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s/t: & What Happened Afterwards
In New York City in 1969, Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian poet just beginning to master the American vernacular, began writing The Life & Times of an Involuntary Genius (1975), a memoir of antic Communist youth now recognized as a classic of comic self-creation. "There I was, twenty-three years old, the possessor of a wealth of experience which had already spawned an equal if not greater quantity of mythicizing anecdotes."
Anecdote 1: He was the intellectual love child of Transylvania's great culture heroes, Dracula and Ionesco, twin totems of the Immortal and the Absurd. Anecdote 2: He was a political exile from Communist Europe, and everyone knows that all exiles are geniuses. A later anecdote the one about the enormous file the INS had collected on him and his left-wing Neo-Beat activities provides the subject of the sequel, In America's Shoes (1983), the mock epic of his quest to become a U.S. citizen.
This new book collects both of Codrescu's memoirs, together with the now-middle-aged author's wry notes on the young man who wrote them. While traveling the road from the Balkan forest to the land of the free, he writes, "I never abandoned my rebellious Romanian generation, within which I'd been raised a baby dissident destined for great things and prison. I just put on a cape ' a Dracula cape, with a star-spangled lining ' to complete the picture."
This cultural-literary-social critique examines why, when a society moves from a repressive system of government wrought with censorship and oppression to a free state representing unlimited possibilities, the art once created and treasured by that population is taken for granted. Taking into account his own exile from Stalinist Romania, as well as the plights of such greats as Garcia Marquez, Breton, the Dadaists, Kundera, and Milosz, Codrescu issues a call for those living in a free society to reach beyond a benign reality founded in technology and commercialism by tapping into their imaginations and striving for a better, evolutionary existence. ";One day I had a revelation. There had been hints for some time that certain books had better not be discussed. Our next-door neighbor had a German Bible hidden at the bottom of an old sea chest. Her son Peter, who was a year older than me, showed it to me in secret one afternoon after making me swear that I would never reveal its existence to anyone. . . . It emitted a dark, pungent odor of darkness, monks, time, Gutenberg, sea journeys, incense, and last rites. Peter told me there were other books like this, some old, some new, all of them containing secrets so awesome we would be put in prison for merely mentioning them."; From this point in his Romanian childhood, Codrescu became acutely attuned to the meaning of literature in the progress and movement of societies, both free and oppressed. ";The police have arrived everywhere: in [Eastern Europe] they are uniformed police. In the West they are the invisible police of image manipulation."
Andrei Codrescu, an essayist, poet, "All Things Considered" commentator, and MSNBCcolumnist, has published numerous books, including "Road Scholar" and "The Devil Never Sleeps," Born in Romania, he came to the U.S. in 1966, and currently teaches at Louisana State University.
Filmmaker Lourdes Portillo sees her mission as channeling the hopes and dreams of a people. Clearly, political commitment has inspired her choice of subjects. With themes ranging from state repression to AIDS, Portillo's films include: Despues del Terremoto, the Oscar-nominated Las Madres: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead, The Devil Never Sleeps, and Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena.
