Download or read book The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius written by Andrei Codrescu and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Involuntary Genius in America s Shoes and what Happened Afterwards written by Andrei Codrescu and published by David R Godine Pub. This book was released on 2001 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Multimedia culture critic, novelist, poet, editor of the radical literary journal Exquisite Corpse, Andrei Codrescu proves also a candid, witty, iconoclastic and exuberant commentator on his own colorful life. The self-invented Codrescu was born Andrei Perlmutter in the medieval town of Sibiu, Romania in 1946. A dissident student-intellectual and draft-dodger, he experienced a chequered adolescence under a draconian Communist regime. Beguiled by ideal photographs of places out of reach, at the age of 19 the young rebel fled his Transylvanian homeland -- this drab military country where young men turned old before they had a chance to look -- for the Land of Opportunity. It was my great luck, Codrescu remarks with characteristic sly irony in his introduction, coming into America in the late Sixties, to encounter several wayward myths ready-made for me, Transylvania being but one of them. Transylvania at the time of my arrival was a growing myth, full of potential, and anybody who bought stock in Dracula then must feel like an investor in early McDonald. In the past two decades I have seen Halloween overtake Christmas as the nation's greatest holiday, and Dracula become bigger than Jesus Christ, and even John Lennon. Queasy at first about this Hollywood fantasy, I later considered it as a gift. The dark stranger who bites blond Anglosaxony in her semisleep is the outsider, par excellence, the exile who brings history to a halt with his story. His bite ends being in time, it jumpstarts eternity, overthrows daytime and the bourgeoisie, reinstates aristocracy and difference. And it was a great way to meet girls. I never abandoned the profoundly gloomy existentialist disposition ofmy rebellious Romanian generation within which I had been raised as a baby dissident destined for great things and prison. No, I just put on a cape to complete the picture. Ionesco, my previous totem, was only a literary Dracula. To be bit by the absurd is every bit as liberating as being bit by an immortal, but why not be bit by both?
Download or read book An Involuntary Genius in America s Shoes and what Happened Afterwards written by Andrei Codrescu and published by David R. Godine Publisher. This book was released on 2001 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the candid account of author, essayist and broadcaster Andrei Codrescu's life. From a bitter-sweet childhood in a Transylvanian castle to the horrors of the Ceausescu years, the author eventually re-invents himself in a new country.
Download or read book The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius written by Andrei Codrescu and published by George Braziller. This book was released on 1975 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Poetry Lesson written by Andrei Codrescu and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-11 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Intro to Poetry Writing is always like this: a long labor, a breech birth, or, obversely, mining in the dark. You take healthy young Americans used to sunshine (aided sometimes by Xanax and Adderall), you blindfold them and lead them by the hand into a labyrinth made from bones. Then you tell them their assignment: 'Find the Grail. You have a New York minute to get it.'"--The Poetry Lesson The Poetry Lesson is a hilarious account of the first day of a creative writing course taught by a "typical fin-de-siècle salaried beatnik"--one with an antic imagination, an outsized personality and libido, and an endless store of entertaining literary anecdotes, reliable or otherwise. Neither a novel nor a memoir but mimicking aspects of each, The Poetry Lesson is pure Andrei Codrescu: irreverent, unconventional, brilliant, and always funny. Codrescu takes readers into the strange classroom and even stranger mind of a poet and English professor on the eve of retirement as he begins to teach his final semester of Intro to Poetry Writing. As he introduces his students to THE TOOLS OF POETRY (a list that includes a goatskin dream notebook, hypnosis, and cable TV) and THE TEN MUSES OF POETRY (mishearing, misunderstanding, mistranslating . . . ), and assigns each of them a tutelary "Ghost-Companion" poet, the teacher recalls wild tales from his coming of age as a poet in the 1960s and 1970s, even as he speculates about the lives and poetic and sexual potential of his twenty-first-century students. From arguing that Allen Ginsberg wasn't actually gay to telling about the time William Burroughs's funeral procession stopped at McDonald's, The Poetry Lesson is a thoroughly entertaining portrait of an inimitable poet, teacher, and storyteller.
Download or read book New Orleans Mon Amour written by Andrei Codrescu and published by . This book was released on 2006-01-31 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For two decades NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu has been living in and writing about his adopted city, where, as he puts it, the official language is dreams. How apt that a refugee born in Transylvania found his home in a place where vampires roam the streets and voodoo queens live around the corner; where cemeteries are the most popular picnic spots, the ghosts of poets, prostitutes, and pirates are palpable, and in the French Quarter, no one ever sleeps. Codrescu's essays have been called "satirical gems," "subversive," "sardonic and stunning," "funny," "gonzo," "wittily poignant," and "perverse"—here is a writer who perfectly mirrors the wild, voluptuous, bohemian character of New Orleans itself. This retrospective follows him from newcomer to near native: first seduced by the lush banana trees in his backyard and the sensual aroma of coffee at the café down the block, Codrescu soon becomes a Window Gang regular at the infamous bar Molly's on Decatur, does a stint as King of Krewe de Vieux Carré at Mardi Gras, befriends artists, musicians, and eccentrics, and exposes the city’s underbelly of corruption, warning presciently about the lack of planning for floods in a city high on its own insouciance. Alas, as we all now know, Paradise is lost. New Orleans, Mon Amour is an epic love song, a clear-eyed elegy, a cultural celebration, and a thank-you note to New Orleans in its Golden Age.
Download or read book No Time Like Now written by Andrei Codrescu and published by Pitt Poetry. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Codrescu's own words: "I wrote my first book of poems, License to Carry a Gun (Big Table, 1970), when I first lived in New York City, 1967-1970. Those were troubled times and I was 21 years-old. Decades later the city has changed and the times are still troubled. These poems, 2016-2018, try to find out just how changed my dear city and how troubled my days."
Download or read book Imagining Home written by Anamaria Falaus and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-11 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an age of shifting social and political landscapes, there is one constant challenge individuals and groups have to face: that of internalizing the tension between the two opposing tendencies that rule the world today, homogenization and heterogenization. People transgress the limits of nationality, ethnicity, and culture in order to become citizens of the world, while at the same time longing for stability and certainty. Imagining Home: Exilic Reconstructions in Norma Manea and Andrei Codrescu’s Diasporic Narratives interprets the polymorphous development of two exiled writers’ identities, from the point of view of their “migrant” condition. Their restless, nomadic existence, perfectly reflected in the geographical territories mapped by the books under discussion, involves crossing boundaries, negotiating difference, and the colonizing imposition of a foreign culture. The outcome provides an insight into the concepts of Romanianness and Americanness, analysing them through the notions of alo-images and infra-images, while at the same time developing a context and a reading approach for Eastern European immigrant narratives.
Download or read book Wakefield written by Andrei Codrescu and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Devil arrives to take his soul, Wakefield, a motivational speaker and architecture buff, makes a bargain that would give him one year to search for an alternative life and embarks on a year-long odyssey that takes him across the country, meeting New Age gurus, billionaires, techno-geeks, and other characters along the way and leading to a shocking act to restore his world. 20,000 first printing.
Download or read book Genius Anxiety written by Norman Lebrecht and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively chronicle of the years 1847–1947—the century when the Jewish people changed how we see the world—is “[a] thrilling and tragic history…especially good on the ironies and chain-reaction intimacies that make a people and a past” (The Wall Street Journal). In a hundred-year period, a handful of men and women changed the world. Many of them are well known—Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka. Others have vanished from collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich, no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus, no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin, genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber, there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth. What do these visionaries have in common? They all had Jewish origins. They all had a gift for thinking in wholly original, even earth-shattering ways. In 1847, the Jewish people made up less than 0.25% of the world’s population, and yet they saw what others could not. How? Why? Norman Lebrecht has devoted half of his life to pondering and researching the mindset of the Jewish intellectuals, writers, scientists, and thinkers who turned the tides of history and shaped the world today as we know it. In Genius & Anxiety, Lebrecht begins with the Communist Manifesto in 1847 and ends in 1947, when Israel was founded. This robust, magnificent, beautifully designed volume is “an urgent and moving history” (The Spectator, UK) and a celebration of Jewish genius and contribution.
Download or read book Zombification written by Andrei Codrescu and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1995-02-15 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The world is undergoing zombification. It was gradual for a while, a few zombies here and there, mostly in high office, where being a corpse in a suit was de rigueur . . . The worst part about zombies raging unchecked is the slow paralysis they induce in people who aren't quite zombies yet." Never at a loss for a trenchant comment or off-beat imagery, National Public Radio's Andrei Codrescu has long been considered an eloquent if often sardonic expert on the absurdities of American culture. The essays in Zombification (all taken from this poet's popular commentaries for NPR) were broadcast during the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period that witnessed the collapse of Communism, radical changes in American politics and society, and the birth of new nations. These large subjects—along with lively riffs on dozens of topics, both timely and timeless, both everyday and strange—are treated with Codrescu's inimitable wit, insight, and candor. Included here are "Seven Embryos for Seven Lawyers," "Dali in Vegas," "Culture Vultures and Casserole Widows," and other classics.
Download or read book It Takes One to Know One written by Michael Lally and published by David R. Godine Publisher. This book was released on 2001 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of autobiographical poetry and prose in an ongoing quest for truth, healing and acceptance.
Download or read book The Dog with the Chip in His Neck written by Andrei Codrescu and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1997-10-15 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of essays, Codrescu focuses his keen eye on America in the "age of the chip." He confronts the convulsions of our post-ideological world at a time when "the advent of cyberspace and the caffeinating of America have occurred simultaneously." With poignancy and trenchant humor, he takes us on a roller-coaster tour of our dramatically changing country.
Download or read book Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America written by Kirby Olson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-09-17 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is one of those times, a time choked in the weeds of academic and civilian formalism. To put it mildly, most of what we see in print in North America is unbearably trivial and singularly devoid of courage."--Andrei Codrescu, The Disappearance of the Outside. Known to the general public as a radio commentator on National Public Radio, Romanian-born essayist and poet Andrei Codrescu has developed a variety of voices throughout his career: Transylvanian humorist on NPR, surrealist poet in his many volumes of poetry, academic essayist in his philosophical writings and historical novelist. Taking seemingly everyday events in seemingly mundane places, Codrescu is able to link the random details into a larger whole, leading his readers and listeners to conclusions very different from those they first imagined. This work explores Codrescu's writings and how they are a part of the surrealist tradition. It examines the ways in which his poetry, essays and novels are influenced by his upbringing in Communist Romania and the liberal attitudes he encountered upon moving to the United States, and draws comparisons between Codrescu and other surrealists. An interview with the author is also included.
Download or read book The Devil Never Sleeps written by Andrei Codrescu and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-04 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Embracing cell phones, cable access, and cyberspace, the ubiquitous Devil of secular culture embodies the true evil facing us today - banality."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Bibliodeath written by Andrei Codrescu and published by Antibookclub. This book was released on 2012 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning author Andrei CodrescuOCOs ""Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life in Footnotes)"" surveys the evolutionary relationship between language and technology by examining his own career as a prolific American writer for more than four decades. Born in Transylvania, Romania, CodrescuOCOs journey spans from his earliest days as a scattered poet in the 1960s to his founding of the journal"" Exquisite Corpse"" in 1983 to his ongoing commentary today on National Public RadioOCOs All Things Considered. Amid the release of some of his most celebrated books, the authorOCOs story is an insightful address of the survival of the literate world and the transformation of print, told through suspenseful reflection and alluring, signature footnotes."
Download or read book New Orleans Stories written by John Miller and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2004-06-10 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Voodoo. Vampires. Jazz. There's no city quite like New Orleans, a city that whispers stories and where writers come to eavesdrop. New Orleans Stories collects the very best writing on the Big Easy by a stellar gallery of writers for whom the city has played host and muse -- from Walt Whitman and William Faulkner to Anne Rice, Truman Capote, Walker Percy, Tennessee Williams, and Zora Neale Hurston. With a striking new cover, this anthology captures the vibrancy -- and variety -- of New Orleans as it casts its most seductive spell.
