My mother and I were part of a deal in the mid-'60s between Romania and Israel. Israel bought freedom for Romanian Jews for $2,000 a head. Ceausescu made a bundle in hard currency. He also 'sold' ethnic Germans to West Germany. Instead of going to Israel, my mother and I came to the United States.

Andrei Codrescu

Categorized in : Head Mother Freedom Hard

There is a velvety sensuality here at the mouth of the Mississippi that you won't find anywhere else. 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. But in New Orleans, I'll tell you, it's like ink and honey passed through silver moonlight.

Andrei Codrescu

new-orleans air night

The real technology -behind all our other technologies- is language. It actually creates the world our consciousness lives in.

Andrei Codrescu

learning technology real

How did you fall in love with New Orleans? At once, madly. Looking back, sometimes I think it was predestined.

Andrei Codrescu

falling-in-love new-orleans thinking

The worst part about zombies raging unchecked is the slow paralysis that they induce in people who aren't quite zombies yet. The rest of us un-zombies turn our heads, hoping the ghouls will just go away.

Andrei Codrescu

zombie ghouls people

There is no ´Complete Idiots Guide to Creationism,´ but perhaps one is not needed.

Andrei Codrescu

idiot guides needed

These are the poems of a traveler and a lover who feels both the terror of time passing and the consolation of eternity. From such tension spring lovely poetic objects, ready for intelligent use.

Andrei Codrescu

lovely intelligent spring

The peasants of all lands recognize power and they salute it, whether it's good or evil.

Andrei Codrescu

peasants land evil

Cookbooks bear the same relation to real books that microwave food bears to your grandmother?s.

Andrei Codrescu

sarcastic real book

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.'

Andrei Codrescu

nice real thinking

In the grand collage that is Dada, past and future are equally usable.

Andrei Codrescu

collages past

Nostalgia is masochism and masochism is something masochists love to share.

Andrei Codrescu

masochism nostalgia share

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.

Andrei Codrescu

girl language years

It is the job of the market to turn the base material of our emotions into gold.

Andrei Codrescu

emotion gold jobs

Only the poor can create art.

Andrei Codrescu

poor art

The evaporation of 4 million who believe in this crap would leave the world a better place.

Andrei Codrescu

atheism believe world

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.

Andrei Codrescu

friend party lucky birthday

Americans are accustomed to welcoming, or at least receiving, refugees from other countries, not creating our own.

Andrei Codrescu

refugees our own creating

New Orleans reminds me of Romania because New Orleans is very corrupt politically.

Andrei Codrescu

corrupt new because me

Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.

Andrei Codrescu

greatest tragedy circumstances way

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.

Andrei Codrescu

whatever nothing feel village