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...

Prairie Lights

The best study place I've yet to find is Prairie Lights in Iowa City. If I could write my dissertation here I would, but distances, circumstances, and three kids being what and who they are, I now write from home surrounded by my kids' puzzles, board games, and wheelie toys and a stack of library books, style manuals, and outdated NYT newspapers that I vow to read once this dissertation thing is over. (Please let it be over!)

Because I'm a nerd like that, I remember some of my more favorite study moments at Prairie Lights, such as: Studying for my Buddhist literature final while Aimee Mann's Magnolia CD played on repeat for hours and hours. One is the loneliest number, Aimee. And everything is suffering, Gautama. Eavesdropping on Paul Ingram, the iconic book buyer for Prairie Lights, as he met with book vendors at various tables near mine. Spotting Jorie Graham, my undergraduate intellectual idol, reading the shelves of the poetry aisle (how meta is that?!). And the day that I headed into Prairie Lights keenly aware that it was the last time in a long time that I would frequent Prairie Lights' book-adorned halls and tables and stairways and nooks and crannies. I had no idea then what I would be missing forever in Iowa City... Prairie Lights me manque!!!