Menu
A few years ago an otherwise forgettable newspaper sports columnist wrote that baseball was going the way of boxing and horse racing in our culture. Both were once major attractions but faded from popular interest. The same seemed to be happening with baseball. To paraphrase a remark often used in…
Read More »Simon Warner, our occasional contributor from England, wrote this review of the book, False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground by Steven Taylor (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003) when the book was first published. The review first appeared in the journal Ethnomusicology Forum, Vol. 13, No. 2, November…
Read More »Boarding School Blues: Ch. 55 By Louise Peloquin Ch. 55: Here Lies . . . It was already the end of January 1966 and SFA was well into its daily work routine spiced, sometimes, with a little bit of play. The boarders enjoyed their morning maple butter and the chores…
Read More »Who dropped a whole truckload of fizzies into the varsity swim meet? Who delivered the medical school cadavers to the alumni dinner? Every Halloween, the trees are filled with underwear. Every spring, the toilets explode. Dean Wormer Animal House Back in 1978 when I first saw the movie Animal House,…
Read More »In 1969, Tim Trask returned from the Vietnam War and took a job as a guard at Massachusetts Correctional Institute (MCI) Concord. The following is taken from his memoir about that experience. Other parts of that work, West of Walden, appeared on this site as Odysseus Wandering (on Oct. 4,…
Read More »Readers of this site are familiar with Louise Peloquin as the author of the Boarding School Blues story that’s published in serialized installments every two weeks, but Louise is also our correspondent on all things French. So a few weeks ago when I started reading stories about turmoil on the…
Read More »Mahoney Family Fund presents: Reducing Child Abuse by Rethinking Discipline Breakfast & Program Friday, March 31, 2023 Complimentary Breakfast Buffet 8:00am, Program 8:30am-10:00am Long Meadow Golf Club,165 Havilah Street, Lowell, MA 01852 RSVP Being a parent is a job that doesn’t come with a handbook. As wonderful as it can…
Read More »In her newly released second novel, The River is Everywhere, Lowell writer-editor-author Emilie-Noelle Provost takes readers on a roller-coaster coming of age ride that is immersed in the Franco-American culture of the northeast. Ernest Benoit, the 16-year old protagonist, is shattered by the accidental drowning death of his best friend…
Read More »Living Madly: Mud Season By Emilie-Noelle Provost Although I’m one of the few people I know who looks forward to winter, I’ve been feeling depressed since last fall. I’m pretty sure it happened gradually, the way that bad weather rolls in and blocks out the sun one cloud at a time.…
Read More »