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Russell Banks (web photo courtesy of cmu.edu) After 22 years of the annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! festival on the first weekend of October, the long-time organizers and new allies and partners came together to boost the festival to a higher orbit. The re-named Jack Kerouac Literary Festival will open on…
Read More »The NYT today has an article about the current exhibition of photographs by poet Allen Ginsberg at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The article in the paper includes a photograph of Kerouac making a goofy face on the street in NY in 1953. Read the article by…
Read More »Voices are getting louder and more anxious as the country openly re-examines its value system. I have a sense that some key brick in the wall of national identity has come loose, leaving us with a very shaky structure that is causing widespread instability. I had an encounter today with an…
Read More »I know our readers can get national opinion columns elsewhere on the web, from the sources and other aggregators, but I feel compelled to bring some of the ones that make a lot of sense to me to our site for easy access. Also, any day now this growing controversy…
Read More »Lowell is a generous community. You can say the same for the region: Greater Lowell and the Greater Merrimack Valley. The people, businesses, organizations, foundations, and institutions give and give to those in need and to important causes that benefit many of us. Here are a few upcoming fund-raising events from my…
Read More »Common . Nineteenth-century designers saw parks as breathing spaces whose trees would pump oxygen through tenement and mansion alike. Even the vocabulary of green spaces freshens speech—grove and bee, clover and pebble, pine cone and jay. Seagulls on the common across the street from my family’s house stand as stout…
Read More »He’s back with another brain-stretcher of a mega-concept. David Brooks is writing about a national “gentility shift,” a long-term trend in how Americans are organizing their society, that he suggests may be a root cause of today’s new kind of economic pain. This has to do with younger people mostly—what those with more…
Read More »In today’s NYTimes, columnist Nicholas D. Kristof writes about Susan Retik and Patricia (Fleming) Quigley, who co-founded Beyond the 11th after their husbands were killed in the 9/11 attacks as a way to reach out to women in Afghanistan who, like them, lost their husbands in violent incidents. Patti (Fleming)…
Read More »Read E. J. Dionne’s latest take on the recalibrated mid-term election battle in this pick-up of his regular column from truth-out.org. E. J. says President Obama has moved to reshape the narrative just about nine weeks from voting day. What’s great about this link is that it includes the full…
Read More »We don’t like it, but we write about guns and shootings on this blog because that’s part of what happens in our lives. Fortunately, we live in a place that offers many ways to uplift and enrich us day to day. Dick wrote about the Bread and Roses Festival in Lawrence on Labor…
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