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The Dog with the Chip in His Neck by Andrei Codrescu Nonfiction, 1996, 270 p. ISBN: 0-312-14316-8

Book review copyright 1997 by Pen Waggener     For more than a decade now, Andrei Codrescu has been delivering insightful, funny and ironic commentaries on modern life for National Pulbic Radio. A collection of those essays, along with speeches and papers he's delivered, titledThe Dog with the Chip in His Neck, has recently been released in trade paperback. In it, Codrescu holds forth on democracy, America, computers, voice mail, art, Europe, religion and everything in between.     Codrescu came to America from Romania in the 1960's. In the first chapter, Codrescu recounts his first trip to America, on a plane full of immigrants from Eastern Europe. As the plane got to New York, "The Statue of Liberty came into view, slippling quite easily into the space already reserved for her in our minds. We had seen her so many times in pictures, she had a home already there, behind our eyes."     In the essay "Whose Woods are These?" he relates his mother's experiences coming to America. She spent the first few years in this country acquiring material things that she could never have gotten in her home country, only to realize that she has nobody to share them with. He writes: "It began to dawn on my mother that she had perhaps made a bad deal: she had traded in her friends and relatives for fake chicken, ersatz tomatoes, and phony furniture." Only later does she come to realize what she's really gained by coming to America: freedom.     As an immigrant, Codrescu has a keen eye for things that those of us who've lived in America all our lives tend to take for granted. As someone who's lived in America for most of his life, Codrescu also has a keen eye for things uniquely American. He writes with wry insight about the paradoxes inherent in modern religion, politics, and pop culture.     In the essay "It's a Crime!" he points out the politicians and journalists need for crime. Usually, he says, the people who make the most noise about crime are the ones who rely on it to stay in business. "We love our criminals on TV and at the movies and we even love to elect them, provided that they are big enough criminals."     A good part of the book is devoted to Codrescu's thoughts on technology. The title essay, "The Dog with the Chip in His Neck," relates his encounters at a technology fair where he met a woman whose dog had, in fact, had a chip injected into his neck. Apparently, the chip contains an ID number that accesses the information about the dogs owner, etc., from a national database, so that lost dogs could be reunited with their owners.     As unsettled as he is by the practice of injecting chips into dogs, Codrescu is even more unsettled by other aspects of modern technology, such as voice mail and talk radio. He devotes entire essays to the evils of both, before moving on to the effects of computers on his ability to work.     When he started out as a writer, Codrescu says, he used to write poetry in bars. All he needed to create was a napkin, an ink pen, and beautiful girls for inspiration. He'd write a poem, and if a girl liked it, he would usually write some more.     When got a typewriter, the change in tools changed his writing as well. Instead of poetry, he now wrote prose, essays and stories. However, he had to spend time dealing with the quirks of his new machine: smudges, locks and the like.     Later, he was given a computer. It greatly increased his productivity, but it tied him to his desk to produce: "Now, this was a paradox because in order to create I needed freedom, but in order to get freedom I had to be away from this machine.... So I started writing even less poetry."     Codrescu's experiences with the Internet left him wanting as well. Computers tied him to a desk, then saddled him with a stream of "(mostly) useless information." He then found himself conversing with a group of people with whom he had nothing in common but the technology itself. He continues to use computers to produce his work, but now eyes them warily, aware of their evils as well as their benefits.     After he tackles computers and voice mail, Codrescu moves on to multiculturalism, Rosa Luxembourg, the fall of Communism, art and language. Codrescu's prose is witty and stylish. The Dog with a Chip in His Neck is excellent reading for anyone who has enjoyed his commentary on NPR, and it will be an even better discovery for anyone who missed them.     In "Until I Got Here&emdash;America Boring," he argues not that he livened it up so much as he got here at the right time, because, among other things, more ethnic food and music became available. Codrescu warns against the close-minded bigotry rampant in California, where folks have been trying recently to limit immigration: "Simple-minded souls who want to go back to the safety of their 1950s doo-wop mashed potatoes are fixing to take away our hot sauce. Don't let them, folks."

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