Andrei Codrescu
Andrei Codrescu
Andrei Codrescuis a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was the Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth20 December 1946
CountryUnited States of America
both call everybody exile global oddities picked resident whatever
After so many years, I feel more American than anything else, but I'm also Romanian and whatever other oddities of temperament I picked up elsewhere, in Transylvania or France, for instance. These days, everybody is both an exile and a resident - they don't call it the global village for nothing.
artists money society tedium
Real artists free of the tedium of money can use, now, all of society as an idea factory.
romania
New Orleans reminds me of Romania because New Orleans is very corrupt politically.
express immediate larger
Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.
accustomed creating refugees
Americans are accustomed to welcoming, or at least receiving, refugees from other countries, not creating our own.
artists birthday lucky paid persuade
Most artists don't get paid for what they do, and they are lucky if they can persuade a friend to let them show something at a kid's birthday party.
call city culture feed myths orleans people
Two-thirds of what we call New Orleans culture is really myth-making, ... People feed myths of the city back to the city. These myths are now in pieces.
art poor
Only the poor can create art.
real nice thinking
The time has come for writers to become inaccessible again. The reason is not some kind of 'mystique' that makes people curious (though it helps), but the fact that no real writers ever lay down anything real in public-they work in solitude, they think hard, and their thoughts are rarely nice or 'friendly.'
jobs gold emotion
It is the job of the market to turn the base material of our emotions into gold.
art artist artists conceive conceptual field known levels money problem serious slight species takes
There is a slight problem with being a conceptual artist these days: You won't get paid. But this levels the field and takes the art of money out of the field of serious art. The only conceptual artists who would conceive of making money on the Internet are a lowbrow species known as hustlers.
real learning technology
The real technology -behind all our other technologies- is language. It actually creates the world our consciousness lives in.
girl years language
It's still a mystery to me exactly how I learned the language. [But] I was 19 years old and I had very urgent things to tell girls.