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There’s a major museum exhibition in Paris about the Beat Generation writers this summer. Geoff Dyer, one of the best writers working today, has a piece about the show in The Spectator in England. He gives Jack Kerouac high marks for literary achievement but minces no words about the author…
Read More »My father collected stamps most of his life. Below is an item called a First Day Cover, which can be a card or an envelope with a postal cancellation mark on the day the stamp was released to the public. This one is from 1962, the stamp issued in connection…
Read More »Heirloom lily from the zealous gardener Elizabeth Nesmith in the backyard garden contributed by Richard Marion, who rescued the plant from a greenhouse site that closed down a few years ago. We have another one from the 1940s that has three buds and should bloom later this week.—PM
Read More »I don’t know why I thought of this today, this morning while sitting on the back steps as the straight rain began to douse the trees, grass, cars. Excited small brown birds darted from the lilac bush to the low branches of maple trees bordering the driveway. What came into…
Read More »The flamingoes landed.
Read More »Following is a list of books I have in play this summer. Some I’ve read through; many others are either partly read or waiting for their time to be picked up. When I wrapped up my management job at UMass Lowell, one of my goals was to re-engage as a…
Read More »For the Fourth of July, Independence Day, here’s a poem from the nation’s capital. I wrote this prose poem after a family trip to Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2004. There were John Kerry-for-President signs in the windows. GOP posters for “W,” too. Barack Obama was a figure on…
Read More »Web photo courtesy of Yelp.com Thursday, July 7, 6.00 to 8.00 p.m., at HyperText Bookstore Cafe, 107 Merrimack St. Free and open to all. This program is part of the Downtown First Thursdays arts and business series. Short fiction, long fiction, nonfiction, poetry, the whole literary bag. Writers reading: Walter…
Read More »From “History of Chelmsford” by Wilson Waters and Henry Spaulding Perham (Courier Citizen, 1917): “… Down as late as 1820, there were caught, mostly at this spot [site of the large mill of the Middlesex Company], and at the foot of Pawtucket falls, twenty-five hundred barrels of salmon, shad, and…
Read More »Just a quick update. I finally got around to Googling to identify the prolific yellow flower that’s been a star in my main garden for the past few years. See the image below for the Coreopsis Moonbeam or maybe Zagreb. With a big patch of them, as in my case,…
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