Andrei Codrescu > Quotes

“Nostalgia is masochism and masochism is something masochists love to share.”
― Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City

“There is a velvety sensuality here at the mouth of the Mississippi that you won't find anywhere else. Tell me what the air feels like at 3 A.M. on a Thursday night in August in Shaker Heights and I bet you won't be able to say because nobody stays up that late. But in New Orleans, I tell you, it's ink and honey passed through silver moonlight.”
― Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City

“It's still a mystery to me exactly how I learned the language. [But] I was 19 years old and I had very urgent things to tell girls.”
― Andrei Codrescu

“Nosferatu is the daddy of modern American sex.”
― Andrei Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess

“Poetry is again hip in America as people are beginning to refuse to die of boredom and to choke in the fog of their funny money.”
― Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City

“With the sound of gusting wind in the branches of the language trees of Babel, the words gave way like leaves, and every reader glimpsed another reality hidden in the foilage.”
― Andrei Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess

“It is the job of the market to turn the base material of our emotions into gold.”
― Andrei Codrescu, Zombification: Stories from National Public Radio

“The peasants of all lands recognize power and they salute it, whether it's good or evil.”
― Andrei Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess

“Our secrets, odd or not, are the pins that keep our inner life in place: the inform our psyche with meaning.”
― Andrei Codrescu, Zombification: Stories from National Public Radio

“Like Venice, Italy, this is a place of fleeting beauty. The knowledge that we won't be here long gives everyone an intense appetite for living.”
― Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City

“The fact is we all know that there exists in the world an order different from that in which we pass our days. If we reveal its existence people think that we are crazy.”
― Andrei Codrescu, Zombification: Stories from National Public Radio

“It is a sad fact that all flesh must die, but there is no reason why one's story, as well as one's soul, should be slighted after the passage. The attraction artists feel for our cemeteries is only partly aesthetic; much of it is gossip, a continual whisper intended for the delighted ear. Marble without a story is just marble. A true monument leans over and murmurs in your ear.”
― Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City

“Death is not enough for such men. We must add mechanics”
― Andrei Codrescu, The Blood Countess

“This is important, Your Honor, because it establishes the fact that language, like blood, is a living thing that proceeds forward in time.”
― Andrei Codrescu, The Blood Countess

“When writers come here they walk about smelling everything because New Orleans is, above all, a town where the heady scent of jasmine or sweet olive mingles with the cloying stink of sugar refineries and the musky mud smell of the Mississippi. It's an intoxicating brew of rotting and generating, a feeling of death and life simultaneously occurring and inextricably linked.”
― Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City

“The beauty of Molly's is that it is not, whether in the daytime or at night, the exclusive preserve of an age or income group. Unlike the sterile night scenes of pretentious San Francisco or New York, Molly's (and most other New Orleans bars) welcomes all ages, all colors, and all sexual persuasions, provided they are willing to surrender to the atmosphere.”
― Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City

“The richness of our ethnic insults vocabulary was wide and deep. It reflected, all too easily, the more elaborate predjiduces of our parents (not my parents), which in their rabid form, had already resulted in tribal bloodbaths.”
― Andrei Codrescu

“As a newcomer I felt that this was indeed a blessed place, capable of unabashedly advertising its flaws, fearing no ridicule and no criticism. That, in essence, is the opposite of provincialism. The great cities of the world are not provincial: They invite complexity, not propaganda.”
― Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City

“...Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris, a brilliant reenvisioning of one's own city as an exotic locale. Sue, who was too poor to travel, turned an awed gaze to the familiar and gave his readers a city they would recognize but which hid a poetry far from the familiar.”
― Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City

“It's worth getting out of bed some mornings. And it's a pleasure, especially if the pale winter sun is out and shining, to delight with your lover in the urban gift of your favorite café. Fresh coffee, steaming croissants, and the Sunday papers. Ah! All the way to ours, Alice and I talked about love and how many people don't get any while others get a lot, and how that unfairness probably accounts for the federal deficit and crooked contracting practices, and so on.”
― Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City

“Telling a story to go with the meal is de rigueur, cher, it makes the food more memorable, and both meal and story get better when you sip that ice-cold Dixie beer.”
― Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City

“The real secret, though, is that nobody belongs, whether they are natives or not. After expulsion from paradise all humans are in exile. You can be a Colonel Sanders chicken, born, raised and fried in one quarter of a square foot and you'll still be an outsider. The thing we call reality is a holding tank for people who must worry about belonging -- it's a worrier prison. Don't worry people! You'll soon be fried and eaten. A few of us are writers, hence double-alienated, but happier (because we are busy)
If it's true that many of us go through life feeling like we don’t belong, could digression (geographical and otherwise) be our way of trying to forget, or to escape, that feeling?

Bad news: there are no digressions. Everything is connected in the whole darn ball of yarn: start pulling at any end and you'll get to the same place. On the other hand, most normal people dislike digression because they have to lose themselves to follow you. The surest way to drive your dear ones crazy is to digress. In private, it's an offense. In public it's "art," "performance.”
― Andrei Codrescu

“The internet liquefied physical borders faster than they were already doing on their own. For all that, there are only regional writers. There are no "internet writers," like there used to be "paperback writers." Every tweet comes from somewhere, and that "somewhere" goes into the "somewhere" where you're reading it in. You read Nietzsche in the Ozarks for a while, let's say, then you get up and sweep the leaves from your porch for a longer while. Place wins on time spent every time, unless you're demented enough to put out your eyes on screens longer than you sweep. We are in a state of "transitional regionalism," a place where regions are instantly transmitted to other regions, but they don't universalize them, they only make them more provincial, by framing them with the local.”
― Andrei Codrescu

“Our ancestors had fought and murdered one another, married and forged alliances, founded countries. At their best - but only for selfish reasons - they patronized art, literature, and music. But their worlds had to be overthrown by revolutions, because there was room in them only for themselves.”
― Andrei Codrescu, The Blood Countess

“I knew there was something holding me here. It wasn't paprikash. Or nostalgia for my meager childhood...

...Somewhere in me a nearly voiceless child was asking to know the rest of the story that had been interrupted.”
― Andrei Codrescu, The Blood Countess

“eulogy for men

for ruxandra

men have doubles.
women don't.
men invent doubles for women so that they can both have a woman.
women pretend that they too have a double to please their double-man.
women may have many double-men who believe that they have a double-woman.
one woman can be the author of dozens of imaginary women for their many double-men.
one woman can make many women from stories.
eve had to make up lillith, sheherezade had to make up 1001 women
but there was only one eve and one sheherezade, the rest were men's dreams.
women invented speech to multiply themselves while also multiplying men.
women are the mothers of stories and the mothers of men.
poor men whose only gift is to listen and whose only strength is being two.”
― Andrei Codrescu

“In America a child can no longer
visit the place where she was born
a shopping mall
stands there instead.
In America a grownup can no longer see the school
where she learned the art of growing sad
a freeway goes through there now an overpass
her memories of brick turn to glass
the suburb goes from white to black
and time speeds up so much she has
to stay young forever and reset the clock
every five minutes just to know where is there
and there is everywhere
because she lives in time and not in any space!
In our country here
the future is in ruins before it is built
a fact recognized by postmodern architecture
that grins at us shyly or demonically as it quoted
ruins from other times and places!
There are no buildings in America only passageways
that connect migratory floods
the most permanent architecture being
precisely that which moves these floods
from one future ruin to another
that is to say freeways and skyways
and the car is our only shelter
the architecture of desire reduced to the womb
a womb in transit from one nowhere to another!”

Saddened by his own vision and sensing smugness in the audience, Wakefield is revolted by his desire to please the foreigners. He coughs. He is portraying his own country now for the sake of… what? Applause? There isn't any. He veers down another path.

“The miracle of America is of motion not regret
in New Mexico the has face of Jesus jumped on a tortilla
in Plaquermine a Virgin appeared in a tree
In Santuari de Chimayo the dirt turned healer
a guy in Texas crasahed into a wall when God said
Let me take the wheel!
And others hear voice all the time
telling them to sit under a tree or jump from a cliff
or take large baskets of eggs into Blockbuster
to throw at the videos
the voices of God are everywhere heard loud
and clear under the hum of the tickertape
and all these miracle and speaking gods
are the mysteries left homeless by the Architecture
of speed and moving forward onward and ahead!”

Wakefield throws his hands into the air as if to sprinkle fairy dust on the room; he is evoking the richness of a place always ready for miracles.”
― Andrei Codrescu, Wakefield

“I want a house that’s mobile but stationary, situated in a safe place without borders, where the people are peace-loving.”
― Andrei Codrescu, Wakefield

“Sorry,” Wakefield insists, “but what exactly is cultural imperialism?”
The boy turns his good eye to Wakefield. “That when Indian kids play with Mickey Mouse instead of kachinas. Kachinas mean something to their people. The Mouse means nothing.”
“He must mean something,” Wakefield says.
“Yeah, he means money. A Kachina tells the story of the earth, of the people, of dances, rituals, how to make rain… Talk to the fucking mouse and see what he tells you.”
― Andrei Codrescu, Wakefield

“Still, there is something disappearing from the world, something composed of many instances of tradition and skill, or maybe not disappearing, but translating. Maybe culture, like physical matter, doesn’t disappear, but is subject to infinite play, and th e world is a vast workshop for making and remaking everything, including people, and the engine of play is desire…”
― Andrei Codrescu, Wakefield