GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Sun's back! Well, eventually, anyway. We get a break from this week's unsettled weather, with clouds diminishing over the course of the day and highs reaching the mid or upper 70s. There's a slight chance of showers later this afternoon and things could get kinda gusty as a cold front passes overhead, though the main action will be off to the west. Mostly clear tonight, mid 50s.Nature finds a way. In front of Hanover High, from Annemieke McLane.In Bookstock's rise and fall, a cautionary tale about success. In the Valley News over the weekend, Alex Hanson detailed his conversations with Woodstock's Jen Belton and Julie Moncton, who were asked by Bookstock organizers last year to check in with the groups in town that had helped the literary festival. The upshot: It had gotten too big for them to manage. “If we’d put on the festival that was designed and planned for this year, we’d have lost more people in the community,” Moncton says. Hanson outlines what led to this year's decision to cancel and what kind of future it might have.Hartford police arrest WRJ man day after standoff. It began Friday, the HPD says in a press release, after they encountered two women, aged 91 and 72, who'd been injured in a domestic assault. Police went to the Stony Creek condos in Wilder, where John Beane, from a second-story window, told them he had a gun and threatened them. With residents sheltering in place, police tried to talk Beane out, but eventually withdrew after deciding that trying to enter his apartment "would yield an unreasonable public safety risk." On Saturday, a relative called to say Beane was semi-conscious; police broke in and arrested him after EMS revived him. He'll be arraigned today.Don't worry, PYOers: There'll be pumpkins at Riverview Farm. Back in early April, a Daybreak item linked to a Vermont Standard article about farmers dealing with climate change that reported that Plainfield's Riverview Farm had switched its pumpkin field to Christmas trees. Paul Franklin, who owns the farm with his wife, Nancy, writes that it's true for one field, but not the PYO field, which "has better soils and will continue as it has for decades," rotating portions between corn and pumpkins. He adds that with hard frosts seemingly done, apples are in great shape and blueberry bushes are in full bloom.SPONSORED: You'll be delighted by the array of offerings at Wm. Smith's Annual Memorial Day Live Auction! Please join us today to see it all in person—and leave your bids for the Live Auction, which begins Weds. at 10 am. An incredibly diverse sale: a 2017 BMW X3i or a 2011 Corvette Grand Sport convertible, gold and diamonds, 17th and 18th-century furnishings, exquisite art, and much, much more. You’ll always find something you must have! We are just down the road in Plainfield, and would love to see you. Check it out at the burgundy link or here. Sponsored by Wm. Smith Auctions.Claremont's about to get a new center for the arts. On Friday, the West Claremont Center for Music and the Arts cuts the ribbon on a new home on Opera House Square. A decade in the making, the Claremont Creative Center will take over the first floor of the old Claremont National Bank building (work on the roof and second floor is slated for this summer), celebrating with concerts by Bassel and the Supernaturals (Friday) and the Villalobos Brothers (Saturday). Backers are looking to the center to draw visitors to the city, help support nearby businesses, and spur downtown redevelopment.In Lebanon, two new employer-sponsored childcare efforts aim to join city's. As you probably remember, the city's got a project going to build a child care center for 200 kids near the airport. Now, reports the VN's Christina Dolan, the Lebanon School District has announced a project for a room at the Hanover Street School for 15 children of district employees, and Dartmouth Health and CCBA are teaming up on a new center—at CCBA—for 40 children of DH employees. It's due to open in September, and would be the first off-campus child care program in the Dartmouth Health system, Dolan writes.SPONSORED: Osher's Summer Lecture Series begins July 10 and registration is open! “America’s Role in Preserving Peace and Prosperity” addresses issues affecting U.S. global leadership: autocracy and threats to democracy; climate change; human displacement and forced migration; facts vs. misinformation; geopolitics since the Cold War. The series will take place on six Wednesdays, July 10 through August 14, from 9-11:30 AM. Join us at the Lebanon Opera House or via livestream. Open to the public; register for the full series or individual sessions. Sponsored by Osher at Dartmouth.NH House rejects abortion stats bill. You may remember that there's been a to-do in the legislature over the GOP-controlled state Senate's move to gut a bill originally designed to protect abortion rights and replace it with a measure to require abortion providers to report abortion data, including where and when, age and state of residence, and the method used. NH is one of a handful of states that doesn't collect stats, and the move was opposed by advocates and abortion providers. On Friday, reports Annmarie Timmins in NH Bulletin, the House voted 201-164 to reject the new version of the bill. At least, for this year.With a key omission, Sununu paints a rosy picture of NH energy prices. In the Boston Globe (sorry, paywall), Steven Porter and Amanda Gokee point out that the NH governor's declaration last week that NH is better off than its neighbors because "we’ve let markets, not government, drive innovation," was a bit misleading. It noted jumps in electricity prices in nearby states—but left off the state just to its west, where, Porter and Gokee write, "Vermont’s electricity rates have risen more slowly and remain lower than New Hampshire’s rates." It also used what they label "a cherry-picked timeframe" for its comparisons.Bear in Warren, VT: Lock those vehicle doors, people! Okay, the bear didn't say that. It just demonstrated that while black bears may not have opposable thumbs, this doesn't mean one couldn't open, say, Thomas Pelino's pickup truck door in Warren. Via WCAX.The Monday jigsaw—on Tuesday. The Norwich Historical Society's Sarah Rooker this week offers up a turn-of-the-century view of a one-time Hanover building that, she writes, many people in the Upper Valley might have been inside at some point in their lives.
Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it stick around by hitting the maroon button:
We may be the middle of nowhere to everyone else in VT and NH, but
we
know what's good! Strong Rabbit's Morgan Brophy has come up with the perfect design for "We Make Our Own Fun" t-shirts and tote bags for proud Upper Valleyites. Plus you'll find the Daybreak jigsaw puzzle, as well as sweatshirts, tees, a fleece hoodie, and, as always, the fits-every-hand-perfectly Daybreak mug. Check it all out at the link!
Literature prof and author Renée Bergland in conversation with law prof Jack Sammons about Bergland's new book, Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science
. "Just as Darwin’s work was informed by his roots in natural philosophy and his belief in the interconnectedness of all life," the publisher's notes go, "Dickinson’s poetry was shaped by her education in botany, astronomy, and chemistry, and by her fascination with the enchanting possibilities of Darwinian science." At Woodstock's Norman Williams Public Library at 6 pm.
Actually, the drag performer Taylor Mac's “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music” lasted 24 hours, performed in 2016 in a giant warehouse in Brooklyn's Dumbo neighborhood. The
NYT
critic Wesley Morris called the one-time event "one of the great experiences of my life... 246 songs spanning 240 years for 24 straight hours, including small breaks for him to eat, hydrate and use the loo, and starting in 1776 with a great-big band and ending with Mr. Mac, alone in 2016, doing original songs on piano and ukulele." Tonight at 7, Hop Film brings in Mac himself for a screening of the HBO documentary about it all. At the Loew—no charge, but you'll need to have a ticket.
, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 classic about the pursuit of artistic perfection that may be the best-known ballet movie ever: a ballerina determined to excel but torn by her love for a young composer; the iron-willed manager of the Ballet Lermontov and his demand for obedience. In the Martha Rich Theater at Thetford Academy.
The ensemble—Bynum on cornet,
J
acqueline Kerrod on harp,
A
llison Burik on bass clarinet, and
K
en Filiano on bass—will be in the East Reading Room of Dartmouth's Baker-Berry Library with "a contemplative and organic approach to creative music making, freely blending the composed and the spontaneous, maximizing the individual agency of the performers while in service to the collective sound."
And the Tuesday poem...
I DID NOT READ books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the brain or the hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amid the pines and hickories and sumacs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until, by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night.
— From
Walden
by Henry David Thoreau.
The Hiking Close to Home Archives. A list of hikes around the Upper Valley, some easy, some more difficult, compiled by the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. It grows every week.
The Enthusiasms Archives. A list of book recommendations by Daybreak's rotating crew of local booksellers, writers, and librarians who think you should read. this. book. now!
Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.
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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Poetry editor: Michael Lipson Associate Editor: Jonea Gurwitt About Rob About Michael
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