an Indian in Iowa City

What a pleasure to read this positive post by Indian novelist Chandrahas Choudhury about GETTING SETTLED IN IOWA CITY, my hometown. (Actually, I was born there but grew up 20 miles to the north.)

It’s not that rare for writers to pass through Iowa City in large numbers, since the University of Iowa hosts a famed Writer’s Workshop. During the early 1970’s my parents owned a hippieish restaurant there, and Kurt Vonnegut was just one of many who passed through for a sandwich. Orhan Pamuk has lived there even more recently, and the list goes on. As a result, I believe there have been two dozen or so novels set in Iowa City. (As for philosophers, both Gustav Bergmann and Wilfrid Sellars taught there, the former for quite a long period of time.)

And Iowa City is also the home of the nearly Lovecraftian BLACK ANGEL in Oakland Cemetery, where eerie black squirrels also frolic, often penetrating into even remoter neighborhoods of the city.

Not too far from Iowa City is a small town called Riverside, which became famous by declaring itself THE FUTURE BIRTHPLACE OF STAR TREK’S CAPTAIN JAMES T. KIRK, something that no other town had thought of doing, and William Shatner himself has apparently acknolwedged the truth of this prediction.