Prairie Lights

 

During my recent visit to Iowa City, I spent a considerable amount of time reading and thinking and browsing the shelves in IC's famous bookstore, Prairie Lights, the companion bookstore to San Francisco's famous City Lights. While here, I scored a major reading spot in the window overlooking Linn Street--a perfect perch for my Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space which is proving enormously helpful in my ongoing thinking about Robert Louis Stevenson vis-a-vis Henri Bergson (see link to my journal article here: “Softened with time”: A (Proto) Bergsonian Metaphysics in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde).

Bachelard's philosophical inquiry into spacial poetics is a beautiful interrogation of architecture, beauty, the quest for human meaning, and the necessity of shelter. I am finding many connections also to my dissertation chapter on Lewis Carroll's Alice books and their Wittgensteinian riddles. More analysis to come...

jam to-morrow and jam yesterday, but never jam to-day

"Jam to-morrow and jam yesterday, but never jam to-day..."
Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
~The White Queen~ (Lewis Carroll)

When J takes the kids to the library, they always come home with a few cookbooks for me to try. This Outlander Kitchen has been the best so far. I've never read Outlander and I've never watched the series, but this cookbook is *amazing*. I've already made about ten different recipes---so easy, so tasty, and all so interesting in their rustic presentations. I made the jam tarts for a kid-friendly picnic at the park (which got rained out so we ate the tarts in our basement instead).

The tarts reminded me of Alice which then reminded me of Carol Channing's scary/creepy/brilliant song from the 80s television version of Alice in Wonderland. That scene is one of the weirdest, scariest things in all of my childhood memories, and despite its scare-factor, it made me love Carol Channing forever for all of her oddball Broadway theatrics.

On a more intellectual note, one of my favorite literary theory essays is Hélène Cixous' introduction to the French translation of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. The White Queen, always losing her cape, is also always in danger of de-capitation (see the deconstruction: de-cape)---the opposite of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland who threatens to decapitate (de-cape) her impotent subjects. Cixous' text is a smart, creative, imaginative, deconstructionist read. It forever changed the way I approach the Alice tales, and really, it adds a playful working dimension to my reading habits in general:

"Concerning a reading which plays at working."

John Tenniel, Knave of Hearts

Kusama's Alice (Tenniel's redux)

The second chapter of my dissertation is devoted entirely to Alice in Wonderland. Kusama's illustrated Penguin edition makes the writing/reading process even more imaginative and fun. The colorful pictorial version also makes it easier to share the story with my toddleroos. Tenniel would be so perplexed by his modern-day replacement.