RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

On the Divide

On the Divide

By Jim Provencher

Wandering the Empty Quarter,
crossing the Divide, dropping
down into El Paso:  que pasa?

Further along the Carlsbad Road
where the U-Pull yards
and rusty car tips peter out,
Texas rain ticks off the dune tops
if the wind is right on East Montana.

Where the deposited local missing
usually surface, a fitting spot to locate
new holding pens for the maverick herd.

A furtive quiet—
Mexican desert dove
dart back and forth
across the wire.

From his Mount Cristo del Rey perch,
a monumentally stylized Christ hangs,
impassively surveying the played-out scene.

New Poem in ‘The Café Review,’ Maine

New poem with Lowell setting in the latest issue of The Café Review in Portland, Maine, which has been around for a long time. I have three poems in this issue, and have been in the magazine previously. Kudos to them for keeping the magazine alive. The CR has interviews, book reviews, poetry, and artwork in each issue. Order the new issue at Yes Books, 589 Congress St, Portland ME 04101 for $15 ($60 for 4 issues a year). — PM

Pork Pie Hat

On a plain Wednesday,

Late in a winter that wasn’t rough,

In the city just waking up,

Slouched in a black raincoat

And tilted gray pork pie hat,

The hospital chief lifts a coffee mug

To his lips and George Washington teeth.

The diner is full of men who could be

Doctors, candlemakers, teachers, mechanics.

They burp and spread sports pages

Over toast crusts on yolk-smeared plates.

High school Girl Officers will show up later,

Four in a booth or a pair at the counter.

Always open, the caboose car pulls eaters

Via the red rooftop neon sign glowing

Like an electric stove ring set to medium.

–

–Paul Marion (c) 2026

Living Madly: As Good as a Feast

Photo courtesy of Conger Design

Living Madly: As Good as a Feast

By Emilie-Noelle Provost

There’s a feeling I sometimes get when the refrigerator is full, dinner is in the oven, the house is clean, and I have nothing immediate left to do or responsibilities to worry about. It’s almost like contentment, but that word doesn’t quite define it. This feeling also incorporates a sense of wealth: At that moment, I have everything I need close at hand and the freedom to do whatever I want.

I discovered recently that there’s a word for this feeling in Swedish: lagom. Translated into English, lagom means “just enough” or “just right,” but for the Swedes it goes a bit further.

According to the website Swedishness.ch, lagom is rooted in the Swedish culture of minimalism and finding joy in the things you already possess. It’s almost the complete opposite of our culture in the United States, the underlying concept of which emphasizes that happiness can only be found in coveting and obtaining more stuff, more money, more prestige.

The problem with the American outlook is that happiness can never quite be realized. In continually coveting more, we often fail to appreciate what we already have. We find ourselves caught in a never-ending cycle of consumerism that by default leads to disappointment. This isn’t just because we’re always looking to obtain the next best thing. It’s because, in doing so, we often don’t recognize opportunities or engage in activities that can bring us real satisfaction.

By contrast, the Swedes have a saying: Just enough is as good as a feast.

In Sweden, the word lagom is also applied to the concept of moderation: One cookie will bring you joy but ten will give you a stomach ache. Lagom is knowing the difference and using judgement and restraint to achieve the best outcome.

Lagom is also used to describe balance in Sweden, particularly a healthy work/life balance. Sweden is one of the world’s wealthiest countries, but the Swedes don’t live for their jobs. Unlike in the United States, in Sweden there is no glory in working nights and weekends. Overwork is looked down upon. Having enough time to spend with family and friends, working on hobbies, or enjoying the outdoors is as valuable to the Swedes as having a fat bank account. The way they see it, without the former, there’s little point in having the latter.

Sweden is also one of the world’s happiest countries. The World Happiness Report, an annual publication that rates the happiness of people in 140 countries based on Gallup polls, has consistently ranked Sweden among its top ten happiest countries since its inception in 2012. (In 2025, Sweden was number four, while the U.S. came in at twenty-four). This isn’t the result of happenstance.

When was the last time you looked around your house and really noticed and appreciated the things in it? The books on your shelves, the clothes in your closet, paintings, knick-knacks, souvenirs, all of these things at one point or another held meaning and significance. What if that meaning wasn’t so fleeting? What if buying a new car made us less happy than the places that car could take us?

You don’t have to be Swedish to practice lagom. You just have to be mindful, stop what you’re doing once in a while and appreciate the people, experiences, and things that make life worthwhile.

###

Emilie-Noelle Provost (she/her) – Author of The River Is Everywhere, a National Indie Excellence Award, American Fiction Award, and American Legacy Award finalist, and The Blue Bottle, a middle-grade adventure with sea monsters. Visit her at emilienoelleprovost.com.

Seen & Heard: Vol. 7 

Welcome to this week’s edition of Seen and Heard, in which I catalog the most interesting things I’ve seen, heard and read over the previous seven days. 

Winter Olympics week 2 – Last week I wrote that my affection for the Winter Olympics was grounded in the opening narration of ABC’s Wide World of Sports (“the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat”). For US Olympians this week seemed more about the agony of defeat, especially when it came to figure skating. The media had devoted much attention to 21-year-old Ilia Malinin, who had won 14 consecutive figure skating events over the past three years and is globally known as the “Quad God” for his ability to routinely execute a quadruple jump that no one else does competitively. In the team competition last week, his skating seemed uninspired but sufficient to help the US team to a gold medal. Then his first skate in the individual program was superb which put him far in the lead. All he had to do in his second skate was get through it intact. On Friday at 4:30 EST, all eyes were on screens to see him achieve greatness. Instead, disaster struck, he fell twice and finished far out of the medal competition. A John Powers story in the Boston Globe was titled “Fall from grace: With one unimaginable performance, Malinin tumbles off skating podium.” A New York Times article was headlined, “Quad God Falls: Ilia Malinin, Whose Acrobatics Wowed the World, Fails to Medal in Milan.” On top of that, the US ice dancing duo of Madison Chock and Evan Bates won a silver medal which in historic context is huge, but they were widely expected to win gold. Their performance was stellar but not stellar enough because the French pair who skated next surpassed them and won the gold. 

Podcast: Uncanny Valley from WIRED magazine – Early last year when many national news outlets were appeasing President Trump by settling outlandish lawsuits or platforming right wing commentators, WIRED magazine made national news with a series of stories critical of Trump. I had subscribed to the print edition of WIRED two decades ago but it had long since disappeared from my media consumption menu. That changed last year when I signed up for a digital subscription. But you don’t need a subscription to listen to this weekly podcast. Most Hollywood people are adamantly opposed to AI, but in this podcast, Jonathan Nolan, who I knew nothing about previously, had a more nuanced view. He explained that he’s long been fascinated by science fiction which caused him to begin studying AI more than 20 years ago. During the interview, Jonathan kept referencing “my brother” until I finally realized that would be Christopher Nolan, the director of Oppenheimer, Dunkirk, Interstellar, and the Dark Knight trilogy. Jonathan explained that AI had the potential to allow less established filmmakers to create amazing special effects at minimal cost, although he said AI could never replace storytelling done by human beings. As for the potential cost savings of AI, he said that people always predict that new technologies will save lots of money, but technology has never cut costs. At the end of each episode, there’s a short segment called “Control – Alt – Delete” in which the host asks the guest, “What’s a technology you would like to control; what is one you would like to alter; and what is one you’d like to delete?” Nolan said he would like to control AI video. He said it is very good at creating amazing special effects but he also warned that it is so good that it risks upending our politics (even more so than they have already been upended) when videos of leaders saying outrageous things appear and are believed even though they were artificially generated. He would like to alter the CRISPR gene-editing technology. He explained that he knows many people burdened by diseases that could be minimized or cured through gene editing. The technology is excellent but there is insufficient funding to develop it at the scale needed to benefit people today. The thing he would like to delete is the algorithmic nature of social media. He’s not a fan of social media in general but understands it has its uses, but the way the social media companies use algorithms to maximize “engagement” has severely damaged society so he’d like to do away with that. 

Newspaper: “An Elegy for My Washington Post” New York Times op-ed by Carlos Lozada – Back in 2017, the Washington Post had some excellent stories and op-eds on the first Trump Administration (and with me calling them “excellent” you can assume they were mostly critical). That prompted me to purchase a subscription to the digital edition of the newspaper. Exposed to the paper on a daily basis, I came to enjoy its coverage beyond national politics, especially its book reviews which were written by Carlos Lozada. However, Lozada left the Post for the Times in 2022 and then, in 2025 when Post owner Jeff Bezos embraced the second coming of Trump and emasculated the paper’s coverage of the new regime, I canceled my subscription. I wasn’t the only one to do that. Although I frame my cancellation as a protest, a succession of budget cuts had diminished the quality of the paper and I found fewer things worth reading in it. Those cuts accelerated last week when Bezos laid off one-third of the paper’s employees and eliminated sports, book review, and other sections typically seen as central to a major newspaper. Those most recent cuts prompted Lozada to write this op-ed. In it, he recalled that when Bezos bought the paper in 2013 he vowed to retain the culture of the paper while investing heavily in modernization. That has all changed for some reason. Here is what Lozado wrote:

“I will not pretend to have a simple solution – or any solution – to the business challenges afflicting America’s news media, nor do I believe that just because Bezos is rich, he is obliged to subsidize The Post in perpetuity. Yet, despite management’s preoccupation with The Post’s mounting losses, it is hard for me to imagine that economic concerns are the sole reason to eliminate more than a third of the Post newsroom, on top of the previous cuts in recent years. I went to see the “Melania” documentary last weekend, for which Amazon reportedly spent $75 million overall, which includes a hefty promotional budget. Based on that viewing, I can only conclude that turning a profit on a quality product is not always Bezos’ primary motivation”

Book Review” King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation” by Scott Anderson (2025) – I’ve long thought that 1968 was the pivotal year for US history in the second half of the 20th century, but after reading Scott Anderson’s “King of Kings,” I’m reconsidering that opinion and now believe the late 1970s are almost as important. When most Americans think about the Iranian Revolution, the story is about the 52 Americans from the US embassy who were held hostage for 444 days in Iran by a radical Muslim student group. This book does a masterful job of expanding the canvas to show it was about much more than that. The Iranian Revolution transformed Islamic fundamentalism from a fringe theological movement into a potent, state-sponsored geopolitical force. Previously, anti-colonial movements leaned leftwards with the coffeehouse as incubator. What happened in Iran in 1979 proved that a popular uprising rooted in Islamic identity could topple a strong, Western-backed ruler. The mosque replaced the coffeehouse. Activists in Egypt, Algeria, Afghanistan and other places took note. King of Kings ends with the hostage taking so the book is almost entirely about the decade that preceded it. Despite having one of the world’s biggest and most technologically advanced militaries, the Shah of Iran was a ditherer who avoided tough decisions, leaving it to others to make them and if they did not, letting problems fester unaddressed. More than anything, that behavior allowed the revolution to succeed. Not far behind in the culpability index was the United States. The Nixon Administration removed all restrictions on the purchase of weapons by Iran. To Nixon and Kissinger, this was a win/win. US arms manufacturers profited and a friendly country that bordered the Soviet Union strengthened its armed forces, or did so on paper since Iran was incapable of maintaining and operating many of the systems it purchased. Another problem for the US was an inability to see anything in other than a US/Soviet Cold War context. Even near the end, the US convinced itself that Ayatollah Khomeni might not be so bad since he was anti-Soviet. Finally, hardly any of the Americans assigned to Iran spoke Farsi which prevented them from discerning what was going on in the country. They relied on their inside contacts who were fully subservient to the Shah and fed the Americans an overly optimistic view of events which the Americans were quite happy to believe uncritically.