M: Mr. Codrescu, it is not an overstatement to say that you yourself are a multimedia event. What propels you/inspires you into so many different fields: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, film, investments? Incidentally, how do you apply for the job of Social Critic of Our Times?

AC: These are weighty questions that can be answered only by my army of exegetes, biographers, chroniclers, and girlfriends. What propels me is fear that they might find me boring and take their exegesis, chronologies, and charms over to my enemies. There may be also be the Vice of Curiosity and her Imp of Perv Play that demand different forms for different discoveries. For instance, if you are faced by a Confederate submarine in Jackson Square in New Orleans, your only response to such an absurd object has to be poetry. You write a lyric investigating the symbolic weight of this object within the subconscious of the city and three months later you notice that the submarine (object of your poems and reflections) has disappeared and a three-times-larger-than-life statue of Marilyn Monroe holding on to her skirt over the subway grate in the "Seven Year Itch" has replaced it. The only response to such an astonishing turn of events is more poetry. Now take the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel in Seattle where you find yourself one fine dining hour. You notice the money discreetly flowing through, the expensive dresses clinging to perfect spa-moulded bodies, crisp tuxidoes, fresh flowers, and efficient help with small, focused pupils resembling the black dots in .Com. Faced with this, your only recourse is social commentary. While you are absorbing the lobby for your commentary, you notice a distressed young woman in a black strapless dress holding a shoe with a broken high heel in one hand and the heel in the other seated helplessly on a velvet tambour two feet away from you. You offer her your help, but since you know nothing about cobbling, you make her laugh instead, a reaction that leads her to forget all about the party on the mezzanine where she doesn't know anybody anyway and you end up going together to the pricey bar in the lobby, both of you shoeless since you decided in solidarity to also take your shoes off. And then you sleep together and she turns out to be a very sweet and sensible nurse who will never meet her blind date now but who ends up one of your best friends and Seattle shelter from the storm. And that's either reportage or fiction, depending on how you look at it. So it's life that comes up with the occasions. All you need is the proper forms