Upcoming Events:

ANDREI LIVE!

MAY
DATE	TIME	LOCATION
9th	1-3 pm	New Orleans, Maple Street Books, at PJs Coffee, Reading and signing of The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess. Tel: 504.862.0008
JUNE
DATE	TIME	LOCATION
24th	TBA	New Orleans, AFTA (American Family Therapy Meeting), keynote. For more info, write to: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
OCT.
DATE	TIME	LOCATION
1st- 3rd	TBA	Tempe, Arizona State University, Comparative Literature Conference keynote. For more information, call Professor Ileana Orlich, 480.965.4658
6th	11am	Hot Springs, Arkansas Arts Council, Keynote
NOV.
DATE	TIME	LOCATION
3rd	TBA	Ohio Wesleyan University, the Sagan Lectures. This year's topic is "Renewing America for a Global Century." My talk is on "What is an Immigrant? What Makes an American?"
DEC.
DATE	TIME	LOCATION
9th- 11th	TBA	University of Michigan Ann Arbor, The Weiser Center at The International Institute, and the Avant Garde Interest Group.

Public Appearances, Current Obsessions:

Andrei Codrescu has keynoted conferences, participated in symposia, and performed in many noted venues. In addition to performing his poetry, he is available to groups interested in contemporary cultural issues. The topics below are ever-evolving, because they are areas of ongoing concern, they are not set pieces. Many of them can be found, in nuce or in media res, in Codrescu's essay collections.

The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess. In 1916 Zurich, Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dada, and Lenin, the daddy of communism, play chess. Also in Zurich at that hour is Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, and James Joyce. In this game in the smoky Cafe de la Terrasse in the neutral zone of a Europe at war, is the stem-cell of the 20th century: when the two men get up from the table, nothing will again be the same.

American Cities: What Makes them Tick. A seasoned traveler, Codrescu shares his layered (in time) observations on changing American cities and speculates on the urban future. He has written and lectured extensively on New Orleans, both before and after Katrina.

What is an immigrant? What makes an American? Some reflections on the changing nature of 21st century U.S. The rhetoric of politicians and the reality of the labor markets are forever at odds. Caught between them, the immigrant has a complex relationship to his or her own self. This talk is an evolving inquiry into nationalism, capitalism, and the psychology of emigrants.

Plato's Cave and the Socratic Agora: A lecture on education, solitude, and utopia. The displacement of the book by newer reading technology returns us to the oral forum of the marketplace, where questions are instantly taken up, answered, googled, returned in new forms, deepened, or disposed of. How does the traditional university deal with this ubiquitous learning environment? Are the "humanities" dealing adequately with the pervasive and quickly morphing realities of culture? Is utopia an exclusive privilege of reading, an activity only the book (or Kindle) makes possible?

Poetry as Currency. A guide to investment, or a lecture on the currency of the imagination. This is a Codrescu obsession often meant literally, but explored playfully every time.

Walker Evans: Photographing the Language of the 20th Century. See Codrescu's book on Walker Evans, published the Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

The Metaphysics of Cyberspace: Who Stares Without Blinking? Considerations of humans and machines in the future. An examination of new virtualities and their rituals. This is an ongoing inquiry about virtual reality, resulting from a continuing conversation with thinkers and engineers.

Whose Global Village? Reflections on power and imagination in today's world. Related to the "poetry as currency" research, this talk is focused on the differences between globalite (Michel Deguy's term) and globalism. The first is the natural connection and growing awareness of global sympathies, the other a crude, and often unfair, economic reality.

Literature in the Age of Self-production. Reflections on the future of literature without editors; broadcasting the self & its projections; the proliferation of writing in the age of blogs, and the critical mechanisms developing on the internet. Distinctions between "high" and "low" literature have been already overthrown by the early avantgardes of the 20th century, but are the new instant communications developing new ones?

Poetry, her battlefields, and hardwon horizontality. American poetry now. This is the battlefield view of an active participant in the poetry scene.

Editing Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Letters & Life (corpse.org, since January 1983, ongoing) This journal has published hundreds of writers, instigated dozens of polemics, and has been an active player on the cultural landscape since 1983. Editing the journal, first as a monthly, then a quarterly, then one of the first internet journals (1996), Codrescu has had a privileged view of the dynamics of literary (and not just) culture.

Swimming Between Languages: Learning English by Osmosis & Other Adventures. A talk about learning a new world with a new language; bilingual education; multiculturalism; language politics. Explored in a number of essays, this too is an ongoing concern.

Romania: the World’s First Televised Revolution. The infamous video tapes of the Romanian "revolution" of 1989, and how they changed our idea that "the revolution will not be televised." This talk can be focused solely on the exemplary mass-delusions of the Romanian event, but touch also on the new politics of the media and their influence (possibly creation) of new global realities; the late 20th century "revolutions" in East/Central Europe, their roots in Sixties American counterculture, the quick rise of new political-cultural models, and the resurrection of nationalism in the European Union, as seen and created by media.