Hail Babylon!
By Andrei Codrescu
(St. Martin’s Press, $23.95, 241 pp.)
by Thomas Christian
I can remember, vividly, with nose pressed to cool schoolbus glass, the awe-inspiring visions of the city’s metal spires scraping the sky. Squinting in between the glittering silver bridge conduits that flashed past in rapid succession, there was a sense of wonderment that existed in The City in the distance; building after building crammed into block upon block upon block, long avenues, boulevards, underground tunnels, each gazzulating with their own intense white fire of human electricity.
It is with this same first-thrill excitement that immigrant-turned-citizen Andrei Codrescu makes his approach and descent upon the American city in Hail Babylon.
“She filled him with the poetry of her streets,” he imagines, initially, with Whitmanesque patriotic flare. In a book that’s shared with Walker Evans’ stark L.A. and NYC shadowbox photography, Codrescu’s journals reflect upon his trips to New Orleans and Las Vegas; Utah, New York, and the Deep South, whose history he determines has been skewed by its regard of culture, “Elvis Presley has somehow gotten mixed up in the glories of the Confederacy.” Disappointed in his search for The New World, he finds instead a land laden with the crass mechanical plumbing of commercialism.
“If the Disneying continues,” he writes, “we may have to retreat, leaving an empty shell,” eventually exhuming the great dead poet as pet comrade on his weeping shoulder to see for himself: “Whitman would have been outraged by a sexless, empty collection of guarded, stand-offish buildings that shut down at night after swallowing their residents directly from shapeless tin cans in hideous underground garages.”
In this disintegration of The City, Codrescu hangs the banner of the Dadaists’ battlecry – “jollity on the cusp of disaster,” and points to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights avenue grid as the inspiration behind the salvation plan – “Any city that names its streets after poets deserves to be saluted!”
