by Bob Newell | Sep 30, 2013 | Opinion
Recently, I learned that due to the religious politics of the day, early in the 14th century the Italian poet, Durante degli Alighieri, better known as Dante, was banished from Florence, Italy – the city of his birth. Dante and his “side” wanted Florence...
by Bob Newell | Jul 25, 2013 | Opinion
I am told that when Walt Whitman read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” he was highly influenced. When the young Whitman heard Emerson say that the United States needed a poet to capture, in a proper fashion, its national spirit and character,...
by Bob Newell | Jul 10, 2013 | Opinion
It’s not at all uncommon to see death notices posted on the side of buildings on the streets in Athens, Greece. This is the remarkably economical and semi-efficient means by which a local neighborhood is notified of a death and the plan for memorial services at...
by Bob Newell | Jun 4, 2013 | Opinion
She said that she was a friend of a U.S. school in another city in Greece and wanted to sell me tickets to a country-western barbecue fundraiser for scholarships. In a traffic jam of instant mental images, synaptic connections collided in my brain: I told her that I...
by Bob Newell | May 23, 2013 | Opinion
Before and during the Great Depression, my grandfather, William Emmitt Newell, was a small truck farmer, living and growing his crops in the red dirt near Marion, Miss., just outside of the “Queen City” of Meridian. Granddaddy raised turnips, tomatoes,...
