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Good books retain their newsworthiness, so I’m recycling this review-essay about Patti Smith’s most recent book, Year of the Monkey, which I posted on my website, paulmarion.com, late last year. This piece was written before the coronavirus spread among us, a time that seems six years and not six months…
Read More »John Wooding, professor emeritus of political science at UMass Lowell, is the author of the forthcoming biography Gandhi’s American Friend: Richard Bartlett Gregg (Loom Press, October 2020). He is a past contributor to this blog and president of the board at Mill City Grows in Lowell. ‘Cause I’m on the…
Read More »Today we’re introducing a new feature: Lowell Lists. Besides our ongoing presentation of new literary content by writers and poets from Lowell and beyond, we also hope to make this site the go-to place for information about Lowell. Since lists are a useful vehicle for presenting a large volume of…
Read More »Some Saturday morning cartoons from the past few weeks from our UK-based cartoonist, Nicholas Whitmore:
Read More »For the month of July here on Trasna, we have been highlighting some of the literary and artistic events cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The other significant arena of cancellations due to COVID-19 is, of course, sport. Today we present an article by Irish sports historian, Dr. Tom Hunt,…
Read More »One of the things that has distinguished Lowell from other similar sized cities in post Industrial America is its willingness to keep moving forward. Some efforts work well, others don’t. But the critical thing is to keep trying. Today, we dipped back in the archives and found four such stories,…
Read More »CROSS OF SNOW By Nicholas Basbanes 461 pp. Knopf. For many years my relationship with poetry might best be described as admiration from a distance so I would not normally pick up the biography of a poet. But the city of Lowell is a constant tug on my attention which…
Read More »While we were busy with Baseball Week (or maybe “Fortnight” since it lasted for two weeks), Linda Hoffman has added a couple of new posts to her Apples, Art, and Spirit blog. Pedaling for Peace In this June 28, 2020, post, Linda writes about Sam Gloyd who is making a…
Read More »Paul Hudon: Diary in the Time of Coronavirus (10) Another set of pandemic observations from our riverside correspondent Paul Hudon. We held this post during Baseball Week but the content remains timely. June 21 Something of what we’ll call gallows humor from Mike Nichols and Elaine May, one of the…
Read More »Jay Pendergast: A Singular Man By Steve O’Connor My best guess is 1978. Summer workers for the Neighborhood Youth Corps had painted an Irish-themed mural on the back of a building facing Worthen Street. Naturally, after the dedication, the crowd meandered over to the Old Worthen. It was a beautiful…
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