Let's write about little known racism history in Shapleigh Maine! Who knew?

Anybody reading this know where Shapleigh Maine is located? See Facebook link here. 

Shapleigh Maine Town Hall

If it were a Jeapardy question, no one would have a correct answer. Why should you know? And that is the point of this "Let's Write" blog. Who knew there was colonial racism in Shapleigh Maine?

This bridge connecting Orr's Island and Bailey's Island was built in 1928, and is known as the Cribstone Bridge. Due to the tidal action in the area known as Will's Gut, the bridge's foundation was made from granite slabs to withstand the waves and winds. The bridge was listed on the National Historic Registry of Places in 1975, and in 1983, listed as a Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.

I just happened to know where Shapleigh is located because the town is located slightly northwest and adjacnt to Sanford Maine, where my husband was born and where my two sons graduated from high school. Otherwise, there is probably no reason to know about Shapleigh. 

As a nurse, I did a few visiting home health visits in the town where I cared for people who lived in small houses heated almost entirely with wood.

But then I found this article in The Bollard, a monthly published Maine newspaper. "You have got to be kidding❗" was my reaction. But, after my initial alarm, it finally hit me that there is nothing at all funny in this short racial history about Shapleigh, Maine. 

So, with due respect to the author Samuel James, and a credit to the September, 2204 "The Bollard".....here is the surprising report- but one caveat.....I have no information abut how to verify this story. 

Nevertheless, I can only tell the readers about my own experience in Shapleigh.... this town is almost like a rustic version of "Brigadoon".....a mysterious Maine village that appears for only one day every 100 years (or so...). In this case, the "appearance" occured in the year 1682*.

Maine's Mid Coast Baily Island is part of the town of Harpswell, and it's known for a lot of things. Carl Jung gave his first American lecture at the Baily Island Library Hall, in 1936. Bailey Island is also the home of the only cribstne bridge in the world, a cobwork design built in 1928, to withstand rough tides. The bridge connects Bailey Island to neighboring Orr's Island, over a body of water called Will's Gut. But, the most compelling story about Bailey Island strats about 80 miles away, in Shapleigh Maine.

Well, to be honest and in continuation of my comparisom with a Maine version of Brigadoon, the story really starts more than a century before the town's founding, with the death of the namesake, a man named Nicholas Shapleigh.

Born wealthy in England, Shapleigh arrived in the Province of Maine around 1644. He was so rich that the townof Kittery was named after his family's estate, Kittery Quay, in Kingsear, Devon.  Naturally, a few years after his arrival in Maine, he was appointed provincial treasurer and made a major in command of the Maine militia.  Shapleigh put his family money to use, building a gristmill, sawmill, increasing his family's already unseakable wealth.  Of course, much of the actual labor was don by the Black people Shapleigh had enslaved, at least one of whom was a child when Nicholas abducted him from Africa.

But, in April of 1682, while watching a boat launch, the vessel's mast broke off and knocked Nicholas on the head, killing him.  He' left his fortune- including the enslaved Africans- to his nehew, John Shapleigh.  One of these inherited enslaved people abducted by Nicholas as a child was Will.  The townsfold called him "Black Will" because, of course, they did and he caused a bit of trouble. Will had a child with Alice Hanscom, a white woman and because interacial marriages were illegal, their child, Will Jr. , became a ward of the town.  But, in the year 1700, after 18 yeas providing free labor for the Shapleights, Will was freed.  This probably had something to do with John not wanting to financially support Will Jr., who was not 10 years old.

In freedome, Will made big moves. He changed his name to Will Black.  He'd alreaey bought 100 acres in what is now Eliot, Maine, for 25 pounds he managed to save working jobs off the Shapleight plantation. Will established a farmstead. He struck a deal with a local enslaver, trading two of his acres for the freedom of his friend Tony, who soon changed his name to Anthony Freeman. Through act like this, Will turned his farmstead into Maine's first Black community.

Like his father, Will Jr. also made big moves.  He bought land in Berwick and in 1714, he fell in love.  her name was Elizabeth Turbet and she ws white.  Again, interracial marriages were illegal, so when word spread about their relationship, Will Jr. was jailed and the local judge blocked their marriage.  A few years later, when Elizabeth gave birth to Will Black III, the town again lost their shit.  There's no available record of Will Jrs.'s punishment, but Elizabeth received 20 lashes and Will probably got the same, at least. 

It wasnt' long after when Will Jr. took his family up the coast.  Unlike the white settlers, Will Jr. established a good relationship with local tribes and he and his family settled on the island Capenawagen. That island that soon came to be known as Will's Island and it was proably pretty nice to be away from the racist white power structures.  But colonizers are, well, colonizers, and Will Jr. wasn't aqquite done putting up with their bullshit. 

William Dudley was a former member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, the nepo baby son of a former governor and he wanted Will's Island real bad.  Dudley went to the Committee for Resettlement and literally asked to be given "the island upon which Black Will lives".  But, something went wrong somewhere along the transactions and Dudley ended up with Haskell Island instead.  Undeterred and greedy as ll Hell, Dudley then went back to the committee and asked in particualr for "the island whrein said Black Will doth reside, commonly called Sapernawagen".  Without any say from Will Jr., Dudley got a deed to the island, but he died before setting foot on what remained Will's Island.

Will Jr. died rich of old ate in 1762, and was buried alongside his wife on Will's Island.  At some point, the island came into the possession of Deacon Timothy Bailey, after whom it's currently named.  But under that singular cribstone bridge connecting Bailey and Orr's Island, lies a body of water, a strait called Will's Gut, anmed after the original son of Maine's first Black community.

* Coincidentally....1682 was the same year when the French explorer La Salle claimed the land at the mouth of the Mississippi River for France and named it "La Louisiane" in honor of King Louis XIV- just in cast you want to know.

Let's write about Republican Liz Cheney endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris

Thursday, September 05, 2024  Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney endorses Vice-President Kamala Harris in strategically important North Carolina

Former Wyoming Republica Congresswoman Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney, revealed that she will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris for president, during a Duke University event titled "Defending Democracy."

Echo report published in the Duke University Chronicle by By Michael Austin (managing editor) , Zoe Kolenovsky (news editor) and Ava Littman (associated news editor).

Peter Feaver, professor of political science and director of the Duke Program in American Grand Strategy, who moderated the event, asked Cheney if she wanted to “make news” by endorsing a presidential candidate❓

Cheney had previously not weighed in on which candidate she would be supporting in the 2024, presidential election.

“Because we are here in North Carolina, I think it is crucially important for people to recognize … that Trump poses something that should prevent people from voting for him, but I don’t believe we have the luxury of writing in candidates' names — particularly in swing states,” she said. “And as a conservative, and someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.”

Her comments elicited a standing ovation from the audience.

Cheney spoke in Page Auditorium at a Sanford Distinguished Lecture, where she shared her experience as vice chairwoman of the United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol and gave insights into election security in advance of this November.

Moments after expressing her support for Harris, Cheney said the U.S. has “an obligation to make sure that this election is not close” to show the world “who we are.”

Cheney spoke on the importance of voting for serious candidates and “[committing] ourselves, for the good of this country, to having substantive debates and discussions, not to demonizing political opponents.”

“We have to defeat election deniers … Here in North Carolina, that means defeating the Republican candidate for governor,” she said in reference to N.C. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson.

After the Jan 6. insurrection, Cheney became a staunch critic of Former guy Donald Trump. Unlike many of her fellow Republican politicians, she publicly and consistently denounced Trump’s actions.

Cheney explained that when Trump returned to the White House from speaking to the mob of his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, he watched the violence unfold on his television. She said he refused to heed pleas from his staffers and family members to call off the violence, even ignoring a note informing him that a civilian had been shot amid the chaos.

Rather than take action, he tweeted about then-Vice President Mike Pence’s apparent lack of courage, which Cheney said effectively “poured gasoline on the fire of the attack.”

“That’s a man who can never again be entrusted with power,” she said.

Cheney claimed that many members of Congress told her they would have voted to impeach Trump if it was a “secret ballot.”

When asked by Feaver why so many Republicans went back on their private commitments to break with Trump, Cheney gave a one-word explanation: “cowardice.”

Cheney also recalled a conversation with then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy a few days after the election, where he shared that he had met with then-president Trump who “knew he lost.”

From her position on the select committee, Cheney witnessed the “breadth and the depth” of Trump’s plan to “overturn the election.” He went from pushing state legislatures to throw out their electoral votes for Biden to pressuring the vice president and Department of Justice, ultimately mobilizing a mob, she explained.

“Each time something was tried and failed … he would move on to the next piece of it,” she said.

Cheney also spoke of McCarthy’s visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort after Jan. 6, which she characterized as “stunning.”

“After the violence, many of the largest corporations in the country announced they would not be donating to Republicans … So [McCarthy] needed money,💲💵 and he needed access to Donald Trump's donor lists,” Cheney explained.

As an influential figure in the party, Cheney saw McCarthy’s actions as enabling other Republicans “to bring [Trump] back into the fold in exchange for access to those lists.”

She recognized the “courage” of others who stood up to Trump, including Pence, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, former Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews and Russell Bowers, former speaker of the Arizona House.

“[If] Vice President Pence had not withstood the pressure from Donald Trump to act in a way that was illegal and unconstitutional, we would have been in a very much more serious constitutional crisis.”

Cheney pointed out that Trump’s current running mate, JD Vance, “has said specifically, repeatedly that he will not do what Mike Pence did, were he ever to face that situation.”

She believes that the Republican Party is no longer characterized by “substance” and “policy.”

“I don't know that the current Republican Party can be resuscitated,” Cheney said. “I think that there's going to have to be very, very significant work done.”

In concluding her address, Cheney called upon young people to “step up” and “get to the polls.”

“Much of the work that we're going to have to do sort of post this election cycle is getting back to a place where this country has two strong political parties that embrace the Constitution and where we can have substantive debates,” Cheney said.

Editor's note: This story was updated Wednesday night with the rest of Cheney's remarks

Labels: Ava Littman, defending democracy, Duke University, Kevin McCarthy, Michael Austin, zoe Kolenovsky

Let's write about newspaper thiefs! (Looking for someone who is stealing newspapers!) You cannot make this stuff up.

Stop! Newspaper Thief! On one Yorkville (Manhattan) block, print isn’t dying—it’s being stolen. 

Echo essay published in The New Yorker written by Naaman Zhou

Can a book conservator, a ninety-year-old fax enthusiast, and a vigilante nab a well-read bandit?

By Naaman Zhou, a journalist and editor. He is a copy editor at The New Yorker, and was previously a reporter for Guardian Australia.

There are a lot of valuable things out on the street these days. 

Porch pirates swipe packages. Lift a catalytic converter from a Prius—between the engine and the muffler—and you can flip it for a thousand dollars. But what if you’re looking for a more regular income stream? Some newspapers now go for four dollars an issue—six on the weekend. Could that be money for the taking?

On a tree-lined block of East Eighty-fifth Street, in Yorkville, not far from Gracie Mansion, Doris Straus, a retired book conservator (print subscriptions: Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times) noticed a disturbing trend: her periodicals kept going missing. One week—a particularly big one for news (headline: “SOME IN ROOM WITH BIDEN SAY LAPSES ARE INCREASING”)—her Times was gone almost every other day. “It was driving me crazy,” Straus said recently. “I can’t eat my breakfast without the newspaper. It’s not the same thing online.” Neighbors were being victimized, too. Straus ruled out spotty delivery. It had to be a thief—one with particular tastes. “They only take the Post and the Times,” Straus explained. She posted about the incidents on a local online forum. One person commented with relief, “I get Newsday so maybe I am safe.”

A printed-word vigilante found himself drawn to the case. A careful canvassing of the street showed it to be a mix of doorman buildings, walkups, and homes with fenced-off gardens, shady and quiet—perfect for reading. The inky-fingered residents were on edge. “The only issue we’ve had is, like, people parking in front of the pumps,” Bryant Lorenzo, a doorman, reported. “The stealing is really alarming.”

Defensive measures were implemented. Straus’s building has a pair of dark, stately columns that frame the entrance. A secure drop-off? The street’s regular deliverywoman, Rene, started stashing the Times behind them. But the bandit seemed one step ahead. Straus, wearing sunglasses and comfortable brogues, pointed out the compromised rendezvous point with frustration. “You really can’t see from the street,” she said. “You have to know it’s there.” An inside job?

Just when the trail had gone cold, a tipster stepped forward. Cathy De Vido, ninety years old, saw it all go down from the front of her historic wood-frame farmhouse. 

Over a coffee-table interrogation, with Straus sitting in, De Vido, who has light-brown hair and wears clear oval glasses, sang like a canary.

It was early dawn. Six-twenty. De Vido was in her home office, reading a lengthy fax from her son, when she heard something. “Our gate creaks,” she said. Someone was out there. De Vido crept to the front door and peered through a glass viewing slot. “I saw a baseball cap,” she said. The hat was attached to a woman. De Vido opened the door and moved toward the perp, but the mystery woman avoided apprehension: “She was very agile.” De Vido called out, “Hello!” The woman said, “Excuse me,” and scurried away. Only later did De Vido notice that her Times was missing.

The witness described the scofflaw: “Curly white hair, jaw-length. Wearing a jean jacket, the baseball cap, and chinos.” Age? “White-haired, but very spry,” De Vido said. “I would say she had to be in her late seventies or early eighties.” The advanced age didn’t fit the typical profile of a thief, but De Vido suspected ties to a larger enterprise. “I think she was selected for that reason,” she said. “You know, perhaps because she would be so unlikely to have any suspicion aroused.”

Straus said, “It’s a cabal!” (Someone who is involved in a secret plot!)

Enough speculation—this called for a stakeout. Straus suggested that a neighbor, Jim Hart, who gets the Post, could be good to keep watch. (“He’s ex-Wall Street, ex-military.”) But Hart wasn’t a morning person. (“I’m retired—no, thank you,” Hart said.) The vigilante had no choice but to go without backup. Straus and De Vido agreed to leave some papers (“WEAK JOBS DATA HELPS TO SPREAD GLOBAL SELL-OFF”) outside, as bait.

On a warm morning, the vigilante settled in. It was five-fifty-eight. Joggers jogged. Pigeons pecked at a few trash bags. Many dogs were walked. A white pickup was idling for a suspiciously long time. A getaway car? Further investigation revealed a plumber, smoking a cigar while waiting for a job. No dice.

The thief seemed scared off. Rene, the deliverywoman, appeared, wearing a white cap and carrying a ring of jangling keys. (She declined to provide a surname; she prefers delivering the papers to appearing in them.) She’d been up since 2:30 A.M. “I don’t do the job for money,” she said. “I do it because I like to walk.” She had a message for the thieves: “The Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ That means even paper!”

She wandered over to De Vido’s house, and was greeted at the gate. De Vido repeated her description of the suspect.

“I think I’ve seen a woman like that, one time,” Rene said. “It rings a little bell.”

The sun was up—a bright, early-morning light—and Rene went off to finish her route. De Vido picked up her Times and carried it inside. The suspect remained at large. ♦

Published in the print edition of the August 26, 2024, issue, with the headline “The Paper Trail.”

Let's write about the value and accuracy of oral history- Australia is an example

James Bradley is a writer and critic. His new book, “Deep Water: The World in the Ocean,” is available now. In this thrilling work—a blend of history, science, nature writing, and environmentalism—acclaimed writer James Bradley plunges into the unknown to explore the deepest recesses of the natural world.

Amazon review:  "Deep Water is a major achievement....Bradley's skills both as novelist and essayist converge here to create this wise, compassionate and urgent book, characterized throughout by a clarity of prose and a bracing moral gaze that searches water, self and reader." 

Excellent echo report by James Bradley published in The Washington Post:

The written word has long been assumed to be superior to oral traditions — more sophisticated, reliable. This premise has contributed to to many of the darkest episodes in human history — a pretext for violence, dispossession, assimilation and genocide. But the idea that only writing can preserve information over time is no less problematic. Though written records reach back only a few millennia, there is good reason to believe many Australian Indigenous cultures have oral traditions that preserve memories of lands that vanished beneath the sea as much as 12,000 years ago.

To understand how this can be, we need to go back 20,000 years ago, to when the Earth was just emerging from the last glacial maximum. Vast ice sheets covered much of North America and Eurasia and sea levels were about 400 feet lower. Dry land extended from Holland and France to Ireland, and the Bering Strait was a freezing steppe roamed by mammoth and other ancient creatures. Further south, Australia, Lutruwita (Tasmania) and New Guinea were subsumed into a single land mass known as Sahul, with coastlines that lay miles farther than today’s beaches.

In recent years, researchers have begun to reconstruct these vanished underwater worlds using sonar and bathymetric studies that reveal contours of drowned rivers and creeks snaking across the sea floor off Australia’s Bass Strait.

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. Australia is the largest country by area in Oceania and the world's sixth-largest country.

These lost worlds were not just physical spaces; however, they were also human landscapes. The ancestors of today’s Indigenous Australians first arrived in Sahul more than 65,000 years ago. For these ancient peoples, these now-vanished lands were living places. Evidence of this is gradually emerging: in 2019, a team at Flinders University identified Australia’s first subtidal Indigenous archaeological sites at Murujuga, in Western Australia, recovering several hundred stone artifacts dating back around 8,000 years from submerged sites up to 45 feet below the surface.

But archaeology is not the only lens through which to understand these submerged lands.

For many thousands of years, the Mirning people have lived along the edge of the Great Australian Bight on Australia’s Southern Coast. Their elders tell stories about visitors to Mirning Country that stretch back to the arrival of Dutch explorers in the 1600s. 

But the memories encoded in the Mirning’s culture extend much further back, to what they call “the time before the sea.”

The Mirning’s traditions recount the reshaping of the coastline by the rising ocean and its effects upon the creatures that once inhabited the continental shelf. The now-submerged region remains part of the Mirning’s Country — a place they call Billiaum, or Deep Sea Country home. For the Mirning, Billiaum is a living place structured around sacred sites that it is their duty to protect. One of the most significant of these is the site they call Bingarning, which is rich in the red ocher — an important element of Mirning ceremonies. Today, the Mirning rely on ocher that washes up to the shore, which they would collect directly from Bingarning before rising seas immersed the site.

The Mirning are far from the only Australian Indigenous culture whose traditions recall a time before sea levels rose. 

Over the past decade, Patrick Nunn, a professor of geography at the University of the Sunshine Coast, has identified oral traditions from more than 30 locations around the Australian coast that detail rising sea levels. For example, in Lutruwita, which was last attached to the mainland around 12,000 years ago, Palawa stories collected in the 1830s say the island “was settled by emigrants from a far country, that they came here on land [and] that the sea was subsequently formed.” 

Meanwhile on the opposite side of Bass Strait, Gunaikurnai traditions say the strait was flooded after some children found a sacred artifact that was for only men’s use and took it back to camp to show to the women. 

Similarly, Kulin and Bunurong traditions recorded in the 19th century speak of a time when it was possible to walk across Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay.

Although there is no way of definitively proving that such traditions describe postglacial sea level rise, their ubiquity is telling, especially in instances such as the Palawa stories about the inundation of the Bass Strait land bridge and the Mirning’s ochre story, both of which offer practical accounts of changing conditions.

More importantly, there is now clear evidence oral cultures are capable of transmitting information over huge periods of time. Palawa traditions depict a bright star near the southern celestial pole, which University of Melbourne astronomers have identified as Canopus: a star that last lay close to the celestial pole around 14,000 years ago. ☆🌟In other words, these Palawa accounts are up to 10,000 years older❗ than the oldest written texts.

For those of us embedded in written cultures, this might be difficult to fathom. Yet, as history has demonstrated on multiple occasions ― from the burning of the Library of Alexandria to the pillage of the Baghdad House of Wisdom ― archives and libraries are highly vulnerable, meaning written knowledge is frequently erased or forgotten. 

In contrast, stories woven into Indigenous cultures are part of a fabric of knowledge and reciprocal obligation that is carefully preserved. John McCarthy, an archaeologist at South Australia’s Flinders University who helped uncover the subtidal Murujuga sites, says these surviving memories are not surprising. “There’s a very strong emphasis upon the integrity of transmission of oral traditions in Aboriginal cultures, and all sorts of mechanisms that punish people who fail to transmit customs and dreaming stories accurately.”

Jilda Andrews, a Yuwaalaraay woman and Research Fellow at the Australian National University, argues that this continuity is a reminder of the deep repositories of knowledge encoded in Indigenous cultures. “Our culture is inscribed in the land, and country is our text,” she explains. “We don’t have vast libraries that are written down, it’s country that’s ensuring the continuities, and that’s giving us the cues and instructions that help us to remember to keep telling the stories.”

Understood like this, these stories offer a powerful corrective to the ingrained assumption of written culture’s superiority. And in a world where temperatures and sea levels are once again rising, a recognition of the depth of Indigenous memory offers a way to break out of short-term thinking and narratives of collapse. 

By demonstrating continuity stretching back thousands of years, they also provide a model for imagining the future, and prompt us to think about how our actions today will shape it.

Let's write about Ludwig von Beethoven uniting humanity!

Wonderful echo essay published in The Conversation by Ted Olsen Professor of Appalachian Studies and Bluegrass, Old-Time and Roots Music Studies, East Tennessee State University. (Video performance link is at the end of this essay.)

Ludwig Von Beethoven composer baptised on December 17, 1770 and died on March 26, 1827

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at 200: Revolutionary work of art has spawned two centuries of joy, goodwill and propaganda

In early 1824, 30 members of Vienna’s music community sent a letter to Ludwig van Beethoven petitioning the great composer to reconsider his plans to premiere his latest work in Berlin and instead debut the symphony in Vienna.

Beethoven had lived in Vienna since 1792, when he left his hometown of Bonn, Germany, to pursue a career as a composer. Beethoven rose to world renown, but by the 1820s he had fallen out of favor with Viennese arts patrons who, at the time, were drawn to the sounds and styles of Italian composers.

Beethoven had not appeared before a Viennese audience in a dozen years, but he was moved by the letter’s sentiment and agreed to debut his new work, Symphony No. 9 in D minor, in the city. 

The premiere performance was on May 7, 1824, at Kärntnertor Theater.

Symphony No. 9 premiered at the Kärntnertor Theater in Vienna

Concert promoters promised the public that the legendary – and legendarily antisocial – composer would be present at the performance of his latest symphony. Indeed, during the entirety of the performance, he was on stage, his back to the audience, as described by Maynard Solomon in his acclaimed biography of Beethoven.

The composer insisted upon conducting the symphony from a conductor’s stand. The official conductor at the concert, Michael Umlauf, had instructed the musicians – a Viennese orchestra and choir – to ignore Beethoven, who was completely deaf and who theoretically could not be relied upon to keep time.

The performance was interrupted several times by rapturous applause from the approximately 2,000 attendees, but Beethoven could not hear the reaction. According to eyewitnesses, the composer “threw himself back and forth like a madman” and fell several bars behind in his “conducting.”

The enthusiastic response to the symphony’s debut performance presaged its reception in the European music community, globally and across time.

Global appeal:  Symphony No. 9, sometimes referred to as the Choral Symphony, was the capstone to Beethoven’s extraordinary career. In the 200 years since its debut, the symphony has become an essential composition in the orchestral repertoire and is often cited as the crowning achievement of Western classical music.

A central reason for the symphony’s accessibility to a broad audience was Beethoven’s incorporation of the 1785 poem “An die Freude,” or “Ode to Joy,” by Friedrich Schiller, a leading German author, historian and philosopher. Matched to a memorable melody in the fourth movement, this text – with its uplifting, humanitarian sentiment – contributed to the symphony’s character as an anthem.

Widely interpreted as Beethoven’s plea for a global “brotherhood,” the fourth movement has been incorporated into ceremonial events sponsored by international organizations such as UNESCO, the Olympics, the Council of Europe and the European Union. Given the work’s fame the Ode to Joy section of the symphony has also been appropriated for propaganda by supporters of Nazism, Bolshevism, Maoism and other ideologies.
Groundbreaking composition

Symphony No. 9 is extraordinary in many ways, according to Teddy Abrams, music director of the Louisville Orchestra and a Grammy Award-winning conductor.

The Ninth Symphony was not the first long piece of music at the time, but the others were generally built by stringing together many shorter sequences. In contrast, Beethoven crafted the Ninth Symphony – a 74-minute work – out of just four long movements. “The proportions alone are staggering,” Abrams said in an interview for this article.

Each of the Ninth’s four movements is a single cohesive, coherent musical statement. This, more than the innovation of using a chorus in a symphony, was what made Beethoven’s Ninth revolutionary, according to Abrams.

At the beginning of the last movement, Beethoven reprised elements of the previous three movements. This “quoting” was a highly unusual technique at the time, according Abrams. “It is from these musical ‘memories’ that the timeless Ode to Joy theme emerges,” he said.

Energy and drive: The symphony has influenced artists across the cultural spectrum, including various modern and avant-garde music genres. British composer Gabriel Prokofiev, grandson of famed Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, was commissioned by a French orchestra in 2011 to create a new work, Beethoven9 Symphonic Remix, that interpreted the symphony through a fusion of classical and electronic music.

When interviewed for the 2020, documentary film “Beethoven’s Ninth: Symphony for the World,” Prokofiev commented: “A lot of the techniques and approaches [Beethoven] used, particularly his climactic finales and his codas and the drama and the sense of energy and drive he had, we find that everywhere, especially in dance music and electronic music.”

Beethoven’s Ninth has been interpreted and reimagined countless times.

For over a century, Symphony No. 9 has played an iconic role within the recording industry. Given the ongoing popularity of Beethoven’s work, record companies since 1923 have sought to release commercial recordings of this particular symphony. Early records couldn’t fit the entirety of the symphony, however.

Then, around 1980, two record companies – Sony and Philips – negotiated the length of the new digital compact disc format at just over 74 minutes per CD. According to Joop Sinjou, a Philips engineer who played a key role in developing the technology, Sony Chairman Akiyo Morita and his wife insisted that the new format be designed to fit the full Symphony No. 9. However, there are variations of the story, so it’s not certain that the companies’ decision to make CDs capable of holding more than an hour of music was specifically to accommodate Beethoven’s Ninth.

Goodwill symphony: Embedded in the symphony’s fourth movement is a message for peace with particular resonance in the 21st century. In one section of that movement, Beethoven incorporated a “Turkish March” featuring two instruments associated with Turkey: the cymbal and bass drum. According to Prokofiev, during Beethoven’s era Europeans discriminated against Turks.

Daniel Barenboim & the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, composed of young Israeli and Arab musicians, performed Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in 2006.

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 was performed in 2006, by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an ensemble that consisted of young Israeli and Arab musicians. The performance was part of a campaign for a peaceful resolution to the Middle East conflict.

Check out this Carnegie Hall perfermance at the links below.

Ode to Joy section of the Ninth Symphony is among the most recognized melodies in the world. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uooe16ILaPo&t=141s

https://youtu.be/uooe16ILaPo

YouTube videos of this performance have been viewed by millions. The aspiration of Beethoven’s “goodwill” symphony continues to inspire a vision of a united humanity.

Let's write about the history of performing magic

Echo essay by Richard Segal* published in The New York Times:

Richard Hatch was searching the card catalog of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, hunting for intriguing titles under the subject heading “Magic.”

It was 1979, and Hatch was a young graduate student in physics, but he’d long nurtured an amateur’s passion for the conjuring arts and, on this day at least, he preferred to read about sleight of hand than quantum mechanics.

His rummaging stopped when he spotted a title called “Die Juden in der Zauberkunst.” Hatch had spent four years of his youth in Germany so he translated it instantly: “Jews in Magic.” The card said the book was written by someone named Guenther Dammannand published in Berlin in 1933.

He paused. A book about Jews in magic, from Germany, in the very year that the Nazis assumed power and started burning “un-German” books in bonfires across the country. It seemed obvious. This was an antisemitic tract, identifying Jews to make it easier for the government to persecute them and the public to shun them.

Awful, Hatch thought. He then looked for a magic book he actually wanted to read.

Hatch would go on to earn two graduate degrees in physics but left the field in 1983, after realizing that his ardor for magic had completely overwhelmed his interest in science. 

He became a full-time “deceptionist,” as he calls it. While he honed his craft and looked for gigs, he translated a 1942 German book about the famed Austrian magician J.N. Hofzinser. That brought him to the attention of a collector of Judaica and magic books who urged him to translate a fascinating rarity he’d acquired: “Die Juden in der Zauberkunst.”

“That’s when I realized that the book was about the great contributions that Jews have made to magic,” Hatch said in an interview.

Dammann, it turns out, was a 23-year-old Jew and amateur magician, the son of a well-off banker, who lived with his parents and brothers in Berlin when he self-published his book. It was 100 pages long and, historians say, the first attempt to inventory the great Jewish magicians, both living and dead.

Most of “Jews in Magic” is devoted to brief biographical essays inunadorned prose of more than 50 renowned professionals. One entry told the story of the Frenchman Alexander Herrmann, who, in decades of touring, dazzled Abraham Lincoln, Czar Alexander, and the prisoners of Sing Sing and who pioneered the suave devil look — goatee, tuxedo — that became the industry standard. Another profiled Harry Houdini, the Hungarian-born son of a rabbi, who escaped from handcuffs, jails and straitjackets and became one of the most famous showmen of his age.

The book was an oddly timed exercise in ethnic pride and a singular artifact of a life cut short. In 1942, Dammann and nearly 800 others were transported on rail cars to Riga, Latvia, where, Nazi records show, they were shot upon arrival.

Hatch, who lives in semiretirement in a small town in northern Utah, finished his translation of “Jews in Magic” four years ago and is strategizing about how to get it published, with annotations and photographs. At 68, he is a kind of one-man historical preservation society dedicated to Dammann.

Everyone Has a Theory

Since Dammann’s death, the ranks of Jewish conjurers has only grown. Among the notable: David Copperfield, David Blaine, Ricky Jay, Teller — who is the silent half of Penn & Teller — and Uri Geller, who, for the record, has long denied that his spoon bending is a trick. Gloria Dea, born Gloria Metzner, was the first magician to play Las Vegas. Max Maven, born Philip Goldstein, was one of the world’s most admired mentalists.

Why have Jews been so prominent in magic? In his book, Dammann does not speculate. So in January, I visited MagiFest, one of the country’s largest conventions of magicians, held annually in Columbus, Ohio. I went to hear Hatch give a lecture about Dammann, but the convention proved the ideal setting for an informal survey on the question.

MagiFest was three days of lectures and performance
“There’s a saying that we all die three times,” Hatch said. “The first death is the physical one, when your heart stops beating. 

Moreover, the second is when your body is consigned to fire or the grave. And the third is the last time someone utters your name. Life was so cruel and unfair to him, I just thought, it’s a worthy cause to keep Dammann’s name alive for as long as I can.”

One of the attendees was Joshua Jay, who co-founded Vanishing Inc., the company that owns MagiFest, and who had just finished a three-week run at the Midnight Theater in Manhattan. He sat near the round tables one evening and shared a theory.

“In the U.S., part of it is that the explosion of Jews in magic happens at the same time that Jews are flooding into this country as immigrants at the turn of the century and many of the jobs with the government, with corporations were not open to Jews,” he said. “Being a magician was like being a tailor. You were self-employed, so it was safe.”

Others believe that magic, with its emphasis on books and learning, holds an inherent appeal to Jews. Asi Wind, an Israeli-born New Yorker whose Off Broadway show of card magic ran for 16 months, sees a link between his encounters with religion while growing up and his fascination with magic.

“I remember going to classes to hear rabbis talk and you’d hear a lot about mystery,” he said. “They would say, ‘Look, the Bible predicted this or that before science, before anybody else knew.’ It almost felt like I was reading a magic book. The Bible is a book about supernatural powers and a specific kind of knowledge — secret knowledge, the kind that reveals things we don’t yet know.”

On a more pedestrian level, there is the Supportive Jewish Parents school of thought. Many Jewish performers say their moms and dads encouraged them at a young age and today are their most devoted fans.

One of the attendees was Joshua Jay, who co-founded Vanishing Inc., the company that owns MagiFest, and who had just finished a three-week run at the Midnight Theater in Manhattan. He sat near the round tables one evening and shared a theory.

“In the U.S., part of it is that the explosion of Jews in magic happens at the same time that Jews are flooding into this country as immigrants at the turn of the century and many of the jobs with the government, with corporations were not open to Jews,” he said. “Being a magician was like being a tailor. You were self-employed, so it was safe.”

Others believe that magic, with its emphasis on books and learning, holds an inherent appeal to Jews. Asi Wind, an Israeli-born New Yorker whose Off Broadway show of card magic ran for 16 months, sees a link between his encounters with religion while growing up and his fascination with magic.

“I remember going to classes to hear rabbis talk and you’d hear a lot about mystery,” he said. “They would say, ‘Look, the Bible predicted this or that before science, before anybody else knew.’ It almost felt like I was reading a magic book. The Bible is a book about supernatural powers and a specific kind of knowledge — secret knowledge, the kind that reveals things we don’t yet know.”

On a more pedestrian level, there is the Supportive Jewish Parents school of thought. Many Jewish performers say their moms and dads encouraged them at a young age and today are their most devoted fans.

“I played a week at Mystique Dining which is about a mile from my parents’ house in San Diego and they basically sold out the whole run,” said Michael Feldman, who at MagiFest demonstrated tricks from his book “The Pages Are Blank.” (Note: The pages are not blank.) “They called all of their friends and they were like, ‘You have to come see our son perform, he’s doing this run.’ And it was great.”

Egg Bag Redux

Richard Hatch spent part of his adolescence in Frankfurt because his father, a nuclear physicist, served as a civilian working for Naval intelligence in the late 1950s, debriefing scientists who had defected from East Germany. The younger Hatch initially gravitated to physics because he found his father’s work intriguing, but after four years of graduate studies at Yale, he ditched it all for magic. He loved nothing more, he explained, and by the late ’70s, breakout stars like Doug Henning and David Copperfield had proven that careers in the field were financially viable.

“I thought I’d married a theoretical particle physicist,” said his wife, Rosemary Kimura Hatch, a professional musician. “But one day he came up to me and said, ‘I really want to try magic.’ And I said, ‘Well, if that’s your passion, give it a try.’ I was the bread winner the following year.”

Richard Hatch was raised as a Mormon but left the church years ago. Asked why he’s spent so much time studying a Jewish victim of the Holocaust, he first offered a go-to quip.

“My grandfather was a polygamist (Morman❓😯) and his first wife was Jewish,” he said. “But my grandmother was the second wife. So I like to say I was nearly Jewish.”

More seriously, he said he was fascinated by the reaction to Nazism in Germany’s magic community, which quickly divided into Nazi sympathizers and Jews. And he found the story of Dammann’s life an irresistible mystery: Who was this guy? And why did he write a book about Jews and magic at one of the darkest moments in history?

Hatch answered those and other questions during a Friday afternoon at his presentation about Dammann at MagiFest. He was dressed in a blue suit and sported a gray beard, looking like a chief executive who’d come to rev up the sales team.

He explained that Dammann’s interest in magic started when he was 12 or 13 and that a retired illusionist and family friend named Ernest Thorn, who would later turn up as an entry in “Jews in Magic,” became a mentor. At 21, Dammann joined the Magic Circle of Germany, a hybrid of professional society and fraternal organization, though there were women members, too. Inspired by the Who’s Who’s books he read, Dammann decided to assemble “Jews in Magic.”

He clearly understood the dangers of the project. As Hatch told the crowd of about 700, Dammann asked living professionals for permission to include them in the book, usually through the mail. 

Apparently, some said "no". Among the names omitted from the work is Arnold de Biere, dubbed the “Prince of Entertainers, entertainer of Princes,” who frequently toured Germany.

Among his best known pieces was the egg bag trick, a parlor magic staple in which an egg keeps appearing and disappearing in a black bag that has been turned inside out, slapped against a hand and inspected by the audience. Versions of the trick have been performed for centuries. David Leendert Bamberg, born in the late 18th century and part of the six-generation Bamberg dynasty from the Netherlands — Page 25 of Dammann’s book — had a version that ended with a live hen.

Hatch estimates that Dammann printed 500 copies of his book and that it sold poorly. The few contemporaneous magic publications that mentioned “Jews in Magic” — the copies were sent by Dammann, who handled publicity, too — were startled by its very existence. In 1933, Germany was becoming a dictatorship. By September, Jews were not allowed to perform onstage for non-Jewish audiences and the number of Jews in German universities had already been sharply curtailed. The notorious Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of civil rights and citizenship, were two years away.

Dammann’s parents were both dead by 1937 — the causes are not known — and the family’s house had been emptied and seized by the following year. Gunther and his two brothers attempted to flee to Palestine.

“They tried to convert their assets, which were obviously less considerable than they had been,” Hatch told the audience at the MagiFest lecture, which he gave with a series of slides projected on a huge screen. “They were caught doing so. This is his younger brother’s mug shot.”

Gunther became a slave laborer at a Siemens factory in Berlin, where he put rubber coating on cables. None of the Dammann brothers survived the war.

More than a few of those featured in “Jews in Magic” were murdered by the Nazis. One was Hermann Kurtz, who performed under the name Mahatma, and who gained fame with the “inexhaustible hat,” an illusion in which a menagerie of items — plates, flowers, flags, livestock — pour out of a borrowed top hat.

Others fled Europe and continued their careers in the United States. Fred Roner, born Alfred Rosner in Vienna, lived in Manhattan and toured with a pickpocket act, which he performed as after-dinner entertainment in the ’50s in what were called Knife and Fork Clubs. Most memorably, he snagged the wristwatch of the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover. (He gave it back.)

Roner is the only performer from “Jews in Magic” whom Hatch actually met. The two had lunch in Roner’s apartment in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan in 1986, and Roner talked with pride about his version of card to wallet — an effect in which a card chosen by a spectator vanishes from the deck and appears in the magician’s wallet.

“He was really proud that in his version, the wallet belonged to the spectator,” Hatch said. “He told me that getting the wallet wasn’t difficult. The real challenge was putting it back in the spectator’s pocket.”

Today, Hatch sustains the memory of those memorialized by Dammann with more than just historical research and lectures. About once a month, he performs at private homes, country club banquets or night clubs, typically near his home or in Salt Lake City.

When scheduling allows, he appears with his wife and adult son, a violinist and pianist. Wearing white tie and tails, Hatch performs tricks that were sensations a century or two ago in an hourlong act that would have worked in any Victorian-age parlor.

One highlight is a version of the egg bag popularized by Max Malini, who billed himself as “The Conjurer of the Century” — see page 78 of “Jews in Magic.”

“The classics are classics,” Hatch said. “They’re a good place to start, and not a bad place to get stuck.”

David Segal is a business reporter for The New York Times, based in New York, a reporter in the Business section, who has written several stories about magic, including a feature about the world’s most baffling card trick.

Donald Trump cannot be trusted to lead the nation because he is a chronic liar and frauster

 Convicted fraudster echo opinion letter published in the Daily Inter Lake, a Montana newspaper: 

Guilty❗

By now, we’ve all heard the news that Donald Trump was found guilty by a jury decision of all 34 felony counts of falsifying his company’s business records to keep information from voters that he knew would harm his 2016, presidential campaign. (Trump did not want the 2016, voters to know about his sexual encounter with porn actress Stormy Daniels while his wife Melania was recovering postpartum from giving birth to their son. He paid hush money to Stormy Daniels to try to hide his sinful, philandering and aberrant behavior.)

This isn’t only about “hush money”💰 payments. It’s about breaking the law to hide the truth from the American people, 11 days before a presidential election.

Trump has a clear pattern of lying to the American people and trying to undermine our elections in order to cling to power. He still faces three additional indictments and 54 criminal charges, including federal charges for inciting an insurrection to overturn the 2020, election. In spite of all of this, he’s still running for president.

Donald Trump is a convicted fraudster and criminal who still poses a massive threat to our fundamental freedoms. We can’t let him hold the highest office in our land in 2025. It’s up to all of us to hold him accountable and defeat him at the ballot box in November.

From Hannah Plumb, in Whitefish, Montana