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"Only Andrei Codrescu would have the nerve to undertake an On the Road for the 1990s." "Andrei Codrescu, the inimitable National Public Radio commentator and poet, decided to travel the United States of America in search of its wonderful excesses and ironies. He bought a cherry red '68 Cadillac convertible and drove from sultry New Orleans to old haunts in New York's East Village; from utopian communities in upstate New York to the urban ruins of Detroit; from the thriving commercial kingdom of Chicago to the New Age and Native American patchworks of New Mexico; from the gaudy wonderland of Las Vegas to the spiritual center of San Francisco. Along the way he chats with Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; with an Illinois woman whose 1964 Pontiac sparks a heated First Amendment debate; with an urban artist whose work is regularly destroyed by Detroit maintenance workers; with a shooting instructor who gives lessons either clothed or (for a higher fee) unclothed; and with a punk band composed of citizens of the Sun City, Arizona, retirement community. Codrescu visits Ellis Island, Walt Whitman's grave, the McDonald's museum in Chicago (a perfectly preserved original 1955 vintage McDonald's restaurant), the National Atomic Museum at Kirtland Air Force Base, and a sausage factory in Detroit, and he gets rebirthed and undergoes crystal therapy in New Mexico. A camera crew followed, and the movie Road Scholar was created simultaneously with the book." "Codrescu's witty and poignant perceptions are always informed by recollections of his unusual upbringing in Stalinist Romania and his experiences of the changes in America from the revolutionary 1960s to the 1990s. Road Scholar is illustrated throughout with photographs of Andrei's odyssey by the acclaimed photographer David Graham, who translates the sometimes absurd realities of contemporary American culture into unforgettably iconic works of art. Funny, moving, and challenging, Road Scholar provides an entirely new perspective on the vast and varied contemporary American experience."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved… (más)
A different sort of road novel; a brief examination of (then) modern America seen through the poetically inquisitive eyes of a Romanian immigrant. Though published in the 90s, Andrei Codrescu's observations still ring true twenty years later. Not just an outsider's view, Codrescu's is an outrider's view, which may be the perspective we need to see ourselves, as opposed to the mirror reflection we get accustomed to. I found this brief passage particularly poignant:
"The true American religion is speed. When you go fast you don’t notice much. In the Church of Speed, Inattention is God. If you go fast enough, you’ll take the approximate over the accurate . . . the copy over the original . . . the copy of the copy over the copy . . . the ideal cowboy over the bone-tired cowpoke . . . the mythic gunslinger over the petty criminal . . . the illusion over reality . . . the fast buck over the sweaty nickel." ( )
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road,” 1881
Little by little we evolved the idea of getting a car. The only way to see America is by automobile—that’s what everybody says. It’s not true, of course, but it sounds wonderful. I had never owned a car, didn’t know how to drive one even. I wish now we had chosen a canoe instead.
Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 1945
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear?
Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1955
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight? …
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California,” 1955
And now, next, it will be the deconstruction of the American Empire.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1992
Dedicatoria
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
TO the longest sufferer of them all, Alice, who drove me everywhere in her car, and whose efforts to teach me how to drive came to naught; to my many friends over these past two decades from whom I mooched rides; to Jeffrey Miller, a great driver; to Laura Rosenthal, who let me drive her car; to John Clark for standing bravely by at the eleventh hour before I enrolled in Mr. Carney's Safe Driving School.
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
ONE day, in 1990, I got a call from Roger Weisberg in New York. Roger said he was a TV producer and was intrigued by my observations on the radio about American life.
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
A creature like Sammy can exist only in New York. Short, loud, self-engendered, a dozen gold chains around his neck, babbling gibberish in a dozen languages, he is like a golem of schmaltz, born from the trampled mud of Eastern Europe, the muck at the bottom of immigrant boats. He proclaims his well-being at the top of his lungs. His laughter is nothing short of insane, a kind of anguished cry that must sound like a grotesque parody of triumph to his diners, some of whom still have numbers tattooed on their arms.
he cars of the fifties, like the coaches of the sixteenth century, stopped for no one. The plebes took the bus or rode honest bicycles, which had come through the war. Waiting for the bus in the rain, I would watch the depressing river of bicycles streaming to work, and I could see myself on the back of a swan. My white bird would glide over the gray river of bikes, then soar over the towers of the Teutsch cathedral, skirt the silvery roofs of Sibiu and land in the schoolyard just as the bell rang.
I rode a swan to school (though most of my Transylvanian schoolmates used the traditional bats) until my swan died; then I took the ancient streetcar, which, like the Victorian streetlights, was said to be “the oldest in Europe.” This venerable tram groaned its way up the hills so slowly we jumped on its back and rode gratis. Now and then an old conductor, the oldest in Europe, dressed in a threadbare uniform that predated the Hapsburgs, would attempt to shoo away the cluster of children perched on the back of his ancient tram.
Two bums with rags have launched themselves like street rockets onto my windshield, marring its perfection with oily streaks, and I start to scream. It’s a primal scream. A driver is born.
PROOF of the power of dreams: Ray Kroc, one man with a single idea, a rounded idee fixe called a hamburger, began to dream an empire and, lo and behold, one day the entire planet is covered by the mighty waves of his single thought.
Easing my transition from the pink-lit vistas of the New Age to the facts and figures of the old one is the Atomic Museum tour guide. She is as enthusiastic about her little evil chamber as a curator at the Louvre. She recites cheerily the weight, width, and length of every bomb in the museum, and their destructive potential, which she calls “fatalities.” She must mean human beings.
America in the last decade of the millennium is a complicated place. Our shoes come from Italy. Our cars come from Japan. Our patriots come from Nazi Germany. Immigrants are buying Caddies. Romanians teach English to Americans. And the money is shit. You could buy a house twenty years ago for what it costs to buy a Caddy now.
When a car stopped, the boy gave me his only possession, the tattered Leaves of Grass. I carried it with me to my friends’ commune and I spent many hours lying naked on a patch of grass, reading Whitman out loud to my naked comrades. Whitman saw himself being read precisely in this way in some future golden age. He saw himself being passed “from hand to hand,” in a book “that fits in your pocket.” (What pocket if you’re naked?)
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
"The land is an Indian thing." I believe that. But it's also a Romanian thing.
"Only Andrei Codrescu would have the nerve to undertake an On the Road for the 1990s." "Andrei Codrescu, the inimitable National Public Radio commentator and poet, decided to travel the United States of America in search of its wonderful excesses and ironies. He bought a cherry red '68 Cadillac convertible and drove from sultry New Orleans to old haunts in New York's East Village; from utopian communities in upstate New York to the urban ruins of Detroit; from the thriving commercial kingdom of Chicago to the New Age and Native American patchworks of New Mexico; from the gaudy wonderland of Las Vegas to the spiritual center of San Francisco. Along the way he chats with Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; with an Illinois woman whose 1964 Pontiac sparks a heated First Amendment debate; with an urban artist whose work is regularly destroyed by Detroit maintenance workers; with a shooting instructor who gives lessons either clothed or (for a higher fee) unclothed; and with a punk band composed of citizens of the Sun City, Arizona, retirement community. Codrescu visits Ellis Island, Walt Whitman's grave, the McDonald's museum in Chicago (a perfectly preserved original 1955 vintage McDonald's restaurant), the National Atomic Museum at Kirtland Air Force Base, and a sausage factory in Detroit, and he gets rebirthed and undergoes crystal therapy in New Mexico. A camera crew followed, and the movie Road Scholar was created simultaneously with the book." "Codrescu's witty and poignant perceptions are always informed by recollections of his unusual upbringing in Stalinist Romania and his experiences of the changes in America from the revolutionary 1960s to the 1990s. Road Scholar is illustrated throughout with photographs of Andrei's odyssey by the acclaimed photographer David Graham, who translates the sometimes absurd realities of contemporary American culture into unforgettably iconic works of art. Funny, moving, and challenging, Road Scholar provides an entirely new perspective on the vast and varied contemporary American experience."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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"The true American religion is speed. When you go fast you don’t notice much. In the Church of Speed, Inattention is God. If you go fast enough, you’ll take the approximate over the accurate . . . the copy over the original . . . the copy of the copy over the copy . . . the ideal cowboy over the bone-tired cowpoke . . . the mythic gunslinger over the petty criminal . . . the illusion over reality . . . the fast buck over the sweaty nickel." (