2012! There are no longer quotes around "oh, that's so 20th century!" A lot of things are definitely so 20th century now, it's not even funny. Television, for instance. Or sentences longer than the last one. In the mid-90s of the last century, I made a New Year's resolution to watch more TV. I did, and then yesterday I found the reason I was watching it: a guy in a commercial looks at his cell phone and says to another guy with a cell phone, "that was so thirty seconds ago!" And I got it. Took out my semi-automatic and shot the TV. It had nothing else to tell me. Then I threw my cell phone over the bridge into the river. I closed my eyes and contacted some of my favorite writers on T-mail. Everybody was home. They were reading my new book. 

My new book, "whatever gets you through the night: a story of sheherezade and the arabian entertainments," Princeton University Press, is actually four books in one, nested inside one another like Russian egg-dolls. Sheherezade, the Storyteller, saves the young women of Baghdad from King Sharyar who marries them for one night only and has them murdered in the morning. Sheherezade survives 1001 nights by telling stories that end at sunrise just before the denouement. During the day she talks to her Sufi teachers and to her horse, and studies to be an assassin. She and her stories will be fully employed by the future, which turns her into poetry, history, plays, music, dance, philosophy and a fountain of metaphors. Which is where I saunter in, walking backwards on a tightrope. The first of the four books is her biography. I then wrote the book of the tyrant Sharyar and his tyrant brother Shazaman who, pursuant to the betrayal by their wives, take to the god-haunted desert of the third century c.e, but choose different destinies: Shazaman, the younger, will be a mystic vagabond who'll look for the wizards who know the secret formula for making people in pots; Sharyar, the older, takes back his kingly power and avenges himself by marrying a new girl every night and having her killed in the morning -- until he runs into the suspense-making Sheherezade, who neutralises this royal psycho, with the aid of her luscious younger sister Dinarzad, and that's the second book. As Sheherezade weaves her stories so she won't lose her head, she also weaves the world, hers and ours. (An activity that  people not raised in a dictatorship can barely imagine, but anyone held up at gunpoint and having to talk fast, can.) She keeps the world going through Curiosity propelled by Mortal Fear. Storytelling and Sex turn out to be the same thing, both driven by Curiosity, but even as Sheherezade keeps weaving and our stories keep being born of each other,  the human world is in danger of extinction. Shazaman returns from the desert in the 21st century with the wizards' secret of making people in pots, a formula best explained in Carl Djerassi's book,  Sex in the Age of Technological Reproduction. The third book is a story that Sheherezade tells Sharyar, a story from the 1001 Nights and One that as far as I know, has not yet been ripped off by the likes of Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose), or Balzac (La peau de chagrin). The fourth book inside of which the other three are nestled unfolds in 101 footnotes that hug the text: this book is called "the war of the translators," and it's a scholarly detective story. You will find in this matrioshka tomette the chill of the otherworldly, the salacious delight of reviving romantic orientalism for post-Said purposes, an essay on talking to live, aka Storytelling, carnal sensations, and tips for surviving the post-Gutenberg chatter age. I can never re-read my book without a giggle. Six giggles I got at one re-reading, and that's a record for an author. Usually, by the last copyedit most authors have already tied the knot on the rope and thrown it over the beam from which they will hang themselves. Click on the widget below and buy this book. It may be the last book you can honestly call that. Yes, I know. Arrogant prick! Ali's member!

The Poetry Lesson, from Princeton University Press, has been spreading its pernicious and, we believe, tonic, messages for one year.  It was not a great year for human beings, and it is now downright horrific. Poetry is a traditional instrument of Catastrophe, capable of steadying the broken heart when journalism numbs. Joy and play continue in the poem, even as the world shatters. Or, as the graffito in San Francisco's Trieste bathroom used to say, "La poesia non finira col mundo," (Poetry will not end with the world). It won't because the earth won't, even if people do. Keats had it right: "The poetry of earth is never dead." I'm modestly adding some others' opinions below, but I must say three things: 1. the bonfire of poetry is ignited, 2. poetry is the currency of the future, and 3. the gates are unmanned. The castle of eternity is for rent. Bring your pets. After a quarter of a century of amusement and terror, the maxims of a teaching wretch may be of use yet. The Poetry Lesson has its own Facebook page (I don't), where the outlandishly indecent appreciations go on, but here are some lovely words I cherish. 

Praise for The Poetry Lesson:

"Andrei Codrescu's new book is a small comic masterpiece. It is so funny that I laughed out loud as I was turning the pages. The account of the first poetry writing class of the semester is as accurate as it is surreal. What makes the writing so delightful is the juxtaposition of student repartee and the professor's jaundiced--but never predictable--response. The Poetry Lesson is a delightful read--but also a disturbing portrait of academe today."

--Marjorie Perloff, author of The Vienna Paradox: A Memoir

"The Poetry Lesson is a gem--a consistently engaging and entertainingly rambling meditation on teaching and poetry that is filled with Andrei Codrescu's quicksilver mental responses. His teacher-narrator keeps vacillating between denouncing the new, text-message order of his students and trying to ally himself with youth against old-fogeyism. This dance, as the teacher is alternately chagrined and amused, gives the book a lively pulse."

--Phillip Lopate, author of Notes on Sontag

See a video interview about The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess, from Princeton University Press. I don't know about you, but I think that the 21st century cannot do without Dada; this book is not another study of Dada! it is a practical guide to the Dada life. This book is also a geyserized exit from the miserabilism and miraculousness of insane geography as per Jealous Witness: New Poems, with a CD by the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars (Coffee House Press, 2008).  The misery was human, an anthology of human mistakes that nature elevated into tragedy, and the miracle is that we are still here and young artists are remaking the joint. You can hear my commentaries on NPR's All Things Considered, podcast for easy extraction, and you can find my New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writing from the City, The Blood Countess, Messi@h, Casanova in Bohemia, and Wakefield, useful for building literary furniture in your cornucopic sun-powered house. You can add revolution and sentiment with  The Hole in the Flag: An Exile’s Tale of Return and Revolution, a book about the fact that you can go home again, and Ay, Cuba! A Socio-erotic Journey. I also wrote Hail, Babylon: American Cities at the end of The Millenium (the last one), and Road Scholar, which was a Peabody award-winning film. Since 1989, I've also been returning often to Romania and to the language of my birth, and seriously committing bilingvism: the first  attempt was a book-length interview called Miracle and Catastrophe: an interview with Andrei Codrescu by Robert Lazu, published in Timisoara, Romania, by Hartmann publishers in 2005. The second, a more perilous and more vertiginous act of philological derring-do is an epic poem co-written in Romanian by e-mail with the poet Ruxandra Cesereanu, called Submarinul Iertat, published in a deluxe edition by Editura Brumar in 2007, and published in English by Black Widow Press under the title Forgiven Submarine, with a  baroque and fabulously scary cover by Radiu Chio. The literary journal I founded in 1983, Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Life & Letters (corpse.org) has been updating itself spiritually and technologically, which is more than you can say about the Foreign Legion. In any case, this is the work, and the pleasure.

I read with delight the following blog post by Josh Cook, who nailed something about my last three books. It was obvious to me that I found a form that acommodates the things I do well, poetry, essay, and storytelling, but Josh is the first to note it publicly.

http://inorderofimportance.blogspot.com/2011/07/andrei-codrescu-is-up-to-something.html

Andrei Codrescu Is Up to Something...

But I'm not sure what it is. His last three books have all been very different, but they seem to be congealing into or contributing to some grander project. Whatever it is, Codrescu is writing from a completely unique space, mixing genres, styles, and voices like a DJ winning a bet about his/her eclectic vinyl collection. He's found a spot between fiction and non-fiction, between narrative and philosophy, between something you sort of recognize as having experienced in other books and something you're pretty sure you've never seen before. In The Post-Human Dada Guide, The Poetry Lesson, and Whatever Gets You Through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments, Codrescu is up to something. Yeah. Something.

Oddly enough, Post-Human Dada Guide is the most traditional of the three works. It is a work of philosophy or cultural studies that, are you ready for this, explores the idea of the “post-human” through the lens of Dada, the early 20th Century, though-it's-not-quite-right-is-quite-a-bit -easier-to-say, sort of Surrealist art, literature, philosophy, and life movement, while imagining a hypothetical chess game between Dada founder Tristan Tzara and, well, Lenin, THE Lenin. And it does what a work of philosophy does. It has endnotes in Codrescu's conversational style (not really the conversational style most use, but this guy's brilliant so, technically, it's probably how he converses), and a glossary, and if you've read any of the late 20th Century French philosophers, an acceptable prose style. The concepts are complex and the images imaginative, but it's a work of philosophy, and, even if philosophy isn't really your thing, you at least know how to interact with it.

But Whatever Gets You Through the Night, is different. It opens with a series of epigraphs, some of which seem like the kind of results that slip through Google filters and others are cited as coming from articles “published” in 2012. From there the book is a kind of mash-up of cultural studies and fiction. Codrescu retells the beginning of the 1001 Nights, footnoting the text to provide context as he goes along. However, quite often, the footnotes contain as much fantasy as the story itself, and many passages in the story veer into the style and content of criticism. Codrescu's style is like a cup of coffee in which milk has been stirred; you know the cup contains coffee and milk, but you can no longer see the boundary between them. Whatever Gets You Through the Night has both story telling and criticism, but they're woven together so tightly, it is often impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. One then has to ask, what's the difference?

And yet, The Poetry Lesson might be the strangest of the three works. At least you can call Whatever Gets You Through the Night a novel, and shelve it in fiction (given that few bookstores and libraries have shelves for Free Range Meditations on the Action and Purpose of Sheherezade). The Poetry Lesson though is written in the tone and style of a memoir, claiming to be an account of the first day of a poetry class given by Codrescu. However, it is clear that the students in the class are characters and though they might have some connection to actual students Codrescu has taught, they are almost entirely fiction.

Once you realize the students are “fiction” the walls between non-fiction and fiction start to crumble. What does that do to the events in the book? Is there a distinction between fictional characters that are amalgams of real people and fiction characters that aren't? What does it mean for the thoughts Codrescu has and the statements he makes in the books? But at the same time, it doesn't have the distance and images of fiction. You know its not a memoir, but it feels like one.

I wrote about The Poetry Lesson for The Millions and the best conclusion that I came up with for getting a handle on what the book is, is to simply believe the title. It is not a novel, an essay, a memoir, a work of criticism, a statement of aesthetic purpose, or an ars poetica; it is a poetry lesson. It just happens to have an unusual pedagogy.

Taken together, the three books seem to be leading somewhere. The blending of genres, the intellectual depth, the exploration of storytelling; Codrescu seems to be wrestling with some of the questions of form and style raised by modernism and experimented on through post-modernism, but in a tone that is neither ponderous with severity nor dismissive with irony. He seems to approach the questions of genre and category as either already answered by earlier border busting works, or not important enough to be bothered with. And this is before grappling with the actual ideas in the books.

Codrescu is up to something and it might be even simpler than it at first appears. There are a lot of different ways to understand the drive for creating fiction. In a sense though, it's about constructing ways to say interesting things. One of my favorite things about reading is encountering sentences and statements that would be absolutely ridiculous if said out loud in conversation, but are absolutely brilliant within the structure of the work. The characters and events of fiction allow the writer to say interesting things that can't be said in regular communication. It might just be that Codrescu had interesting things to say and these books were the structures he developed that allowed those interesting statements.

Posted by Josh Cook at 9:12 PM 

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Labels: Andrei Codrescu, Books, Theory

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