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At the New Bedford Whaling Museum yesterday, Rosemary and I found in the gift shop a collectible mug whose design features about 20 memorable first lines of books, including Melville’s “Call me Ishmael.” from MOBY DICK, which is why they had it on sale, but the mug also had “I…
Read More »Here we go again. Labor Day is near, and the four-year presidential election cycle will shift into high gear. For months, we had media reports of candidates tromping through the hills and valleys of our neighbor state New Hampshire. I’ve written about this before, but I have to repeat that…
Read More »For anyone who needs a reminder about the distinctive region around us, just check the new issue of the New Yorker magazine with two major articles about historical happenings and people from our general area. Our local history keeps making news. Pulitzer Prize-winner Stacy Shiff writes about “The Witches of Salem:…
Read More »Here’s a throwback thing to the pioneer days of festival-making in Renaissance Lowell. This was “Expo ’79, Art/Music” at Lowell Memorial Auditorium. Lowell CityFair was part of the federal jobs program (imagine that) called C.E.T.A. (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) wherein a dozen or so Lowell artists were hired to…
Read More »Web photo courtesy of Wikipedia The new issue of the New Yorker magazine has a short article about James Whistler’s durable portrait of his mother, speculating on why the painting is on the short list of iconic images in art history. The reporter, unfortunately, skips a mention of where the…
Read More »Sorting old files in the attic yesterday, I found a New Yorker article I had torn out of the magazine and stapled: “A Reporter at Large: Memories of a Day’s Walk from Massachusetts to Maine” by Anthony Bailey, a Londoner who was raised in “old Hampshire.” The story is from…
Read More »Web photo courtesy of commons.wikimedia.org With purple loosestrife spread across the region, I thought I’d re-post this prose poem from years ago.–PM . Long Purples People write letters to writers, and sometimes the mail is a gift. Not long ago, Bill Martin wrote to tell me that he’d read a…
Read More »My best time for reading books is during vacation, when I can live with a book for hours at a time, maybe come back to it two or three times during the day. I can read news articles and magazine pieces on the fly, but I’ve never been someone who…
Read More »We’re well into the contest for a new president, who will be selected in about 15 months. With a two-term president wrapping up his term and his vice-president apparently not going to run, the scene is pretty much a free-for-all, which we don’t often see. There’s no presumptive nominee among…
Read More »Responding to my colleague Dick’s post on George Charrette, here’s an excerpt from my work-in-progress called “The War Place,” which is an extended meditation and commentary on the war experience in America seen through the personal lens of someone trying to make sense of this piece of the national experience.—PM…
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