Thanks to Louise Peloquin for sharing the schedule for this year’s Franco-American Week Lowell’s 2022 Franco-American Festival Week begins Sunday, June 19. Here is the schedule of events. Sunday, June 19: 12:00 pm Mass in French honoring St. Jean Baptiste and dedicated to recently deceased Biloxi Bishop Roger Morin of…
Two days before the 100th birthday of Jack Kerouac on March 12th, I was asked by poet and musician Roger West in France if I could connect people in Lowell with his tribute to Kerouac planned for the hour of the author’s birth 100 years ago, 5 p.m. at home…
Valley Girl By David Daniel Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou. Knopf, 325 pp, $27.95. The Dropout Hulu television miniseries (episodes 1-5). Reviewed by David Daniel. ******** In a 2018 60 Minutes segment on health technology company Theranos, its young CEO and founder…
At Land’s End with Jack Kerouac By Jim Provencher After all that road-going, coasting into Frisco was always an arrival of respite and relief for Jack Kerouac, shaking off desert dust, bathing in thick ocean fogs, luxuriating in the warm, boisterous scenes of Chinatown, North Beach, Berkeley and Russian Hill. …
“Little child won’t you dance with me” Lennon-McCartney, 1963 By Louise Peloquin The Ed Sullivan Show was a family entertainment staple. Across the narrow hall from the kitchen, my parents would settle into their armchairs and my brother and I would sit crossed-legged on the floor while our two younger…
If Lennon Were Here By David Daniel He’d be a different guy. Older, face bonier, nose sharp as a box-cutter, hair like thin grass. He’d be wiry and spry, from yoga and walking everywhere (like Hemingway and Kerouac, he was never one to drive). And he would still need glasses.…
Patrick Kavanagh: a Reader’s Experience For generations of Irish readers—for this one certainly—the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh is inextricably associated with Soundings, the anthology of prescribed poetry for the Leaving Certificate English curriculum that was a staple of Irish secondary education from the end of the 1960s until the mid-1990s.…
‘Love Me Do’ by John Wooding Web photo courtesy of Northantslive.news I had just made my first decade on the planet. A ten-year-old kid in a sad Midlands town. Northampton, like much of England in those days, was all monochrome, fading pubs, and forlorn shoe factories. Pretty soon…
Little John and the Sherwoods Rocked the House By Paul Marion “. . . the most exciting and memorable days of my teenage years . . . .”—David Arsenault When “Light My Fire” was number one nationwide in August 1967, the Summer of Love, the Doors played the Commodore Ballroom,…
A Catholic Schoolboy Discovers The Beatles (Haverhill, Mass., 1964) By Mike McCormick THE AIR CRACKLED as my fifth-grade classmates hung up their coats on the metal racks in the back of the room at St. James School. “Did you see Ringo’s rings?” “I love ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand!’” “Who’s…