Today at the Editor’s glance: If your soul isn’t entirely soot from that shameless orgy of waste and consumer manipulation known as black Friday, marking James Agee’s anniversary–he was born on this day in 1909: the best thing Knoxville, Tenn. ever produced–isn’t bad penance. He is the author of A Death in the Family, an autobiographical novel on the death of his father when Agee was 6 (“You’ve got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or any regard for justice. You’ve got to keep your mind off pitying your own rotten luck and setting up any kind of a howl about it. You’ve got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and that they’ve come through it and that you will too.”) The book won him the Pulitzer. He also wrote, with photographer Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men on poverty in the rural Alabama of 1936 (“However that may be, this is a book about “sharecroppers,” and is written for all those who have a soft place in their hearts for the laughter and tears inherent in poverty viewed at a distance, and especially for those who can afford the retail price; in the hope that the reader will be edified, and may feel kindly disposed toward any well-thought-out liberal efforts to rectify the unpleasant situation down South, and will somewhat better and more guiltily appreciate the next good meal he eats; and in the hope, too, that he will recommend this little book to really sympathetic friends, in order that our publishers may at least cover their investment and that (just the merest perhaps) some kindly thought may be turned our way, and a little of your money fall to poor little us.’ Above all else: in God’s name don’t think of it as Art.”) He was also a screenwriter, a journalist, a film reviewer, and most of all, a drinker and a smoker: he died in a taxi at age 45 in New York City in 1955. He was on his way to see a doctor. In 2005 the Library of America issued his complete works in two volumes. Will Blythe wrote: “Of course, one of Agee’s virtues as a writer is his willingness to heat up the rhetoric until it boils. At its best, his prose is incantatory, a Latin Mass for the Latinless, summoning up through sound alone a host of meanings. At its worst, the language can make readers feel as if they’re under assault by the wolf in “The Three Little Pigs,” huffing and puffing until he blows the novel down.
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October 2025
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
City Repertory Theatre Retrospective Concert
In Court: Jermaine Williams Pre-Trial
East Flagler Mosquito Control District Board Meeting
Flagler County Commission Evening Meeting
Nar-Anon Family Group
Palm Coast Charter Review Committee Meeting
For the full calendar, go here.
“Have you ever questioned the long shuttered front of an old Italian house, that motionless mask, smooth, mute, equivocal as the face of a priest behind which buzz the secrets of the confessional? Other houses declare the activities they shelter; they are the clear expressive cuticle of a life flowing close to the surface; but the old palace in its narrow street, the villa on its cypress-hooded hill, are as impenetrable as death. The tall windows are like blind eyes, the great door is a shut mouth. Inside there may be sunshine, the scent of myrtles, and a pulse of life through all the arteries of the huge frame; or a mortal solitude where bats lodge in the disjointed stones, and the keys rust in unused doors. . . .
–From Edith Wharton’s “The Duchess at Prayer,” a story first published in Scribner’s Magazine, August 1900.
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