THE MUSE IS ALWAYS HALF-DRESSED IN NEW...

THE MUSE IS ALWAYS HALF-DRESSED IN NEW ORLEANS AND OTHER ESSAYS by Andrei Codrescu (Picador: $10; 199 pp.). In these essays, the author and NPR commentator casts a jaundiced eye at American culture in the declining years of the 20th Century. In more serious discussions of media and politics, Codrescu examines how the dreaded Securitate forces provided moving but false images of a popular revolution in Romania while retaining control of the country, concluding, “Romania today is a bad detective novel, a roman policier written by too many writers, plotted by too many atrocious scribblers, edited by hacks, published on bad paper by people without respect for timing, characters or readers--an exercise in embarrassment.”