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Lowell Folk Festival “Here we are dealing with living traditions. We know that the urge to preserve is based on the fact that we know the things that we are passing on have value, and we want to hold on to them. So we try to build continuity and to…
Read More »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 »Is Lowell a Happy City? We’ll find out this fall thanks to the Pollard Memorial Library. This year’s Lowell Reads book is Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery. Lowell Reads is an annual effort by the library to create community through literature and reading. The…
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 »This past Saturday, Sean Thibodeau, the Coordinator of Community Planning at the Pollard Memorial Library, led a Lowell Walk on Literary Lowell. Sean told some great stories about writers who were from Lowell, visited Lowell, or wrote about Lowell. Throughout the tour, participants asked for a list of the works…
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 »An overflow crowd packed Hypertext Bookstore Café this evening for the Loom Press Writers Reading event. Paul Marion, the proprietor of Loom Press which specializes in publishing poetry and prose from Lowell and the Merrimack Valley, recruited a great collection of writers to read from their work. The lineup included…
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…
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