Knowing the way I feel about Andrei Codrescu, a friend and neighbor just sent me the dust-jacket copy for his new book, New Orleans, Mon Amour. Not only is it thoroughly tedious and hackneyed (did you expect anything less?), but it’s completely put me off breakfast, and I was really looking forward to breakfast, ’cause there’s still a sandwich-sized chunk of holiday ham in the fridge.
Anyway, I’m not in the mood to suffer alone on this gloomy Saturday morning–which will certainly get gloomier before long, when it starts raining and my power goes out for the umpteenth time this month–so I’m sharing the dreck with you:
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…. 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.
All of which begs a few questions for Mr. Codrescu, who’s probably enjoying a similarly gloomy morning 80-some-odd miles from here at his home in Baton Rouge, where he’s reading the New York Times or the Bucharest Times or any number of things besides this website:
1. This book: was it your idea or your publisher’s? I mean, it’s an allegedly free country, so you can publish whatever you like whenever you like, but don’t you think–and don’t take this the wrong way–don’t you think it’s a little soon? From where I sit, it reeks just a teeny, tiny bit of opportunism, like all those Time-Life books about September 11 that were on the bookshelves by October. But then, I’m sure you’re planning to do something charitable with the proceeds, aren’t you? …Aren’t you?
2. The hint of rushed opportunism is exacerbated by the book’s title. Did you spend much time on it at all? Was New Orleans, Mon Amour the best you could do? A slovenly reference to Walker Percy, who was himself making a half-hearted, pun-ish homage to Alain Resnais? At the very least, egomaniac that you are, I would’ve thought you could come up with something like, Apres le Deluge, Moi.
3. I don’t know if you penned the dust-jacket copy yourself or if it was done by some intern just out of Bryn Mawr, but from the way it’s written, it sounds like New Orleans was experiencing some kind of Golden Age immediately before Katrina made landfall. Um, not so. I mean, don’t get me wrong: things were fine–good, even–but “Golden Age”? The last time we had one of those was 30 years ago, when we were flush with oil money and folks were clamoring to get into the Superdome. Or possibly 100 years ago, when jazz was just getting started and Storyville was America’s first experiment with legalized prostitution. …New Orleans under Mayor Nagin? Brass, maybe. Possibly even bronze. But hardly gold.
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