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Road Scholar by Andrei Codrescu
with photographs by David Graham
Roumanian-born poet and brand-new driver Andrei Codrescu hops in a mint red
'68 Cadillac and journeys with film crew from Ellis Island to the Golden
Gate, making stops in a ravaged and abandoned Detroit, a moving and shaking
Chicago, the New Age and Survivalist supermarkets of the southwest, the neon
kitsch of Vegas, and finally the odd peace and stability of San Francisco,
where Codrescu notes, "From here on out there is nothing but ocean. You can't
run any farther. You must turn around to face yourself." Perhaps because
he himself is a bit eccentric, Codrescu never condescends to or disparages
his subjects, remaining true to his observation that "what keeps us together
is precisely the awed awareness of our differences...."
 Towards
the end of the book, Codrescu interviews City Lights founder
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (an interview which didn't
make it into
the film version, by the way) who compares Henry
Miller's and Kerouac's cross-country roadtrip accounts,
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare and
On the Road, respectively: "...Miller was more focused
on the reality of America whereas Kerouac was off in his Catholic consciousness
more. When you read On the Road closely, you see he really
wasn't observing the reality in front of him."
Other than occasional nostalgic flashbacks to the '60s, Codrescu is genuinely
engaged and surprised by what he finds at the well-lit fringes of American
society at the end of the 20th century and describes it all with journalistic
acuity and poetic flare. A must for anyone who's done or is dreaming
of doing the transcontinental trip. |
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