Arguably the best thing about my time in Washington, D.C. was driving to work and listening to Andrei Codrescu and David Sedaris on NPR. Until I moved to WDC, I hadn't been aware of NPR, having lived in parts of New England which were then apparently not considered to be enough a part of the nation for National Public Radio to bother with, or in New York City, where I never listened to the radio because I was never in a car.
But then I moved to DC and acquired a car with a radio and I was intrigued by this guy with his Transylvanian accent brightening my day in 60 seconds and I thought, "Hey, maybe Washington won't be so bad, after all."
I was wrong about Washington, but Codrescu remains a find.
Some time ago, I was deeply saddened to learn Mr. Codrescu had died, but Googling him today, I find this announcement was premature, which brightened my day once again, even though I have not heard from him for years.
I wondered how that rumor got started, but then I remembered Codrescu has edited a journal called "The Exquisite Corpse" and that may have had something to do with it.
The reason all this came to mind is a copy of "Raised by Puppets: Only to be Killed by Research" surfaced as I was rearranging my bookshelves.
I was rearranging my bookshelves because watching PBS News Hour I realized everyone is now judged by their bookshelves and I wanted to be sure mine displayed my better points to advantage.
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| Hampton Falls, New Hampshire |
Here is just one little riff from Codrescu which may give a sense of the man:
"Downriver"
"The world's not good from downriver. It's no fun waiting for that big mess from Ohio to float down to us. How long will it take? Three weeks? Four months? However long, it doesn't change the universal law: we folks downriver are forever waiting for whatever folks upriver will send us. Every glass of water in New Orleans, goes the old saw, has already been drunk six times. Of course, the trouble's not all from upriver. We do our best to poison our own water: we dump radioactive runoff from gypsum into it, too. An overworked filter is supposed to take out all the bad chemicals. But then--radioactivity isn't a chemical. Every few months a new report tells us how vile our water is. As if the highest rates of liver and pancreas cancer weren't enough.
No Louisianan in his right mind drinks the river water, unless he's poor, and the poor are, obviously, not in their right minds since they are poor...Nevertheless, there comes that time in the middle of the night when you stumble into the kitchen to fetch yourself a glass from the faucet before you're thinking clearly. You hold it in your sleepy hand, and just as you're about to bring it to your lips, it begins to glow--and hum! Mutated microorganism come to life with an eerie luminescence while trace minerals from every discarded chemical by product start singing softly. A cobalt blue radioactive light of indefinite source plays softly over the whole show. 'Drink us,' the horrors croon, looking quite beautiful in their man-begotten glow, 'and you can be just like us!' And you do, because it's late, and you're thirsty, and you think it's all a bad dream. But it's not: it's the middle of the night three months from now and the mess from Ohio has finally arrived!"
I missed many a turn on the way to the office, listening to Codrescu.
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| Auvers, France |
Now, I can sit on my porch in New Hampshire and read him.
He had to live in New Orleans. No place else in America is odd enough for him.
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| Hampton, New Hampshire |
