Economy of Words

American Review Keyes continuedfrom previous page Olson works hard to show us the roots of Codrescu's investigations in the theoretical Azores: Nietzsche, Benjamin, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Pierre Klossowski merit lengthy discussions, and there are not entirely gratuitous references to Hume, Kant, and Hegel, among others. And then there are statements like this one: "Psychogeographical surrealism, from Walter Benjamin on forward, has had Andrei Codrescu as more or less the leader and top theorist ofthe North American branch." This claim manages to be simultaneously inflated and obscure, and it's not alone. We hear that "Codrescu straddles massive worlds," that he "has as many identities as Imelda Marcos had shoes, and he dances in them, performing travesties of the ephemeral fictions of identity." This is the risk—amounting almost to a certainty —that an authorruns when he starts to indulge in needless lionizing of his subject. Just one more example: Shot through Codrescu's book [Road Scholar (1993)] is disapproval ofracists, sexists, money-grubbers, Spartan ascetics, dead corporate men, communist tyrants, authoritarian schemers, and those who are blind to history. ... As he speeds into the west, through the great hinterlands ofindustrial capital, his vengeance tends to deepen as his sense of the pleasure of place is overcome by the meaning of time. Always, fun has a counterbalance, morality. One wants to ask, who doesn 't disapprove of racists, sexists, etc. "[D]ead corporate men" in particular stands out for its unintentional hilarity. Olson does much better when simply attending to the influences and major concerns of Codrescu's work. He does a particularly goodjob ofilluminating the tension between the hedonic and the ethical that is at the heart of Codrescu's work, not to mention the heart ofthe American Myth. "I am aware," Codrescu writes, "at all times, that my 'fun' is taking place in a death camp called life and guarded by deeply rooted (and highly charged) ethics." Olson traces this tension , most notably, in the interviews appended to this essay, at one point provoking the following tirade: This question is full of repressed anger. Isn't life, joy, and squalor. . .worth attention ? Are you making a case against poetry , against joy, against the sun? All the delicate trembling that takes place along the vast surfaces of the tactile world, isn't that what a poet attempts to render momentarily visible? And if not, why not? Savonarola stalks the streets ofFlorence still, as does Kenneth Starr.... The "ethics"-spouting hypocrites are nasty perverts, see Freud. Happily, sometimes, when a new Inquisition or Puritanism rears its ugly head, American commonsense corrects it. This is first-rate fulmination, almost inarguable . So what prompted it? Referring to some teenage Cuban prostitutes Codrescu had written about, Olson asks, "What... [about the] kids on the street, if I could ask you to think about it from an ethical perspective?" The outburst looks a little different in this light, even ifit's tempting to give Codrescu credit for standing up for the trembling world ofEros in the face of the emerging, if not full-blown, moral panic around child sexuality; tempting to nod in agreement, to feel ourselves on the side of Blake and Nietzsche against Savonarola and Starr. This isfirst-rate fulmination. None of which changes the fact that we wouldn't want our kids on those streets, or any other ones, doing what those kids are doing. It's of the nature of an aporia that it can't be theorized, prophesied, or wished away. Aporias can only be worried over, gnawed at, burrowed through. Only moles can really address them, and it's interesting to watch Olson's mole rooting around in the shadow of the eagle Codrescu, asking the questions that can't even be seen from significant altitude. Paul Keyes works as a computer programmer in Seattle, Washington. Economy of Words Larry Fondation The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories Steve Almond Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill http://www.algonquin.com 242 pages; cloth $22.95 Cry Uncle Alan Michael Parker University Press of Mississippi http://www.upress.state.ms.us 286 pages; cloth, $28.00 Steve Almond's first book, a story collection called My Life in Heavy...