Originally appearing at: Voices of New Orleans

New Orleans Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings From the City
By Andrei Codrescu
Algonquin Books 2006
ISBN 1-56512-505-3
272 pages

One of the best ways to understand a city is to read the words of people who lose themselves within it every day. Anyone can go someplace and share their opinions on the weather and the architecture and the food, but they don’t really know the place; they don’t understand it.

They don’t love it.

New Orleans has had a lot of lovers over the years, and most of them have been more than happy to record their memories. Andrei Codrescu is a transplant who has fallen so hugely for New Orleans that he teaches at Louisiana State University, edits the literary journal Exquisite Corpse and has a weekly column in the <>The Gambit along with contributing to NPR on his favorite subject. Codrescu loves New Orleans and in his latest collection, New Orleans, Mon Amour, readers are finally able to read his best pieces on the city in one sitting.

A lot of the essays in Mon Amour are clearly written as brief slices of life. In “The Muse is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans,� he talks about visiting Lafayette Cemetery with friends from out of state and experiencing the unusual culture of death that pervades life in the city. “Old cities soothe and ease the pain of living,� he writes, “because wherever you are, someone else was there before, had troubles worse than yours and passed on. I don’t see how people can inhabit spanking new suburbs without succumbing to terminal anxiety. We need the dead to make us feel alive. In New Orleans they’re at it full-time.�

As someone who lives in a neighborhood that is so new the paint isn’t even dry yet, I can’t imagine that feeling of age, of permanence. Nothing lasts forever where I live because no one has been here that long. How can you feel the past in Wal-Mart or Target? How can you feel it surrounded by Corian countertops and sub-zero refrigerators? Is it fear of our past that makes us buy into these bland and overpriced subdivisions, and if that is true, how come they aren’t similarly afraid in New Orleans? How come Codrescu can take the Polish artist Wodycko to a gravesite and enjoy a cup of coffee, and it’s just another pleasant day with a friend, but to the rest of us, it’s a kind of exotic that borders on the strange?

What makes it so easy for them to see yesterday when all of us are rushing towards tomorrow?

There is a certain level of grimness to their close relationship to death, however, as Codrescu learned one day from a Wall Street Journal reporter. Apparently, New Orleanians live “on the average 10 years less than most Americans.� The author does not dispute this, but he also challenges the definition of “living.� Is it just a matter of years on this earth, or is it what you do while you’re here? It’s the old quantity versus quality argument boiled down strictly to the numbers. (Because the numbers are always the only thing that matters, right?) But then there is this: Codrescu knows people, lots of people, who defy the vestiges of time. “I know a 300-year-old man,� he writes, “occupies the stool at the far end of the Saturn Bar. His longevity is the result of having no idea what time it is. He hasn’t seen a newspaper in 200 years. He is plotting to rescue Napoleon from exile, boredom and history.�

This is how people live forever, by living every moment and refusing to succumb to the lure of the contemporary over all else. There is more, you can tell yourself, there is always much more than just this.

In “Death Was the Theme This Year,� Codrescu explores the theme of dying through Mardi Gras and the march of the Krewe de Vieux Carre. There were a lot of things to mourn, he notes: “The death of education in Louisiana, the death of New Orleans by casino, and the demise of Republicanism.� He even hints at how bad things could get, in this essay written before 1995, “if the levees break.� It’s a short and funny piece, with mention of vampirism and the “Shroud of Turism,� but you get the feeling Codrescu is the canary in the mine as he writes about his black chiffon angels marching at a funeral pace. It has always been tradition to see death as a game or a joke in New Orleans or even as an old and sentimental friend. It never occurred to them that it could be so cruel to the people who loved it best; that it could hurt so badly the city that kept the idea of death so very alive.

Codrescu writes about a lot more than death, however. This is New Orleans, after all, and the subject of literary matters can never be far behind. “I have a whole shelf of New Orleans books, and that’s about one-hundredth of all the books about New Orleans,� he explains. “If you add all the books by New Orleans writers that are not necessarily about New Orleans, you can fill a whole library.� The modern book that has most captured the city’s imagination, and that of everyone else who ever wanted to feel that they “know� New Orleans, is John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, a book that Codrescu admires deeply and cannot resist giving his full attention.

The story of Confederacy's rejection by the major publishers is legendary, and the tragedy that it brought down upon the author, leading to his suicide, is the stuff that fuels the fevered dreams of would-be writers everywhere. Codrescu initiates a lively discussion of the book’s content in “My City My Wilderness� and how one of his undergraduate classes in particular reacted to it. Fully half of his students did not like the book, the result perhaps of hitting a bit too close to home. “A writer hurts the ones he loves because he knows them,� writes Codrescu, recalling the adverse reaction from his own mother to the publication of his autobiographical novel, The Life & Times of an Involuntary Genius. Surely the impact of many local readers to Toole’s epic cannot be expected to be too different.

The characters in Confederacy, are “ultra-realist depictions of a time and place,� according to Codrescu, and much of it he feels could not be written in the present. He notes that one student felt the book gave the city a “bad image�; the author finds this the most interesting response of all. “Nostalgia is a full-time business in New Orleans,� he writes, “replete with manufactured glories, blessed by the chamber of commerce, and abetted by the cult of literary figures.� And yet for all his popularity, for all the lionization of his “Pulitzer Prize-winning, posthumous accomplishment,� there is no annual festival noting Toole’s achievement. Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner are lauded annually but not the man who nailed the city better than anyone else, and that, Codrescu writes, is a shame. “A Confederacy of Dunces Dunciad would be infinitely more appropriate,� he notes, “not to mention therapeutic.�

The most poignant section of Mon Amour is of course the final one, with the pieces Codrescu crafted after Katrina. “I often compared [the city] to Venice because of its beauty and tenuousness, its love of music, art and carnival,� he writes. “The problem of engineering the survival of Venice has preoccupied the world for centuries, but very little thought has gone into protecting New Orleans the same way.� Because he is there, because he was thinking about it long before it was a national nightmare, Codrescu is harsh and tender about the tragedy at the same time. “We could have been preparing for this during all the years that we knew it was going to happen. New Orleans should have been re-engineered after the flood of 1927. Instead, like the citizens of Pompeii, we made libations to the gods of chaos. Carpe diem! Our politicians, like our citizens, lived in the moment, a beautiful, fragrant, delicious, sexy moment. The hard work, mañana.�

That is New Orleans and Louisiana, of course, as Codrescu knows all too well. But it is also the rest of the country, he notes; it is the way of life for all of America in the 21st century. “All the USA is the land of shopping-mall, credit-card dreamy dreams…� and the reader nods her head in agreement, looking at her neighbor’s two (count them two!) SUVs for a family of four. We all have played against the demands of tomorrow in our grasshopper habits of today, and New Orleans is where we have finally, just barely, begun to understand how unprepared for the real world all of us truly are.

In the end, Codrescu cannot help but wonder if the message of Katrina has really gotten through, or if this is just Louisiana’s problem, just something that happened to people the rest of us have never met, and while it was a diversion on a national scale, it was still and only, a diversion. For the citizens of New Orleans, of course, it is desperately, and tragically, much much more. “What is going to survive of our culture?� asks Codrescu. “We already know 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 America unto themselves. But this blues now is just too big.�

Andrei Codrescu knows the city of New Orleans, and he is worried that America doesn’t love it enough to save it. After reading New Orleans Mon Amour, I am reminded again just how much harder we need to fight for all that is unique about that particular place in our country. “Tell me what the air feels like at 3 AM on a Thursday night in late August in Shaker Heights and I bet that you won’t be able to say because nobody stays up that late,� he writes. “But in New Orleans, I tell you, it’s ink and honey passed through silver moonlight. Accuse me of poetry, go ahead. But prove that it isn’t so. You can’t because New Orleans is made of a tissue of poetries that wove each other together over time.�

A city built of poetry, and we are letting it slip away. While we hurry into tomorrow, Andrei Codrescu reminds us, we are letting the stuff of poetry slip away.