Andrei Codrescu
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPROWELL: As the first month of 2006 began, Algonquin Books published your New Orleans, Mon Amour, a collection of essays. I especially like the title, which, I have no doubt, represents the feeling of a vast number of people who have established exchanges with the people of New Orleans and enjoyed their many cultural traditions and productions. I know I have long had a love affair with that city, since I first visited it during the late 1960s. Will you talk about New Orleans, Mon Amour, its title, occasion, and purpose—a very important book, which appeared in January 6, 2006, not long after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina?
CODRESCU: The book is a collection of twenty years of writing essays about New Orleans. I moved to the city at the end of 1984 to start teaching in the fall of 1984/85 in the LSU English Department. Some of the essays are love letters to the people and culture of New Orleans, but others are unsparing criticisms of some of the local institutions and aspects of that same culture, which could be so loveable and infuriating at the same time. The majority of these pieces were broadcast on NPR's news program "All Things Considered," and some of them were written for my weekly column in New Orleans alternative weekly, Gambit. The Storm afforded me an opportunity to reread everything I'd written and to see the evolution of my feelings and thinking about the place that became my home. In a way, this book is an autobiography sketched by means of people and events I was able to observe.
ROWELL: As if you have not already answered the next question in your response to the first or in your essays in New Orleans, Mon Amour, I'm still compelled to ask you this: What does New Orleans mean to you? I am talking about the New Orleans before Katrina. If you posed the same question to me, I could talk for hours or days about its meaning to me—and I know no other North American city that has affected me so. What is New Orleans for you? You apparently have a very special relationship to that city: you teach English at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where you live part-time, but you also live in New Orleans. In fact, you have lived there for twenty years or more. But your origins are Eastern European—Rumanian, to be exact; you come from another cultural background. But I forget: New Orleans is a world city; culturally, it is not like any other place in the [End Page 1107] USA. What attracted you to New Orleans, and what continues to fascinate you about that city? Here I am speaking as if that magical city is still in tact, as if Hurricane Katrina never touched it. Yes, I, too, love New Orleans. It has long worked its conjure on me.
CODRESCU: You right, as people say around here (our common friend, the great and lamented poet Tom Dent loved to use that phrase with just the right inflection, and he grinned whenever he said it, aware I think both of its significance and how funny it must have sounded to my Transylvanian ears), you right that it would take days and nights and months and years to talk about New Orleans. I think that it should actually take that long and that, in fact, it does take that long because people who have been touched by the city, even slightly, will talk about it for a long time. There is an interesting (though by no means happy) phenomenon resulting from the destruction of the city, namely that now people never tire of talking about it, mythicizing, fabulizing, and making it live in stories. Our diaspora alone, hundreds of thousands of people, are re-creating the city for people in places as far away as Alaska. If New Orleans wasn't a place of myth and legend...
