the set.
Bibliodeath is about how our lives are collected in "archives," and how the actions, reactions, passive systems, active transgressions, appropriations, power dynamics, unconscious drives, typos, books, and notebooks surrounding, establishing, and being our lives become a reverse Golem: a being spitting out words for the world to collect. In a way, Bibliodeath is also about the permeable borders that surround us and our words, the border between our minds and the public, between the remembered and the forgotten, between the officially recorded and the metaphysically archived, "between the real and the virtual." As Codrescu concludes, "This essay is a history of how I got to that border, and how I moved to one or another side of it... Either side of the border between the 'real' and the 'virtual' is a province of technology: print in the 20th century, digitization in the 21st. The border looks now like a dotted line over the head of a cartoon character, soon to dissolve like clouds in Wordsworth's poem." We are all citizens of that border. Bibliodeath is a challenging and rewarding tour of our new nation, further proving that Codrescu is a unique and necessary writer.
INTERVIEW BOOKSLUT: Interview
Josh Cook, December 2012
Andrei Codrescu is the author of dozens of books: poetry, memoir, philosophy, fiction, criticism, works that fall somewhere between stable categories of writing. He's commented on NPR's All Things Considered, won a Peabody Award for writing and staring in the film Road Scholar, and founded Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Books & Ideas. For over forty years he's been pushing at the seams of literature, carrying the project of his Dada forefathers through fad and fashion, over movements and monuments, into a space unique in contemporary literature.
Erudite, intellectual, playful, complex, abstract, Codrescu's recent books, The Poetry Lesson, Whatever Gets You Through the Night, and his newest book Bibliodeath, have pushed the bounds of writing even further, finding joy in the action of difficult thinking, while writing the best exploration and explanation of the act of writing itself. Andrei Codrescu discusses Bibliodeath with us.
Why does the rise of digital technology have to result in the death of print technology?
Because Mr. Ford ate the last working horse, thus making room for the racing horse. Technologically, the horse is a skeuomorph, but symbolically its power is increased tenfold by its selectively bred descendent. What we call "book" now will also likely be a magical thing that was once common. They symbolic book of the future will be a deluxe object related only slightly to its current Random House ancestor. Current print technology is dying as a mass-tool and will be reborn as art. Art is the last stage of capitalism.
Can we hold on to the sensuality of page turning and digitize the world's books?
If you're a twentieth-century-born reader, odds are that books are your best furniture, either as a library, a room divider, or a straightener of crooked things. If you can stay home, have the luxury of time, and are reading your English class homework under adult supervision, the sensuality of turning the pages is your consolation. But if you're a grownup, you now have some mighty forces aligned against that setup: books are heavy, and you're never alone. An electronic butler is with you always. Reading on public transportation is a good defense against the mob, but the pleasure is marred by the sea of judgment about your reading matter -- everyone who sees the cover pigeonholes you, a real buzz kill. In your car, the complexity is increased: you cannot read a print book unless you are a cult follower of Ed Dorn's essay "Reading and Driving." Barring that, you will nonetheless experience an ongoing battle between good and evil: an invisible e-reader going at it in the womb of your car titillates you with the hands-free choice between fast food and literature. You can mix it up between porn and the classics by just pushing a couple of buttons, a sensual experience more intense than turning pages, albeit briefer.If you like your reading dirty with just a touch of "literature" to justify your college debt, like a sprinkling of truffle on a cheeseburger, you can only have it electronically. If there are enough stoplights, that is, and it's a light day on .doc, Facebook, Twitter, and spouse on Skype. Time is speeding up, and there is less of it, so you might want to hold the truffle.
But if you do enjoy the aesthetic of the paper book, you have a vast back list at your fingertips (i.e., search engines), and you will also be catered to by makers of book-art, objects that serve simultaneously as things to read and things to wear (or display). If you enjoy book-art, you will need to obtain leisure by any means possible ("Poetry Requires Unemployment," Andre Breton, or "Independent Wealth," Andrei Codrescu). Architects are already using the millions of hardback remainders from vanished commercial houses as bricks to build houses that "read" to their residents, and there is at least one car manufacturer making a car from books that doesn't just read out loud as you drive, but moves also like pages sensually turning. (Infrastructure TK.)
In other words, yes, of course, the sensuality of turning pages will be available, but at a much higher price, like organically grown coffee. The paper book will be a boutique product, far from the products of today's publishing giants that are collapsing as we speak. The noise that you hear is actually the sound of editors-in-chief being sucked down the Amazon-dot-vacuum. So, the short answer is: yes. All books will be digitized, and all print books will be available either as print-on-demand from your computer or as art from your local snob-shop owner. The only problem is the one that freaked me out in Bibliodeath: all writing, print, digital, archived, anything recorded anywhere, will not only be with us, but it will occupy every space available, including our bodies, which will function as storage units. The real problem is that nothing really dies; it just piles up in every media and fills the world with endless copies. Our consciousness is bound to go nova at some point from the weight of endless repetition.
It struck me that some of the rhetoric of the fascism you experienced, such as a lack of educational attainment proving one's purity, or the anti-Semitic association of Jews with city living, is similar to the anti-intellectual rhetoric of contemporary conservatism; you can't be a "real American" if you're too educated or your city is too big. Are these similarities meaningful, or are they the result of my efforts to find a personal connection with what I'm reading? How do you tell the difference?
There is no comparison at all. The rhetoric of commie national-fascism in my native Romania was backed up by the secret police. It meant nothing to anyone, except that any dissent was punished, and anything (not just violation of the rhetoric) could be interpreted as dissent if a cockroach in the state apparatus chose to interpret it that way. The individual was both powerless and silenced. The American brand of anti-urban, anti-immigration, anti-college sentiment is a populist strain that runs throughout American history: it's Jefferson versus Madison. Ruralism versus urbanism, self-sufficiency versus government planning, these are rhetorical tropes trotted out by politicians at every election. No secret police enforces either of them: they are the warp and woof of our national fabric. There is no telling what a third party committed to the rural rhetoric might do if it ever got into power, but at this point it's just how we roll.
Footnotes usually prioritize. The ideas footnoted are less important than those in the body of the work. What happens to that organization when a footnote fills entire pages, replacing the body on those pages?
Is there a difference between the archives we make through writing, Tweeting, posting on Facebook, and the archives we generate with the information we leave in our wake from our genes to our credit card purchases? Will these two personal archives converge as information-gathering technology becomes more advanced and more omnipresent? Do the systems of power value one archive higher?
In Bibliodeath, I used footnotes to write a parallel book, related to the main text, but standing on its own. The footnotes here are irruptions of the unconscious (or whatever it is that interrupts you when you're talking). Most writers choose to ignore that voice (it often contradicts the just-typed assertion), but I decided to let it surface. The result is that whenever the voice wants the podium, my sentence makes room for it, so there is often a footnote appearing mid-sentence like a lava upflow.
The result, methinks, is a topography: the text gets texture. Less typography, more topography. My use of footnotes in this way started with the book Whatever Gets You Through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments, and it was suggested by the fact that The 1,001 Nights have been so often translated, each version deserves its own book, a fact that mirrors in an odd way the frame-story of the Nights. This use of footnotes to make books-within-books like Russian egg dolls is different from Nabokov's use of the novel-length footnote in Pale Fire to explain a poem, or David Foster Wallace's sinking into self-canceling analytical essays, though they are all related as a fictional technique. I've been working on a new form that incorporates memoir, exegesis, poetry, and philosophy, since The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess. The three books that followed employ this combo and can be read, I hope, pleasurably, without any overt tricks of perspective.
That's a grape cluster of questions, Josh. Let's see if we can break them down a little. To your first big question, as to the difference between our so-called private social traces and the products we consume as a result of being commercially read, I'll say that there is no difference. I'm fine with your opinion that our social ejaculations exhibit genetic markers (one can't help but be who one is when one speaks or writes), but your archive of communication with your intimates differs only infinitesimally from the reading of product peddlers. The infinitesimal difference is the illusion (or delusion) of the autonomy of your sentiments. One imagines that within the imaginary circle drawn by notions of privacy, autonomy, and genetically-tinged desire, one individual speaks specifically to another. In the faith-based production of this archive, it is possible to ignore that anyone else is listening, and that this particular listener is a corporation or a robot. But the net effect of creating a personal archive is to broadcast desire that will or will not be accepted by particular individuals, but will always be accepted by the collective or corporation. The archive of desire always has an attentive listener called The Consumer Index. (Our true and faithful lover.) The Consumer Index values archives equally, it cares only for the specifics of what the message broadcaster requires. The merger, if there ever was one, occurred with the advent of language; the ability to convey desire symbolically was collective property from the start.
Excepting those physically stained with actual bodily fluids and residues, are there any works of literature impossible to digitize or particularly resistant to digitizing? If a writer wanted to resist digital archiving are there stylistic techniques to do so?
Everything can be digitized, including your jizz on page twenty-three of Spinoza's Ethics. In fact, that jizz might help clone a whole Spinoza. There are only technical difficulties. Why would a writer resist digitization? A person who did that would not be a writer. Herm would be a silent monastic. Anyone who writes will be digitized, and there is no great drama in this. The mystery I chase in Bibliodeath is that of communication, in whatever media. Who or what is it we are talking or writing to or for, and where and when and why or why not?
You've written and read in several languages in your life, sometimes translating your own work from one to the other. You've also written poetry, fiction, memoir, and have recently worked in a critico-fictive or fictional-critical voice, and those voices and styles could be considered foreign languages. Do all of these languages unify in the brain? If so, what does that sound and feel like? If not, does this mean you experience a kind of controlled multiple personality disorder, or is there a better metaphor for the experience of language and voice in your mind?
There is no "foreign" language. Before going to school I spoke German, Hungarian, and Romanian, but I didn't know that they were separate languages. They were just how I talked to my friend Peter, who spoke Mitteldeutsch, like my nanny Ilse; to Istvan, who spoke the way I did with my grandmother; and to Ion, who spoke how most of our neighbors did. In school, I learned that I conducted these friendships in different languages. That never took. I didn't believe it then, I don't believe it now.
Everyone can speak every language, and it's only lack of practice and opportunity that creates inflexible monolinguism. I agree with Roman Jakobson that all languages derive from an ur-language, and that the ur-language is hardwired in the brain and can be activated to go live into any of its branches (any language or linguistic family) whenever called upon. When my writing works well you can hear the hum of that ur-language in every sentence. If you use, in addition, the mysterious tool called The Language Crystal, you have extraordinary powers. I'm not going to describe this tool in any way here, but it's in the book.
Is there a difference between words in your head, words archived on paper, and words digitally archived? Is there something inherent in the "word," that is preserved no matter the storage or transmission technology?
Yes. The words in your head cannot be archived by any known means. It's possible that the akashic records have that ability, but I don't know. The sign has to manifest to be reproduced.
You talk about writing as a method of reaching hyperlucidity. What can you see from this state?
Everything I missed before.
Is there a universal style or genre you, and maybe all writers, strive for?
Yes. Poetry.
One of the main characters in Bibliodeath is your first writer's notebook that you lost. What would you do if you found it?
I'd burn it.
Tuesday, March 12, 2013 "Where Art and Ideas Meet" • Philadelphia, PA • Dan Rottenberg, Editor
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.”
Like the review you just read.
> © 2013 Broad Street Review 1315 Walnut Street • Suite 904 • Philadelphia PA 19107 • 215-735-1455
*
http://newpages.com/bookreviews/2013-03-01/
Bibliodeath
Antibookclub, November 2012
Review by David Breithaupt
If you are reading this review, chances are good that books, those things with lots of words crammed between two covers, are probably an integral part of your life. You live with them, thumb through their pages, pass them on to friends, and—if you have enough—make furniture with them (as do I). If this describes you in any way, you will doubtless do yourself a favor by reading Andrei Codrescu’s take on the printed word both past and present, how it lives, where it goes, and the very nature of archives. Bibliodeath is also a portrait of a life lived with books and words. At the end of his tome, Codrescu states: “It is still possible, for as long it took you to read this book, to distinguish the quickly vanishing border between the real and the virtual. This essay is a history of how I got to that border, and how I moved to one or another side of it.” Indeed, Codrescu surveys with depth and humor this very transition we are living through, the digitization of our words.
Over the years, I have read most of Codrescu’s memoir pieces, and this book, to me, seems one of the most intimate—for when you reveal the nature of the relationship you have with books it tells me more about you than all the episodes that ended poorly with spouses, experiments with substance abuse gone amok, or whatever might be on your personal laundry list. Codrescu writes evocatively of his early youth, recalling notebooks lost and found, margin-scribbled books of poetry, books so imbued with the author’s DNA that these items ascend to the status of spiritual, holy-object talismans. It is precisely this type of object that Codrescu contemplates throughout Bibliodeath as the age of physical artifact merges with the arrival of the digital archives. He writes:
In these letters there are no smudges, no odd pauses of the keys, no whiff of tobacco or perfume, no ink blots, no erasures. The pain and pleasure of the writer are invisible. And that is in effect what a good old-fashioned archive preserves: pain, flaws, whiffs of bygone bodies, the evidence of the unseen surround flowing through the writer’s finger(s) unto the paper.
Codrescu delves into this parade of digitization into the archival realm and how it may affect us. “The machine will be holding all of humanity’s memory hostage, and there will be no remembering without praying to the info clouds that will release their data rain in accordance to the accuracy of the prayers addressed to it.” Just what will be stored and who will have access to it? Will the physical artifact become eclipsed and then extinct, like the passenger pigeon and two-cent cigar?
Bibliodeath considers the fetish-nature of the archive librarians who oversee the last of the physical tomes, ranking them as “super-pervs.” Indeed, what nature will the actual sweat-stained manuscripts take on as they become as rarified as a snow leopard sighting? “Paper from the past will be accessible to the uninitiated only via an unbreakable Da Vinci Code.” One of the book’s more visceral anecdotes about personalized manuscript material is the encounter by research librarian J.J. Phillips with a writing document by the late Richard Brautigan. While perusing one of his last manuscripts, she wondered about the brown specks covering the papers. Eventually, she came to the conclusion that these pages were witness to the author’s final act, his suicide. The brown specks were pieces of Brautigan’s brain matter. That final touch would obviously be lost in the digital process.
Codrescu traces a personal and public history of thoughts and how they are stored and how and why we may keep them. His storytelling ability is evident in this book and gives us his unique stamp on this biography of border-crossing writing in the 21st century. One warning though—the “Life in Footnotes” are copious and small, and, if you have old man (or old woman) eyes like me, these additional notes are a bit of a strain. But they are well worth the effort. If you go blind, these last notes will give you much to think about in your world of darkness. But you won’t go blind; rather, you will be enlightened. Read this book and wonder where we have been and where we are going. Both are always important questions, and Bibliodeath is an important attempt to address them.
*
PUBLISHERS' WEEKLY, January 14, 2013 starred review
BibliodeathAndrei Codrescu. Antibookclub (IPG, dist.), $25 paperback (168p) ISBN 978-0-9838683-3-0
Celebrated Romanian novelist, essayist, radio commentator, and poet Codrescu scribes this eulogy-cum-paean of the printed publication. In tribute, Codrescu narrates his personal memoir as essentially archival and entangled with its textual production. He recounts an illicitly borrowed typewriter in Soviet-occupied Romania, handwritten poems copied by lovers, postcards written for posterity, marginalia, and the recent entombment of his various scrawls and snippets into an official archive. This official archive has its doppelgänger in a dispersed archive including his first journal, long-lost and still mourned, a twice mislaid government file, a stolen manuscript, disseminated letters, never-realized novels, and correspondences vaporized on crashed hard-drives. What becomes of this inherently written life when this multifarious cache is reduced to a spectrally digital library, condensed to the virtual, when all texts are read illuminated on the same screen? Codrescu’s various hyperbolic and absurd edicts respond to the alleged death knell of literature at the hands of e-reading, yet the main tenor of the book is a jubilant fête for the diverse and rich history of linguistic technologies and the concomitant literary movements. Lucid, clever, and lyrical, Codrescu’s delightfully distinctive prose extols a linguistic productive life as he commemorates this vertiginous moment in which the textual world flows from printed form to digital existence. (Nov.)
Reviewed on: 01/14/2013
ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR
• Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century
• Monsieur Teste in America
• Zombification: Stories from National Public Radio
• Alien Candor: Selected Poems, 1970-1995
• New Orleans, Mon Amour
• Messiah
• A Bar in Brooklyn: Novellas & Stories, 1970-1978
• The Blood Countess
• Raised by Puppets: Only to Be Killed by Research
• WAKEFIELD
• The Devil Never Sleeps: And Other Essays
• IT WAS TODAY
• Raised by Puppets, Only to Be Killed by Research
• Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape
• Belligerence
• An Involuntary Genius in America's Shoes: And What Came Afterward
• The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans: And Other Essays
• CASANOVA IN BOHEMIA
• Ay, Cuba!: A Socio-Erotic Journey
• Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile's Story of Return and Revolution
• The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess
• The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile's Story of Return and Revolution
• The Dog with the Chip in His Neck: Essays from NPR and Elsewhere
• The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape
RELATED
• More about Andrei Codrescu
• 978-0-9838683-3-0
• More about Antibookclub
• More in Reviews -> Nonfiction
*
Winter 2013 — ForeWord Review
https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/bibliodeath
Bibliodeath: My Archives (with Life in Footnotes)by Elizabeth Millard
The unceasing pace of technology is creating a “bibliodeath” in which the written word is heading toward loss, some potential mourners believe. But that doomsday view ignores the evolutionary relationship between technology and language, Andrei Codrescu posits.
With a thought-provoking and highly philosophical style, Codrescu (author of numerous novels, poetry, and essays, including The Blood Countess and New Orleans, Mon Amour) attempts to encapsulate his forty-year career as a writer and commentator, and view his journey though a new lens.
“This is the story of a writer fast-tracked by the zeitgeist from the awakening of his mind in calligraphy to its maturity through a half-century of quickly morphing technologies of keyboards and memory,” he writes in Bibliodeath’s first essay. “It is intended to be a thriller.”
While he delivers on that promise, his explorations aren’t suspenseful in the conventional sense. Instead, he digs a rabbit hole for readers, leading them deeper into his sinuous thoughts, and drawing out insight along the way.
The direction of Codrescu’s musings is often unpredictable. He describes his experiences as a young bohemian poet in the 1960s, with a notebook that became his whole world. It was his first archive, full of “religion, decadence and profanity,” and when he loses it, the magnitude of the loss reaches across decades, making him cringe even fifty years later. That experience sets up a very extended and sumptuous riff on the culture of archives, texts, libraries, and literature itself. While he burrows so artfully into this material, Codrescu begins to expand his footnotes, which act as a parallel history, full of memory and random thoughts.
Much as he has in his poetry, and in his commentaries for National Public Radio, Codrescu excels at turning language into a kind of shuttlecock, bouncing words around with amazing skill. When talking about his experience writing poetry, for example, he recalls a “hypnagogic laziness” and finding inspiration in a “dense, female-shaped fog.”
The result that is Codrescu’s writing must be savored, never skimmed, and because of its inventiveness, he actually ends up using his writing style to prove his point: writing and words are evolving forms, but they also possess a fundamental solidity that can’t be destroyed, even though the lines are blurring. The border between the real and the virtual is like “a dotted line over the head of a cartoon character,” he writes, “soon to dissolve like clouds in Wordsworth’s poem.”
*
DOWN AND OUT, January 2013
Down & Out
Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life in Footnotes)
review by David Plick
by Andrei Codrescu
ANITBOOKCLUB, 2012
January 2013
Imagine there’s a very intelligent, literary writer 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, so because of that (or because to him arguing a point, like a Congressman up at the podium on C-Span, is dull and simple), he has a tendency to go on tangents. Sometimes these tangents lead to further tangents and further 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 is his essay, 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 of 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 test the barriers of 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 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 and spend time 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. To call this book simply an assault on Google, Twitter, and Facebook, would be an insult to the author. Rather, from his role as a poet, novelist, 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.” As critical as he is of the digitization of archives, he spares no one, including paper archives and the intellectuals who (politically) decide what’s worth archiving, and what future readers need not concern themselves with. Codrescu isn’t simply a champion of the paper book—something that he says was once a new technology just like Gmail or anything else. If he’s championing anything, it’s language itself.
And beyond Codrescu’s already very awe-inspiring ideas, are his even more awe-inspiring 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 former 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 century’s 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.
David Plick is the founder and editor of Down & Out.
Search
© Down&Out 2012
VATRA, December 3, 2012
http://www.revistavatra.ro/pdf/vatra_2-2012.pdf
Arhive, biblioteci & note de subsolby Rodica Grigore
Andrei Codrescu, Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life in Footnotes), Antibookclub, 2012
"Poetry is a collaboration between the demon who possesses the poet
and the intelligence that studies it.” (Andrei Codrescu)
Venind după The Poetry Lesson (2010) şi Whatever Gets You through the Night (2011), Bibliodeath, recent apăruta carte a lui Andrei Codrescu, îi poate lua prin surprindere doar pe aceia (mult) prea puţin obişnuiţi cu maniera sa de a scrie. Căci autorul nu face, prin intermediul acestui volum, decât să desăvârşească un soi de inedit triptic dedicat, dincolo de orice altceva, scrisului. Iar dacă Lecţia de poezie evidenţia importanţa liricii chiar şi în (mai ales în!) epoca noastră, iar aventurile Şeherezadei dezvăluiau mecanismele mereu fascinante ale istorisirii şi nevoia dintotdeauna a omului de a-şi căuta un refugiu împotriva nemiloasei acţiuni a timpului în povestiri menite a suspenda (amâna / înşela) moartea, Bibliodeath (beneficiind de condiţii grafice deosebite şi având pe copertă o reproducere după Albrecht Dürer şi Apocalipsa sa din 1498) aduce în prim plan relaţia dintre scriitor şi cartea pe care o scrie – sau în care se (în)scrie. În egală măsură, Codrescu analizează pe larg mult clamatul sfârşit al erei tiparului şi, implicit, temuta (sau dorita de către unii!) dispariţie a cărţii în format clasic, tipărit (de aici şi titlul: „Biblio-death”), în contextul afirmării tot mai accentuate a ediţiilor digitale ale operelor fundamentale ale umanităţii sau ale textelor literaturii contemporane. Pornind de aici, autorul redefineşte, indirect, locul cărţii de hârtie în contextul mai larg al istoriei literare şi a ideilor.
Însă trebuie să ţinem seama că preocupările lui Andrei Codrescu vizând rolul extrem de important al scrisului şi sensul adevăratei literaturi nu sunt noi, câtă vreme încă în Miracol şi catastrofă (dialogul în cyber-space cu Robert Lazu, cea dintâi carte scrisă în româneşte de Codrescu, după volumul de debut, Instrumentul negru, publicat în 2005, deci cu câteva decenii mai târziu...), autorul se exprima după cum urmează: „Scrisul este în întregime un act moral. Fără intenţia de a îmbunătăţi lucrurile n-aş atinge tastatura. N-aş fi atins hârtia din liberă voinţă nici prima dată. De atunci nu s-au prea schimbat motivele: sper că fac plăcere şi că dau un îndemn la blândeţe şi toleranţă.” Practic, toate apariţiile editoriale din ultimul deceniu ale lui Codrescu se dovedesc a fi înrudite din punct de vedere tematic, fie şi parţial, configurând, dacă sunt citite integral, un excelent portret al artistului în devenire. Un artist pentru care literatura înseamnă mai mult decât o activitate de delectare, mai mult decât o trambulină spre celebritate (americană sau nu!) şi, desigur, mult mai mult decât o disciplină universitară.
Înrudite oarecum cu formula unui jurnal literar, dar şi cu structura unui discurs / demers de istorie a mentalităţilor ori de analiză de ansamblu a fenomenului cultural contemporan, paginile din Bibliodeath, trimiţând adesea şi la scrierile anterioare ale autorului, dar şi la activitatea lui de comentator la National Public Radio (e foarte cunoscută rubrica sa intitulată „All Things Considered”), discută pe larg modul în care ia naştere o carte – şi, deopotrivă, un scriitor. Dar şi pe acela în care un scriitor poate face faţă (sau face faţă mai puţin) provocărilor tehnicii din ultimii ani, mai cu seamă proliferării arhivelor electronice, cu întregul lor arsenal de beneficii – dar şi de inconveniente... Căci, după cum se exprimă, aici, Andrei Codrescu „Execuţia publică la care este supusă astăzi cartea de hârtie nu e încercarea de a-i şterge ori anihila conţinutul, aşa cum se întâmpla în cazul incendierilor de proporţii organizate de Inchiziţie sau de nazişti, ci reprezintă transferul conţinutului într-un alt mediu.” Desigur, cel electronic ori virtual – de care, doar în paranteză fie spus, scriitorul american de origine română era foarte preocupat încă din prefaţa la cea de-a doua ediţie a excelentului său eseu Dispariţia lui Afară, republicat în 2001.
Pornind de la pretextul pe care i-l oferă o cerere care-i este adresată de a scrie un studiu pentru un volum dedicat bibliotecilor, Codrescu se lasă complet cucerit de idee şi va scrie propria sa carte, în care explorează pe larg – şi cu o plăcere pe care nu-şi dă nici o clipă osteneala s-o ascundă – conceptul de arhivă. Evident, mai cu seamă în sensul literar pe care cuvântul îl are. Asumându-şi perspectiva celui care a fost martor la mai multe revoluţii tehnice, câtă vreme uluitoarea ascensiune a cărţilor digitale nu e singura transformare pe care omenirea a cunoscut-o în ultimele câteva zeci de ani (să nu uităm de victoria scrisului la maşină asupra celui de mână, urmată de ascensiunea computerelor în defavoarea maşinilor de scris...), Andrei Codrescu relatează istoria propriei sale deveniri din copilăria şi adolescenţa petrecută la Sibiu, la începutul anilor ‘60, apoi ca rezident la New York (unde a şi rătăcit, spre imensa sa disperare, preţiosul lui caiet, cea dintâi arhivă personal-literară pe care a avut-o!), şi până la perioada maturităţii, ca profesor la Louisiana State University şi editor al revistei Exquisite Corpse. Punctul de maxim interes este reprezentat de arhivele pe care, ca un bun poet, le-a purtat mereu cu sine. Mereu sau, în orice caz, până când le-a pierdut... Căci, de la cel dintâi caiet de poezii, cumpărat de la o librărie din centrul Sibiului (unde, pe atunci, calitatea producţiilor lirice era judecată în funcţie de „implicarea cetăţenească” a autorului şi mai puţin de talent) şi până la sistemele sofisticate de arhivare electronică oferite de computerele personale, laptop-uri sau diversele site-uri de pe internet, Andrei Codrescu trece în revistă totul. Şi, cum o astfel de poveste nu poate fi prea uşor de spus dintr-o dată şi dintr-o singură suflare, autorul îşi oferă răgazul unor binemeritate pauze de respiraţie şi de meditaţie deopotrivă, făcând numeroase (135!) note de subsol. Pe care admiratorii săi le vor citi cu aceeaşi curiozitate pe care o au în faţa textului propriu-zis al cărţii, iar necunoscătorii vor fi tentaţi să le omită pentru a ajunge la final... Strategia aceasta a fost utilizată, de altfel, şi în Whatever Gets You through the Night, însă aici autorul îi dă o şi mai mare importanţă, câtă vreme unele note se întind pe pagini întregi (şi nu e cazul, aici, doar al celei intitulate Nuvelă cehoviană), ameninţând, pe alocuri, să inducă cititorului un soi de efect de confuzie – care, însă, e foarte bine controlat de scriitor. Căci Bibliodeath se dovedeşte a fi, citită cu atenţie, două cărţi, şi nu una singură: pe de o parte, o analiză foarte documentată a semnificaţiilor unei arhive umane (a oricărei arhive umane) şi, pe de altă parte, povestea propriei existenţe a lui Andrei Codrescu, devenit, astfel, personaj al cărţii sale, alături de, împreună cu şi, nu o dată, sub ameninţarea munţilor de hârtie în care se transforma în scurtă vreme orice bibliotecă a sa.
Notele de subsol sunt dedicate în cea mai mare parte relatării experienţelor personale. În scrierile multor autori contemporani, aparatul notelor de subsol reprezintă, adesea, un discurs secundar menit a sugera, o dată în plus, extraordinarea complexitate a existenţei, câtă vreme ele sunt semnul nesfârşitelor subdiviziuni şi multiplicări a sensurilor epocii prezente. Numai că în Bibliodeath notele de subsol par a domina, în unele fragmente, discursul principal al autorului, Andrei Codrescu amuzându-se astfel să se joace cu paradoxurile şi să spună, printre rânduri, că, uneori, explicaţiile infinite sunt mai importante decât faptul brut pe care încearcă (fără a-şi propune să şi reuşească întotdeauna!) să-l surprindă ori să-l detalieze... Propriile arhive ale autorului semnifică, astfel, drumul devenirii sale şi explică fascinaţia sa pentru cuvântul scris, căci, după propriile sale cuvinte, „I was an 18th-century scrivener tormented by rain, lust and tuberculosis, hopind to be vindicated by the future.” Sau: „I slid into the posthuman like a fly holding on to the flypaper it believes keeps it from falling...” Desigur, cititorii mai nerăbdători să ajungă la sfârşitul cărţii pot obiecta că notele de subsol din Bibliodeath par o recompunere a imaginii doctelor marginalia din manuscrisele medievale ori o parodică replică dată obsesiei zilelor noastre de a căuta informaţia exactă pe Wikipedia. Dar plăcerea lecturii acestui volum al lui Andrei Codrescu, imposibil de inclus în vreo categorie sau specie literară, constă tocmai în evaluarea raportului stabilit între textul propriu-zis şi notele care-l explică, îl nuanţează şi-l îmbogăţesc, în acest fel, în permanenţă. Ce-ar rămâne din Bibliodeath dacă am exclude notele? (Dualitatea structurala a discursului e încă unul dintre semnele cu grijă ascunse în text de autor pentru a spune ceva despre propria sa identitate, dar şi despre etapele evoluţiei sale literare!) Tocmai notele sunt cele care construiesc un adevărat labirint al oglinzilor (nu întotdeauna şi nu neapărat borgesiene) în care, însă, autorul nu-şi abandonează niciodată cititorul, ci îi demonstrează, fără a-i ţine vreodată vreo predică ori vreun curs că, oricât de abstracte ar putea părea pe alocuri ideile din textul de bază, esenţială este povestea istoria modului în care omul a învestit, de-a lungul timpului, obiectele cu un anumit sens, transformându-le, astfel, pe unele dintre ele (cartea, mai ales!) în adevărate semne ale celei mai profunde umanităţi ori, alteori, în mesageri ai emoţiilor, sentimentelor, concepţiilor care au marcat o anumită epocă.
Procedând astfel, Codrescu transformă aparenta relatare a transformării cărţilor clasice în arhive electronice ori ediţii digitale în ceva mai mult: el subliniază că ceea ce au anulat noile tehnologii nu e legat de activitatea în sine de a scrie sau de a tipări (la urma urmei, o statistică simplă ne poate oricând arăta că acum se scrie şi se tipăreşte mai mult ca oricând!), ci de urmele lăsate de om pe materialul dedicat scrisului – care, în trecut, te împiedicau să faci abstracţie de ambianţa în care un anumit text a fost scris. Căci regatul digital (al digitalizării?) e nu doar extrem de organizat, ci şi de aşa natură constituit, încât să nu fie legat de spaţiu ori de timp, putându-se, astfel, multiplica la infinit, dar fără a fi caracterizat de ceva anume care ar putea fi lăsat spre păstrare generaţiilor ce vin... Bibliodeath se transformă, deci, într-o meditaţie cu privire la modul în care existenţa umană poate fi cuprinsă ori păstrată în arhive, dar şi asupra procesului complex care determină apariţia a noi şi noi arhive (fidele sau infidele, active sau supuse uitării, oficiale sau metafizic-imaginative). Totul e în funcţie de acţiunea memoriei şi de actul în sine al rememorării: dintre toate acţiunile relatate pe parcursul acestui volum ce trece în revistă dorinţe neexprimate sau inconştiente, cărţi, caiete de notiţe, carnete confecţionate din alte cărţi se remarcă povestea volumului semnat de Renata Pescanti Botti, în care tânărul Codrescu îşi scria, pe post de adnotări, propriile poeme (întâmplarea e cunoscută, în parte, cititorilor români care au avut ocazia de a lectura Femeia neagră a unui culcuş de hoţi). După cum concluzionează Andrei Codrescu, aceasta e „povestea frontierei dintre real şi virtual”, dar şi a drumului pe care îl urmează fiecare pentru a o atinge. Atât realul, cât şi virtualul au tehnicile proprii: tiparul, respectiv formatul digital. Care se întretaie, se suprapun şi, nu o dată, îşi măsoară puterile ori se completeaza. Dovadă că şi acum, în secolul XXI, putem să ne bucurăm din plin de cărţile tipărite – cu condiţia să avem grijă ca acelea pe care le păstrăm aproape să merite cu adevărat acest lucru.
***
OTHER BOOKS, OTHER REVIEWS:
HOUSE ORGAN, 2012
Whatever Gets You Through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments by Andrei Codrescu. Princeton University Press, 2011. 179 pages. $22.95
reviewed by Kenneth Warren
“Language is not merely a cognitive operation of our brains; it is a source of sacralization that arises in order to defer mimetic violence. To represent by means of a sign is to cut off from worldly action. The supernatural quality of what is designated by the sign does not arise from the formal reality of the sign’s existence in a different world from that of things; it is rather this formal difference that arises from the human community’s "absolute" need of putting the desired object beyond the reach of its potentially contentious members.”
–Eric Gans, “Body and Soul”
“And, when I became a teacher I still felt a remarkable kinship with Scheherazade because I think our jobs are pretty much the same. If I have a great story, my students will listen. If I have a bad day, it means my story wasn’t good enough. Scheherazade is a great role model for teachers because her very life depends on story—and she can’t afford to have bad day.”
–Kathy H. Zimbaldi, “Deconstructing the Stereotype: Scheherazade’s Feminist Voice”
Andrei Codrescu’s Whatever Gets You Through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments is, in its entanglement with the creative and traumatic core of the Arabian Nights, an irresistible treasure of artistic vision, burnished narrative, fancy footnote, and trickster scholarship. Codrescu’s provocative intervention on the Nights is written flawlessly through an ear that channels the futuristic graces of Sheherezade, the story-telling savior of the virgins of Baghdad, who volunteers to marry the murderous King Shayar, a mad cuckold sworn to wed a virgin each night and have her strangled in the morning. Accompanying Codrescu’s surge into Baghdad is a wildly luscious sense of belonging to the viral force field of myth as well as to the hero archetype that always lives through narrative. Codrescu’s adventure into the Nights is, indeed, that of the psycho-energetic hero who encounters the goddess, rides her lubed serpent, snatches mana from her messianic kundalini, and joins her narrative powers to his own. Ultimately, something dazzling must give and does give from Sheherezade in order that Codrescu might live through the Nights.
Codrescu’s mission is to liberate the magical potency of Sheherezade’s name through the process of invocation. “We are bound to tell her story,” declares Codrescu, “no matter what our postmodern wishes or rebellious inclinations might tell us: simply pronouncing her name invokes her” (1). In Codrescu’s story-telling, the archetypal agency directing the creative mêlée of the Nights is explicitly yoked to infra-red instincts and sensational stories written across carnage. Devoted to “a peculiar literary Genius … who inverts the conventional order of narrative, the power relations between the sexes, sexuality itself, and memory” (1), Codrescu faces down the brutal places of heartbreak in the Nights. After Sheherezade’s name emerges as an explosively formed projectile aimed at the Phallus, the literal is left on the killing floor of Abrahamic horror. The Kingdom of pure historic existence explodes into tricky epiphanies. In Codrescu’s battle for hearts and minds filled with crazy inspiration imputed to Allah, “Sheherezade is an IED” (91).
Culture is a demolition derby, as Codrescu suggests in a footnote on “the Orient”:
The “Orient” was a suspect moniker long before E. Said proceeded to demolish “orientalism” as a colonial excuse that justified European conquest using the huge aggregation of kitsch that had grown around the “mysterious Orient” (90).
Against Arabic identity claims to Sheherezade, Codrescu asserts a cosmopolitan creativity that bends us into a feeling that we all belong to a life stream evolved out of mythos. Because Sheherezade becomes through Codrescu’s narrative a site in the struggle for global consciousness, it is impossible, as he well knows, to read his bold moves on Bagdhad and the legacy of the Nights without recalling Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), a book of sweeping objections to representations of Eastern cultures by Western agents. For Codrescu, however, “the Orient and Occident are enmeshed in ways that cannot be separated.” (90). In order to constellate “the topography of our global minds” (90, he cites Jorge Luis Borges, who posed this rhetorical question in the lecture “A Thousand and One Nights:”
What are the East and West? If you ask me, I don’t know. We must settle for approximations. (42-3)
As for “approximations,” a blurb flashes on the back Seven Nights (1984) that “Borges is a central fact of Western Culture.”
So in the context of a near magical transmission initially defined by Arab, Indian, and Persian oral cultures and that by way of written text now occupies a global domain of authorized fantasies, the co-dependent and fated relationship between Sheherezade and three other translators of the Nights—Antoine Galland, Richard Burton, and Husain Haddawy—pushes Codrescu to confront “the ‘political’ corrections of the late 20th century” (3). Thus Codrescu’s bawdy bead on the Nights draws deeply from the priapic well of 19th century explorer, linguist, and scholar Richard Burton, whose unexpurgated translation The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1885-86) established the centrality of Sheherezade to the coherence of the tales. Burton’s remark that “the Nights are nothing without the nights,” quoted by Jack Zipes in When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition (2007) makes clear Codrescu’s precedent for serving his imagination to Sheherezade. As Zipes explains, “the Sheherezade framework is essential for the collection, and Sheherezade sets the tone for the employment of the narratives, even though they were probably created by different authors: It is she who provides the raison d’être for the tales, the driving impulse, and without comprehending why she was “invented,” the Nights cannot be understood” (59).
While the frame narrative of Sheherezade begins with kingship, an archetypal domain, which reinforces rivalries between fathers and sons amidst the magical field of women (Walker, Barbara, The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Mysteries and Secrets, 1983, pp. 501-8), Codrescu cleverly enframes the frame narrative with the issue of technology and embodiment. Poignantly enough, Codrescu’s starting point comes straight from a virtual place of collapsed context and crowd-sourced knowledge. A Wikipedia entry on One Thousand and One Nights, snagged in 2009, marks a technologically “framed” point of entry to the hidden booty within a book that drips balmy insight into anxiety over annihilation. “Framed” by Wikipedia, Codrescu’s view on the Nights stews momentarily between digital and organic dilemmas. Needless to say, in this book, anxiety over annihilation—whether by tyrannical masculinity, genetic engineering, the Wiki, or all of the above—goads a magnificent story-telling impulse that enlarges both Sheherezade and Codrescu from a body of images capable of evoking daimonic possession.
The technological turn from embodiment hazards a withdrawal of “immediate presence” (67), a distancing from human relation in nature, as Robert Romanyshyn suggests in Technology as Symptom & Dream (1987). Such reflections portray a ground of feeling obscured by technological force. All the way through the book, Codrescu expresses a desire to secure the frame story and the metaphor of Sheherezade to the feeling-charged ground of speech, origins, and presences, in other words, that spirit-haunted ground ordinarily absorbed by cults of the Christian logos. Perhaps because the Nights is rooted in oral tradition, Codrescu’s voice, which can be heard over radio on NPR, provides us with the grain of sound that makes the cut, the call, and the response between narrative and footnotes feel so naturally connected to the heat of the real deal. “To lend an ear” (11), as Codrescu suggests, is to turn the written text toward the feminine and the mythology of nature.
For Codrescu the story-telling complex in the Nights is wedged between the id slaves of passion and the superegoic masters of Allah’s law. As queens slip from the control of kings, a racially mounted image of chthonic sexuality suggests the sensational depth charge that emotionally powers the story-telling complex from below. A line muscled from Burton endows Codrescu’s presentation of the Queen’s betrayal of King Shahzaman with a certain sense of overheated animalism:
Lying on the marital carpet, spread shamelessly beneath a “black cook of loathsome aspect and foul with kitchen grime,” was his beautiful young wife, the only visible thing about her a white thigh arched high over the beastly back, and a strand of the string of pearls snaking away from the sweaty bodies. (5)
Her passionate participation in outlaw sex with a “loathsome Moor” turns the kingdom into a crucible of carnage worthy of a footnote that praises Allah. With a playful recognition of the way the enslaved might read the instinctual drives of royalty, Codrescu deadpans the broiling point:
Back at the palace, the slaves also figured it all out, and not a few of them thought secretly that the King was a fool, and that his wife’s affair had been the most reasonable thing since she had doubtlessly required the cook who pleased her by his food to please her with his cock. Now the palace was both without mistress and without cook, a truly sad state of affairs; at least the King was out of town, praise Allah. (5)
With Burton as guide to the cultural complex that animates the anarchic domain of the Nights, Codrescu accentuates the sense that the black slave is the master of chthonic sexuality. In the alchemical color-play evoked from the body of images, the black slave is the possessor of the embodied nigredo that dispossesses kings of queens. Not surprisingly, King Sharyar’s wife succumbs to Moorish temptation, too.
King Sharyar’s young wife called cheerfully to the lush tree in the garden, and a naked Moor of great physical dimensions leapt down from it and embraced her like a tall black exclamation point around the milky white Queen wrapped herself like parentheses. (8)
With King Sharyar’s discovery of his Queen’s betrayal, the butchery in the kingdom multiplies further.
Sharyar leapt from his hiding place and killed his wife and her lover himself with swift strokes of his scimitar. He, too, like his brother, cut the bodies into pieces—not just four each, but eight pieces each, because, as he was the greater King, his fury was so much greater. He then seized the ten white Mamelukes, five of whom were men, and personally tied them to the tails of horses he whipped until they took off in all directions, rending the guilty flesh. He then danced like a madman among the hunks of bleeding meat, slashing at it with dagger and scimitar. He ordered a hundred virgins slaughtered secretly that night. (10)
Like the knots of Jacques Lacan that slip from sense into language, “hunks of bleeding meat” punctuate the discourse of desire in Codrescu’s soulful recuperation of the Nights. With the heat turned on by sexual impulse from below, the paternal no takes up Allah’s butcher knife to curb instinctual drives and to bring order to the disorder of the skin. The extraverted letter of the law is written into flesh at the bleeding edge of the soul’s awakening to story. “What is known,” Codrescu writes in a footnote, “is that as the God of Abraham becomes more irritable, the number of punishments multiplies, as evidenced by many holy texts and present day humans who are as full of scars as trees chewed by beavers” (54).
King Sharyar’s meat grinding metonymy separates parts from wholes. On the cusp of marrying King Sharyar, Sherherezade listens to her father Vizir tell “the tale of the Ox, the Ass, the Rooster, the Merchant, and the Wife” (53). In the process, Codrescu presents Sheherezade’s theory on “the language of animals:”
Removing the universal language from the human brain was the First Circumcision. There had been others before the one currently decreed by Sharyar, some performed by Allah himself, like the circumcision of the Universal Tongue, others performed by men interpreting the Prophet’s words or the words of other deities. (55)
But Sheherezade stands corrected by Codrescu whose ingenious footnote suggests the alchemical process of dissolution is now penetrating her illusions:
Sherherezade is wrong in this: the One Language was not removed; it was diluted by the addition of vowels, which, just like water, dissolve everything, but especially understanding. The consonants, particularly the cognates led by labials, had resisted the dissolving action of vowels for a long time, but they were eventually riddled with holes like limestone by water, and the One Language is now just a world of caves with a flimsy lace of consonants still linking them. This is a materialist description of the process; to believers in the desert God it’s just more surgery. (55)
“To cut off the head of patriarchy within us,” write Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson in Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness (1997) “is to cut off the power drives—the injunctions, the rules, false reasonings, false values that separate us from our reality and take our voice away” (159). Aiming for that head, Codrescu is a psychic surgeon whose sleight of hand operates on patriarchal confusion embroiled in Allah’s greatness. As images of primordial masculinity rise up from the sexual combat zone, Codrescu scans for pathological matter, always attentive to the total emotional situation that binds the story-telling complex to mimetic crisis and trauma. Like the murder of the tortoise by Hermes, the secret slaughter of a hundred virgins in the Nights marks the limit of the literal. No identity claims based in history can stop the dematerialization underway. Sheherezade is an inspiratrix of collective hysteria. Her ultimate charge to Codrescu is an alchemical one—to transmute the carnage into a grand refusal to grant the law of dead meat rule over the pan-human imagination. From the battered virgins of Baghdad, Sheherezade gathers the hysterical steam needed to power the story of a resurrection patched through Codrescu’s impeccable ear.
reprinted from HOUSE ORGAN, April 2012
O mie si una de fructe ale curiozitatii
Sînziana-Maria Stoie
reprinted from Euphorion, February 2012 euphorions[@]yahoo.com
Andrei Codrescu nu încetează să ne seducă şi să ne surprindă, totodată, cu fiecare carte de-a sa nou publicată. Antrenată într-un tour de force al explorării de spaţii insolite ale scrisului – spaţii experimentale, mai cu seamă – care să mustească de formule narative dintre cele mai neaşteptate şi poznaşe, imaginaţia ferventă a autorului american de origine română violentează în permanenţă automatismele noastre de lectură. Având o logică specială a scriiturii, Codrescu ni se dezvăluie ca fiind un maestru al conceperii de puzzle-uri narative, îmbinate sub forma unor fluxuri metamorfotice de genuri, stiluri şi tonalităţi distincte care se întrepătrund, fără a-şi pierde autenticitatea. Imprevizibilul naraţiunii lui Codrescu îi plasează pe cititorii săi într-o postură foarte asemănătoare cu cea a unor degustători de curry; dulceag la început, sosul devine din ce în ce mai iute pe măsură ce este consumat, intensificându-şi aroma, în funcţie de compoziţia şi proporţia condimentelor, într-atât încât degustătorul este suspendat în plasa densă a beatitudinii simţurilor ca într-un labirint cu mai multe intrări, însă, paradoxal, fără nicio ieşire.
Nu întâmplător am făcut referire la unul dintre cele mai faimoase produse ale specificului asiatic. Exotismul, apetitul pentru afrodiziace şi suspans, efervescenţa, erotismul, atmosfera inconfundabilă, care dau savoarea lumii orientale, nu îi sunt nicidecum străine, după cum urmează să vedem, scriitorului american.
După The Poetry Lesson (Lecţia de poezie), e rândul fascinantei Whatever Gets You Through the Night. A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments (întrucât cartea nu a fost tradusă încă în limba română, un posibil echivalent al titlului ar fi Indiferent ce te ajută să supravieţuieşti peste noapte. O poveste despre Sheherezada şi distracţiile arabe), publicată anul acesta, la fel ca şi volumul precedent, la Princeton University Press, New Jersey, să confirme puterea nesfârşită de invenţie a lui Codrescu, ineditul experienţelor pe care le oferă cititorului, precum şi faptul că autorul şi-a apropriat o dimensiune nevralgică a scrisului, la intersecţia dintre ficţiune, metaficţiune şi nonficţiune, amplificată de mizarea pe posibilitatea suprapunerii celor trei; mai mult decât atât, pe absorbirea uneia în ţesătura bogată a celeilalte. Întrebarea care se impune, firesc, este ce anume face atunci diferenţa dintre cele trei tipuri de discurs, cum reuşesc să îşi păstreze doza de recognoscibilitate. Natura contopirii lor nu poate fi explicată până la capăt; ea pare rezultatul unei tehnologii secrete irigate de forţa proiectivă a autorului, se înscrie în intenţionalitatea acestuia de a genera o alchimie narativă, pentru care delimitarea ficţiunii şi metaficţiunii de nonficţiune ar constitui cel mult un pretext.
Whatever Gets You Through the Night reprezintă o surpriză – incitantă, de altfel – chiar şi pentru cei care urmăresc parcursul scriitoricesc al lui Codrescu. Considerată de critica americană, la scurt timp după apariţie, o capodoperă a povestirii, cartea se axează pe întoarcerea la originile artei narative, ale scrisului şi limbajului, la un spaţiu al metamorfozelor continue. Acesta nu este altul decât lumea halucinantă şi mereu actuală, ne demonstrează Codrescu, a celor O mie şi una de nopţi. Autorul reproiectează întreaga legendă a eliberării virginelor din Bagdad de către Sheherezada, celebra prinţesă persană care, cu ajutorul capacităţii ei de a institui funcţii magice poveştilor pe care le spune, reuseşte să îşi salveze propria viaţă, şi, în acelaşi timp, viitorul omenirii, făcând lumea un loc mai sigur pentru imaginaţie. Emblema triumfului plăcerii asupra fricii, Sheherezada, fiica Vizirului regelui Sharyar, le salvează pe tinerele femei care urmau să devină, fiecare în parte, soţia regelui pentru o singură noapte, ca în dimineaţa zilei următoare să fie ucise, drept garanţie a fidelităţii lor. Şi ea una dintre soţiile lui Sharyar, „Shezz the Telly” supravieţuieşte 1001 nopţi, spunând poveşti pe care are grijă să le „încheie” la răsăritul soarelui, chiar înainte de a da la iveală deznodământul, fără să ştie, desigur, că în miezul povestirii se cristalizează o adevărată poetică a misterului.
Cu toate că include doar una dintre poveştile rostite de Sheherezada în patul lui Sharyar, şi anume „The story of the monkey-scribe” („Povestea scribului maimuţă”) – o alegorie pe tema implicaţiilor scrierii –, Whatever Gets You Through the Night reprezintă o hyperstructură narativă, o reţea textuală configurată sub semnul unui paradox din care îşi trage tocmai firul ce o alcătuieşte. Pe de o parte, chiar şi reunite într-o carte, sau mai ales reunite într-o carte, poveştile din O mie şi una de nopţi violează orice convenţie narativă; ele nu au nici început, nici sfârşit. Până şi începutul primei poveşti e un pseudo-început, reiterat în fiecare noapte, spus şi respus, o recitare sau o incantaţie, mai degrabă. După prima noapte petrecută în patul regelui de Sheherezada şi de sora ei, Dinarzad – cea care, de fapt, păstrează vie precum o plasă de mercur dorinţa regelui, rugându-şi în fiecare noapte sora să continue povestea începută noaptea precedentă –, poveştile nici nu mai încep, nici nu se termină, ci pur şi simplu continuă. Astfel, lui Sharyar, spectatorul prin excelenţă, ne alăturăm şi noi, cititorii, cu toţii ascultători vrăjiţi ai poveştilor prinţesei, iar patul regelui devine o scenă. Pe de altă parte, dacă Sheherezada, acest „Duh din lampă” al literaturii, nu e constrânsă de nicio convenţie narativă, Codrescu, laolaltă cu noi, este. Sheherezada reuseşte, prin iscusinţă şi inteligenţă, să răstoarne nu doar organizarea convenţională a narativului, ci şi relaţiile de putere dintre sexe – ţinându-l pe regele Sharyar într-un suspans narativ şi erotic agonizant timp de 1001 nopţi –, sexualitatea în sine şi memoria. Noi, însă, indiferent ce ne-ar dicta atitudinile noastre postmoderne sau eventualele înclinaţii rebele, suntem obligaţi să ne supunem ordinii instituite poveştilor de Sheherezada; simpla pronunţare a numelui ei o invocă, ne avertizează Codrescu, justificând opţiunea sa pentru conservarea într-o anumită măsură a schemei narative originare a poveştilor. Autorul american păstrează ceea ce este comun tuturor ediţiilor celor O mie şi una de nopţi - povestea iniţială a regelui Sharyar şi a soţiei sale, Sheherezada, precum şi tehnica „povestirii în ramă”, încorporată în naraţiunile pe care le ţese prinţesa persană; învelişul tare al textului îl constituie, însă, livrescul. Whatever Gets You Through the Night este departe de a se reduce la o simplă repovestire. Cum autorul însuşi mărturiseşte, în această matrioshka vom găsi de la plăcerea lascivă a reactivării orientalismului romantic în scopuri post-Said (este vorba despre Edward Said, o figură proeminentă a postcolonialismului, autorul unui studiu influent despre cultura Europei de Est), la senzualitate delicioasă şi sfaturi de supravieţuire în timpul epocii post-Gutenberg a „sporovăielii”.
Există şi aici o ramă, precum în Decameronul lui Boccaccio sau mult mai recenta Ten Nights and a Night (Zece nopţi şi o noapte) a postmodernistului John Barth, însă Whatever Gets You Through the Night nu se identifică pe de-a-ntregul cu nicio altă povestire de acest tip; fiecare „dispozitiv” al tehnicii narative constituie o ramă, o forţă generativă. În ceea ce priveşte „Nopţile”, orice ramă e doar o strategie menită să pună în mişcare universul poveştii. Pentru Codrescu, povestea însăşi reprezintă o ramă, punct de plecare pentru developarea, în paralel, a diferitor niveluri narative care se împletesc cu aglutinante comentarii critice în notele de subsol, atât de stufoase încât, la o primă vedere, îl pun cu siguranţă pe cititor în dificultate. Într-adevăr, unele note explicative sunt mult prea lungi, lăsând impresia unui autor care are vocaţia exhaustivităţii, căruia i s-ar putea reproşa că povestea „centrală” îşi pierde coerenţa, iar plăcerea lecturii este înăbuşită. Cu toate acestea, contrar poziţiei sale marginale în ansamblul textului, paratextul reprezintă cea mai substanţială parte a cărţii şi joacă un rol plurivalent. Scopul notelor nu este pur explicativ; de fapt, ele funcţionează, la nivel metaficţional şi metacritic, ca o vastă prelungire a poveştii „centrale” şi exercită, la fel ca prozele Sheherezadei, o atracţie de natură senzuală asupra noastră. Aşa cum lumina zilei pătrunzând în camera lui Sharyar anunţa întreruperea pe nepusă masă a firului narativ al poveştii – amânare plină de eros –, notele de subsol ne stârnesc apetitul pentru suspans şi imprevizibil, interzicându-ne accesul la poveste în mod repetat.
Pentru a descrie construcţia textului lui Codrescu, cea mai la îndemână este metafora cubului rubik. Volumul poate fi interpretat pe niveluri diferite, ca amalgam de ficţiune şi studii culturale, naraţiune şi filosofie, reportaj şi critică literară, istorie şi povestire factuală. Una dintre mărcile cele mai semnificative ale stilului ludico-relativist care îl defineşte pe Codrescu şi îl face un autor cu totul special, regăsită şi aici, mi se pare anularea opoziţiei dintre cultura „high”, aşa-zis academică, şi cultura „populară”. Asemeni lui T. S. Eliot, Codrescu integrează ambele reflexe culturale într-o viziunea completă, totală, asupra culturii în genere. Însăşi prima parte a titlului trimite la mainstream-ul anilor `70, amintind în mod simetric de una dintre cele mai cunoscute melodii ale lui John Lennon, intitulată în acelaşi fel. Cu toate că nu există indicii cum că autorul ar fi avut în minte conexiunea cu single-ul lui Lennon în momentul intitulării cărţii, cert este că sintagma Whatever Gets You Through the Night incapsulează ideea nevoii deopotrivă de suspans şi divertisment, reprezentând un liant peste timp; la fel cum Lennon obişnuia să vizioneze în timpul nopţii rând pe rând programele de televiziune, căutând emisiuni din care să selecteze fraze potrivite pentru a fi puse mai apoi cap la cap într-un cântec, şi personajele cărţii lui Codrescu îşi trag seva din pânza freatică a unei realităţi virtuale – e vorba, bineînţeles, de această dată, de cea a poveştilor –, luptând în fiecare noapte cu teama că, dacă nu vor primi sau nu vor oferi, mai degrabă, porţia necesară de suspans, vor înceta să existe. Nu putem decât să îi dăm dreptate lui Tzvetan Todorov atunci când afirma că „Narativul înseamnă viaţă; absenţa narativului, moarte...Absenţa narativului nu e singurul dublu al narativului perceput ca viaţă; dorinţa de a asculta o naraţiune presupune asumarea unor riscuri mortale. Dacă locvacitatea poate salva de la moarte, curiozitatea duce însă la aceasta.” Pentru Sheherezada, sfârşitul suspansului, precum şi cel al curiozităţii, echivalează pe deplin cu moartea.
Asemeni lui J. L. Borges, în ale sale Ficciones, Andrei Codrescu, cu apetitul său fabulos pentru ilimitat, ne arată într-un mod subtil, încă din primele pagini ale cărţii, cât de artificială şi friabilă este, de fapt, graniţa dintre ficţiune şi povestirea factuală. Whatever Gets You Through the Night se deschide cu bricolarea, într-o secţiune denumită framed (înrămate) – care joacă rol de prefaţă şi ocupă un număr destul de copios de pagini – a varii tipuri de texte având ca punct comun trimiterile la O mie şi una de nopţi şi la Sheherezada, căreia îi datorăm înlocuirea paradigmei universal valabile a relatării cu paradigma inventării. Fie că vorbim de trecerea în revistă a unor informaţii şi date cronologice, lămuriri critice sau teoretizări pe marginea mecanismelor naraţiunii, prin încercarea de a reconstitui rama istorică a „Nopţilor”, autorul ne provoacă să devenim conştienţi de cât de îmbibate sunt faldurile memoriei noastre culturale în substanţa acestei străvechi culegeri de povestiri populare, adunate de-a lungul secolelor de către un număr impresionant de autori şi traducători de pe continente diferite. Evocările de natură istorică se dizolvă însă în reverberaţiile mijloacelor de divertisment tipice culturii pop americane şi, în cele din urmă, în ficţiune; într-unul din texte, de exemplu, un extras de presă, ne este „relatat” un eveniment ce „a avut” loc în 2012 şi la care au participat femei, majoritatea clone, în simptomaticul număr de 1001. Nota distinctivă dată de melanjul de ficţiune şi povestire factuală este menţinută pe parcursul întregii cărţi; astfel, la un moment dat, Codrescu îşi imaginează că mama Sheherezadei, o nomadă, ar fi putut călători împreună cu Genghis Khan, fiind parţial responsabilă pentru distrugerea „versiunii” timpurii a Sibiului, oraşul natal al autorului, în 1334.
Aparent doar, legătura articulării unor texte precum cele din secţiunea introductivă cu tematica „Nopţilor” este vagă; remarcabil, totuşi, aşa cum palindromicul număr 1001 sugerează ceva ce depăseşte imaginaţia noastră, secţiunea framed, precum şi cea imediat următoare, no telling without retelling (nicio scriere fără rescriere), semnalează ireductibilitatea cărţii lui Codrescu la un simplu intertext cu legenda Sheherezadei şi cu prozele din O mie şi una de nopţi. Tind să cred că semnificaţia titlului no telling without retelling, care aduce cumva a slogan postmodern, ni se relevă, în cazul volumului de faţă, pe fondul unui joc al inversării termenilor; sintagma care s-ar potrivi, mai degrabă, este „nicio rescriere fără scriere”, deoarece textul lui Codrescu e o repovestire şi ceva în plus. Altceva. Un fel de „carte tehnică” a „Nopţilor”. O demonstraţie minuţioasă a modurilor în care funcţionează mecanismele textuale ale operei arabe, în care se pun în mişcare unul pe celălalt. Şi, având în vedere faptul că numărul acestor moduri este, practic, infinit, „Nopţile” înseşi constituind o metaforă a pluralităţii fără limite – cum afirmase Borges, „Să spui <<o mie de nopţi>> înseamnă să spui <<nopţi infinite>>, <<nopţi nenumărate>>, <<nopţi nesfârşite>>. Să spui <<o mie şi una de nopţi>> înseamnă să-i adaugi infinitului cifra unu.” –, avem impresia că însăşi povestea devine infinită prin modul în care Codrescu îi dezasamblează şi (re)asamblează rotiţele, după bunul său plac.
Atent observator al tradiţiei scriitorilor care au adus un aport însemnat în materie de interpretări ale „Nopţilor”, pomenindu-i pe J. L. Borges, care compara structura poveştilor arabe cu o „catedrală”, şi pe B. Odăgescu, pentru care puterea de atracţie a acestora era la fel de mare precum cea a unei flăcări pentru un fluture de noapte, Andrei Codrescu dezvoltă propria perspectivă originală, confirmând şi infirmând, totodată, apartenenţa sa la tradiţia menţionată. Dar pentru noi, ne spune Codrescu, spre deosebire de semnificaţiile oarecum „cuminţi” pe care le aveau pentru Borges sau Odăcescu, „Nopţile” au căpătat amploarea unei mări furioase pe care putem naviga cu prudenţă doar urmărind îndeaproape variaţiile vocii Sheherezadei învălurind din farul patului lui Sharyar întinderea sărată. Putem remarca din nou tendinţa autojustificativă a autorului, acesta avansând într-o primă instanţă pe un teren sigur, cel al poveştii despre regele Sharyar şi fratele său, Shahzaman şi, mai târziu, despre Sharyar şi Sheherezada, fără a se feri să alunece din ce în ce mai des pe panta textului şi pe pantele pe care el însuşi le construieşte, pătrunzând în mod deliberat în torentul poveştii şi dându-i întorsături neprevăzute. Căci, aşa cum observă pe bună dreptate autorul, e în natura celor O mie şi una de nopţi să-i invite pe ascultătorii, deveniţi în timp cititori, să participe, să adaoge, să inventeze, să-şi imagineze mai mult.
Borges, de pildă, admira, în primul rând, resursele textuale inepuizabile ale celor O mie şi una de nopţi şi nu se arăta foarte interesat de personajul Sheherezadei. Alţi cititori şi interpreţi pasionaţi ai „Nopţilor” au fost, dimpotrivă, fascinaţi de caracterul formidabil al Sheherezadei, de întruchiparea arhetipului Povestitorului, de forţa personajelor, însă au eşuat în a îmbogăţi considerabil, cu versiuni proprii, povestea arhicunoscută a prinţesei care, la rândul ei, îi spune unui rege persan poveşti, pentru a rămâne în viaţă. Nu este şi cazul lui Codrescu; repunând în cauză deopotrivă posibilităţile textuale ale operei arabe şi profilarea personajelor, el introduce o serie de date biografice despre Sheherezada, începând cu familia acesteia şi continuând cu perioadele copilăriei şi adolescenţei ei. Biografia personajului este alcătuită fragmentar, reprezentând totuşi fermentul care asigură spontaneitatea discursului; pe măsură ce avansăm în poveste, Sharyar începe să primescă, în timpul zilei, de la un spion, suluri de pergament în care este relatată cu umor viaţa prinţesei de dinainte de a-i fi devenit soţie. Aflăm, de pildă, că Sheherezada obişnuieşte, în timpul zilei, să vorbească cu profesorii de sufism şi cu calul ei, studiind pentru a deveni o asasină. Mai aflăm şi că poveştile ei sunt de fapt repovestiri, că Sheherezada nu fusese nicidecum o elevă strălucită, dar se remarcase în schimb ca fiind o mare mincinoasă. Există aşadar un echilibru permanent între decelarea calităţilor şi defectelor personajului, făcându-l pentru noi mult mai real şi complex. Un Ulise în variantă feminină, Sheherezada lui Codrescu e isteaţă, abilă, năstruşnică şi amuzantă, Whatever Gets You Through the Night necontenind să fie şi un bun manual de divertisment.
Orice poveste, dincolo de ce am putea considera drept utilitatea ei imediată, şi anume nevoia noastră absolută de ficţiune, reprezintă un întreg proces de recreare, de reinventare – a lumii, limbajului, tehnicilor narative, timpului, istoriei, etc., a oricărui fel de cadre cu ajutorul cărora ne fabricăm realitatea. Sheherezada, ne atrage atenţia Codrescu, are o importanţa inestimabilă pentru alimentarea predispoziţiei noastre de a ne imagina realităţi pe care ajungem, în cele din urmă, să le materializăm. Folosindu-se de propriile ei inovaţii de tehnică narativă, „Shezz” a accelerat confecţionarea lumilor alternative, înţelegerea noastră asupra evoluţiei artei narative crescând şi ea între timp. În viziunea lui Codrescu, nu doar spusul poveştilor devine o condiţie existenţială, aşa cum ştim deja, ci până şi cuvintele Sheherezadei constituie o sursă de viaţă, atât la propriu, cât şi la figurat. Dintr-un vehicul al epicului, limbajul este transformat într-o materie, căpătând mai multă consistenţă decât chiar subiectul poveştilor. Un transfer straniu de substanţă are loc între cuvinte şi carne, o corporalizare a limbajului. Cuvintele Sheherezadei sunt o lume aglomerată, un fel de „turn Babel” în care se vorbesc o multitudine de limbaje, atât de către oameni, cât şi de către animale. Limbaje din ale căror cuvinte constitutive se nasc noi corpuri făcute din poveşti, din ale căror cuvinte se formează alte corpuri şi aşa mai departe, o constantă inseminare între limbaj şi carne, carne şi limbaj.
La fel ca procesul, nu lesne de imaginat, al „reproducerii” dintre cuvinte şi corp, textul lui Codrescu, fermecător şi captivant prin meandrele sale, reprezintă în sine un mecanism elaborat şi complicat. Uimitor, autorul sfârşeşte prin a ne indica că rescrierea legendei Sheherezadei, care este şi o repovestire, ascunde de fapt un calcul punctual al viitorului povestirii şi al umanităţii, de asemenea. Fratele lui Sharyar, Shahzaman, se întoarce din secolul XXI în timpul fratelui său printr-o „gaură de vierme”, care este tocmai povestea spusă de Sheherezada regelui, şi face o serie de predicţii. Codrescu reuşeşte să întindă cu dibăcie o cursă curiozităţii noastre, răsplătindu-ne-o, în acelaşi timp. De altfel, ceea ce o transformă pe Sheherezada într-o eroină a tuturor timpurilor nu are nimic de-a face cu sexualitatea, ci cu ceva care se află înăuntrul ei: curiozitatea. NewPages.com http://newpages.com/bookreviews/2013-05-01/#So-Recently-Rent-World-Andrei-Codrescu So Recently Rent a World New and Selected Poems: 1968-2012 Poetry by Andrei Codrescu Coffee House Press, December 2012 ISBN-13: 978-1-56689-300-8 Paperback: 352pp; $22.00 Review by Patrick James Dunagan Andrei Codrescu is a grown-up punk kid who cherishes the pleasures of life. Reading his poems is to enter into the mind of a brilliant classroom prankster (and at least part-time sex junkie). There’s a lot going on, and he has a lot to say about all of it. Zany, off-the-wall goofiness finds its place alongside serious astute reflection. This New and Selected is all the more cherished for exhibiting the range of the poet’s self-transformation over the course of his lifetime. This remarkable range is significantly reflected by way of the mini-introductions Codrescu offers before each book selection presented here, ranging from bibliographic comments to personal memoir of the particular time and place of the original composition-specific poems. As a result, this volume comes to represent Codrescu’s shot at a tour-de-force performance. Prolific to this day, Codrescu opens with a selection of recent work amounting to some 80+ pages. After that, the collection travels backward to start over again at the beginning with a selection from Codrescu’s first book, License to Carry a Gun, then advances chronologically forward, book by book, along with two sets of chapbook sections. This organization serves the work well, no doubt better than Codrescu’s original scheme—“to follow some of [his] ‘themes’”—would have. Luckily Coffee House books publisher, editor, and friend Allan Kornblum convinced him to go this other route. This organization scheme denies Codrescu any opportunity to window-dress his writing history. It also likely contributes to just how openly informative his mini-introductions are, being more reflective rather than attempting to re-shape the work to fit his current views. The book opens with “signifier,” a near prose poem introduction to the new work, which startles with the clarity of its lucid complex extrapolation upon that forever ethereal pronoun for poets, “I”: “One day I had an idea. / This I you don’t know. / This I I barely knows.” Following this evocation is a prose recital of his various encounters with manifestations of “I” across “a nearly half-century” of time, closing with the observation: “In the U.S., my adolescent Romanian ‘I’ met the emerging political ‘fuck you’ of the 1960’s. What happens after that is in English, and the story of this book.” Codrescu began his poetic ascent in the United States at the tail end of the ‘60s as a recent émigré living in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he made his way through the ranks of the St Mark’s Poetry Project scene: In New York in 1968 I met poets my age or slightly older, among them Ted Berrigan, Dick Gallup, and Anne Waldman. I learned English and poetry simultaneously, while working part-time at the Wilentz brothers’ venerable Eighth Street Bookshop. I quit writing in Romanian, French, and Italian, my poetry languages until then, and I tried to find a bridge between the dark metaphorical music of my first poets, and the pop insistence on the actual, physical world that was the passionate poetics of my new friends. Codrescu became rather well known quite rapidly, soon crisscrossing the country with extended stays in San Francisco and points in between. After some time he began the peripatetic career of poet-professor eventually landing a longtime gig at Louisiana State University. Along the way, he edited the literary semi-underground sensational poetry zine Exquisite Corpse and the fairly solid anthology American poetry since 1970: up late, starred in the classic road trip documentary film Road Scholar, and became a periodic NPR news commentator. Among all poets of the United States, his distinct voice has arguably become one of the most publicly well recognized of any among his generation. In his first published collection, License to Carry a Gun, the poems not only reflect his status as a recent immigrant but also reveal the gist of much that was to follow from his varied personae: the flag is an adorable symbol
who never grew up.
like me.
a horny symbol too.
erected stripes touch the forked ends
of my soul. —“the flag” That Codrescu so self-identifies with the symbol of his new country comes as no surprise. He also says about the period, “America was nineteen years old in 1966 and so was I. I’d like to think that we’ve been in sync ever since.” His concern with identity remains paramount throughout his poems. It is easily one of the lasting values of his work, offering readers space to consider timely questions of nationality and immigration: how language blends with, alters/is altered by one’s self-identification(s). The result is an endlessly rich demonstration of how rewarding and varied the poetic crop is that arises upon exploration of such matters. As the last line of “the flag” rightfully celebrates with Whitmanic exuberance: “i praise this American possibility.” |
