The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape

Instead of McLuhan's rosily interactive global village, essayist and poet-provocateur Codrescu, National Public Radio commentator, sees emerging a ``new electronic globe'' that stifles human creativity, thought and imagination. In ``shopping-mall America,'' reality is continually manufactured and people are becoming mere appendages of engines and gadgets. In the totalitarian East, the crude hand of the state intervenes, though Codrescu saw signs of progress during a visit to his native Romania, where TV ``literally woke up the country'' as Ceaucescu's execution was aired on screens that the dictator once controlled. Codrescu argues in these acute if alarmist essays for a rebirth of the imagination, with a nod to surrealism and Dada. Kundera, Solzhenitsyn, Burroughs, Kafka, Garcia Marquez and Ted Berrigan are points on his literary compass as he maps a terrain where life seems increasingly devoid of meaning. (June) this clause and this phrase unclear to me.eed/eliminate this part--pick up from below `Codrescue argues in etc.--if the beginning of sent. gives you oblems;otherwise leave as is:meaning that Ceaucescue was Dracula and now that he is eliminated there is a surge of nationalism, and in the West, as we state earlier in review, our reality is manufactured, making for programmed nonreality.gs