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Former student recounts alleged abuse by Holyoke Catholic High School teacher Holyoke’s Fran O’Connell, seen here in a Holyoke Catholic High School basketball photo from the 1975-76 school year. SUBMITTED PHOTO A 1976 clipping from the Holyoke Transcript-Telegram shows high school sports star Fran O’Connell. CONTRIBUTED Published: 6/9/2021 7:33:06 AM HOLYOKE As a freshman at Holyoke Catholic High School in 1974, three-sport athlete Fran O’Connell was already a big name on campus. In a city zealous about its sports, O’Connell had already been promoted to the varsity football and basketball teams. Holyokers recognized him wherever he went. But O’Connell, now 62, said that it was his new theology teacher, Robert Ellis Hosmer Jr., who showered him with the most attention: buying him gifts, tutoring him, taking him to fancy dinners and teaching him how to be sophisticated. That attention, however, came with a price as Hosmer grew more physical and bega ....
Smith College: Faculty member accused of sexual abuse should have been investigated The Grecourt Gates of Smith College on Elm Street in Northampton. GAZETTE FILE PHOTO/KEVIN GUTTING Published: 6/3/2021 9:45:31 AM NORTHAMPTON Smith College knew for two decades that a faculty member had been accused of sexually abusing a minor, but chose not to act on those allegations, allowing him to teach at the college until recently. On Wednesday morning, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield released an expanded list of former employees who had been “credibly accused” of sexually abusing minors. The list included the name of Robert Ellis Hosmer Jr., a Smith lecturer from 1989 until 2016 who previously worked at Holyoke Catholic High School from 1968 to 1979. ....
“So much for Christmas” Vita brevis, ars longa. The week before Christmas finds MacNeice in London’s National Gallery. Outside, movement continues and suggests ephemerality. Inside, “Other worlds persist,” caught and elevated to significance by the artists’ attention, by the achievements of form. Last March, sensing how things were going and that museum doors would soon be shut, I stole an hour between meetings to duck into the Smith College Museum of Art. The visit felt like a last leave-taking from old friends (I took quick photographs of some favorite works) and like a farewell to the very act of standing in front of paintings (as opposed to staring at reproductions). During the intervening months, that experience of seeing art, of finding some consolatory order and endurance in the frame, was one I keenly missed. I’ve been able to get back into galleries lately, and I have found the frantic rhythms of my mind soothed by those long moments before the canva ....
“Now I must make amends.” It is often said (when people are talking of the “Auden group,” those poets who came to prominence with Auden in the Thirties) that MacNeice was the collective’s resident skeptic. Others, you will hear from Samuel Hynes in his book, The Auden Generation, from Edna Longley in her study of MacNeice, from Robyn Marsack and Beret Strong and Peter MacDonald in chapters on MacNeice, even from Seamus Perry and Mark Ford in their recent London Review of Books podcast episode on MacNeice flirted with political commitment (Stephen Spender is usually singled out as the most gung-ho enthusiast for movements, but Auden and C. Day Lewis also get credit, or blame, for at least provisionally throwing their weight behind some cause), but MacNeice stayed scrupulously on the sidelines. One way to read the whole of ....
A clear, cold winter morning dawns and London’s pigeons, night-shift workers, breakfast cookers, and babies are all up and moving. “O what a busy morning,” abuzz with engines, wires, machines, and butchery: “The housewife . . . Watches the cleaver catch the naked / New Zealand sheep between the legs.” Amid the commerce and commotion, MacNeice finds his mind turning back to his breakup, to lost love no longer recognizable as the love into which he had fallen. Time and busyness and the slow erosion of routine have moved him from the excitement of September and the fresh heartbreak of October to a complacent December chill: “The hypnosis is over and no one / Calls encore to the song. / When we are out of love, how were we ever in it?” ....