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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…
Read More »Our far-flung contributor Tom Sexton has air-mailed a new poem from the Northwest. For those not familiar, Tom is among the Lowell High School Distinguished Alumni, a retired professor at University of Alaska and former Poet Laureate of Alaska, and an all around fine man who has written about 15…
Read More »For about three hours last night, from the anticipation to the grateful applause, there was a thick layer of happiness spread on the front yard of the Boott Cotton Mills in the form of a return engagement by Lyle Lovett and His Large Band. Again, as in past appearances, they…
Read More »Here’s one more outside reading option, the recent “Letter from Iran” by Robin Wright in The New Yorker magazine. I found this helpful in trying to understand what it is like day to day undernearth the bombastic headlines and political artillery shelling here in the U.S. I know very little…
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