Gary Kuhlmann

In August Iowa City was the place that had almost no students left in town. The weather was not wonderful. An overworked magazine editor could wander like a hungry young Ernest Hemingway, the one from A Moveable Feast (I hope everyone has or will read this book) among the moguls of the university. This was helpful for the creative impulse if bad for a lot of else. Not many lawns looked lush, almost none had art students. One went to the public libraray and looked through endless shelves of videos and lo! DVDs! one had heard about from film buffs and things like the Independent Film Channel. One also spent time inside the university library checking out books by John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. I sat around a lot in downtown coffee shops--you may or may not know them. The Java House, and the place on the second floor of the Prairie Lights Bookstore, mostly. The espresso machines were steaming. They gave off awful and awfully exciting smells, and I filled up several of those cards that offer you your 12th coffee free. The painters were peeling, like the paint of their canvases, ne c'est pas? One of my favorite artists, an art graduate student, obtained her MFA and then promptly peeled out of here for San Francisco. She has become interstate and far off. The fire escapes are downtown Iowa City with all the writers. Important here is to get myself more on the streets of the Pedestrian Mall or over to The Haunted Bookshop, a used bookshop where books are cheap. I am becoming well-read in the New York School poets and a few postmodern new ones and little else. The kind man who used to own The Haunted Bookshop died a couple of years ago of cancer. A big picture book about dogs, that was his favorite. A friend wrote to tell me she imagined me chained to my desk and sweating in my summer office with my contraband fan offering too little relief from the Iowa heat under the thumb of my superstitious editor who trembles at the sight of a split infinitive, sprinkling syllables over her left shoulder, rapping on wooden adjectives whenever confronted with a one-sentence paragraph or one ended with a preposition or begun with because. I always seemed to have enough money for coffee.