By MARK ALAN LOVEWELL

The commercial striped bass season began this week with a whimper. The fishermen are out hunting for this highly prized fish, but their landings are off.

Striped bass are local and one of the few species that are plentiful and available at fish markets and restaurants to sell. Bluefish comes a close second as a local fish and are landed daily.

Delores Stevens, pianist and artistic director of the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society, will join a quintet of musicians from the Music from Salem festival series in two concert performances July 21 and 22.

After a genre-stretching foray into jazz chamber music with Billy Childs and the Infiniti Brass, the society, now at the midpoint of its five-week season, returns to its romantic classical roots with a program of music by Felix Mendelssohn and Cesar Franck.

It’s a benefit bivalve banquet: come to the annual clambake and auction to raise money for the Vineyard Nursing Association, the Island’s only home health care agency, on Wednesday, July 23, at 6 p.m. at The Field Gallery in West Tisbury.

“You are not my enemy/ my grandmother my grandfather.

I built walls between us./ Rubble made sound

sand scattered plastic bags all around

rifles and checkpoints/bright lights into your eyes...”

“I landed in Cottage City in February of 1882, after a short stay on the mainland,” wrote the late Manuel S. deBettencourt in an open letter to the citizens of Oak Bluffs. The letter is undated, but Oak Bluffs town archives show that Mr. deBettencourt was first elected selectman in 1925. The letter was a plea for reelection.

An Evening with Livingston Taylor at the Tabernacle, his only concert on the Vineyard this summer, will be tomorrow, Saturday, July 19, 8 p.m.