New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City

A wonderful collection of essays about New Orleans spanning 2 decades from the mid-80s up to post-Katrina today where "the American dream came unmoored..."Codrescu is one of my favorite poets and essayists he doesn't fail to deliver here. I'm quite partial to Codrescu's use of language..."I like people who stumble through language without any idea of what they might run into. It's what I do. I like myself. Sometimes."As a gifted poet, Codrescu writes with precision, employing an exceptional economy of words and more importantly, always choosing the correct word. (As a result of reading this during the Great Northeastern Spring Floods of 2010, the word "bumbershoot" has returned to my own lexicon!).Codrescu continually employs apt and often humorous metaphors in his writing - there is no short supply of these here..."New Orleans cemeteries look like vast bakeries quietly holding the ancestral loaves. This is no idle metaphor in a city that loves its dead as much as its food. The sense that life and death are locked in amorous gourmandise is everywhere."I have only been to N.O. once, and as much as I loved my time there and long to return, Codrescu has taken me there and has made his city so much more real for me. He makes me wonderfully aware of the difference of seeing the city as a tourist and as a Bohemian New Orleansian. That's not to say he doesn't appreciate and accept us tacky tourists for our ever-present and essential role in his city..."If you don't like visitors, you shouldn't live in New Orleans. ... You don't have to be a whore if you live in a whorehouse, but it helps. Everybody who lives here works for the house, like it or not."I highly recomend this book for those interested in a fine collection of short essays with a one-of-a-kind take on perhaps the most unique of all American cities. I read this on my Kindle and will return to these selections again and again - hopefully in preparation for a return trip before too long.

….to miss New Orleans? Well just pick up this volume and you won’t have to miss her. Codescu conjures that near mythical place with sublime depictions of people, places and things, not skimping on the tastes, sounds, sights, smells and sensual pleasures stirred into the gumbo that is New Orleans. A rich pleasure of a reading experience.

<b><i>New Orleans is Catholic, pagan, poor, and Bohemian. The music is the Devil's music and we are a cesspool of sin.</b></i>The Crescent City. If you ever visit New Orleans you will never forget the time you spent there. If I had never visited New Orleans prior to reading <i>New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings From the City</i>, I would have made my way there as soon as I finished. I'm listening to Second Line music as I type these words.Codrescu, a Louisiana State University professor, introduced us to the city at ground level. He didn't try to glamorize the city nor did he try to take us on a tour of its most popular places. These essays ranged from the details and familiar faces at the local bar scene to the history of the city's cemeteries and its burying rituals. With each essay, Codrescu takes the reader on a daily walk through the city revealing a hidden treasure each time.<b><i>Katrina found us dreaming.</b></i>The world watched New Orleans drown when the levees broke. Codrescu put it this way:<b><i>We already knew who's going to pay for all this: the poor. They always do. The whole country's garbage flows down the Mississippi to them. Until now, they turned all that waste into song; they took the sins of American unto themselves. But this blues now is just too big</b></i>New Orleans is my favorite city to visit in literature. <i>New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings From the City</i> reminded me why New Orleans is and always will be my favorite city.

Somehow I had never heard of Andrei Codrescu. Once I did, I discovered that he is nigh ubiquitous, both as a commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered" (which I rarely listen to) and as a prolific author. Since, like many others, I have a very fond spot in my heart for New Orleans, I decided to sample Codrescu via his book NEW ORLEANS, MON AMOUR.Sometime in the mid-80's, infatuated with New Orleans, Codrescu moved to the city. NEW ORLEANS, MON AMOUR is a collection of the various Codrescu pieces over the years (between 1985 and 2006) that feature, directly or indirectly, New Orleans. Many are brief, a little over one page; the longest is 40 pages. The pieces are arranged in chronological order. Despite the common theme, the book is very much a hodgepodge. I found the pieces rather uneven in quality and effect; in general, they improve as one gets deeper into the book, as, I guess, Codrescu matures and improves as a writer. Even so, the writing only occasionally is top-rate.Still, scattered throughout the book are passages that capture, almost perfectly, some of the distinctive aspects of New Orleans. For example:"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. It's a feeling only the rich music seeping all night out of the cracks of homes and rickety clubs can give you, a feeling that the mysteries of night could go on forever, and that there is little difference between life and death except for poetry and song."The last four entries in the book were written after Hurricane Katrina. Codrescu sees them as "eulogies * * * for something that was and will never be again." I think I will heed Codrescu on this matter and never again return to New Orleans, where over the years I had spent a dozen or so magical and surreal weeks and weekends. But I also think I will have to find some other book to be my touchstone for my personal "Mon Amour, New Orleans".