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Weather: Mostly cloudy in the morning, then clearing. Patchy fog in the morning. Highs in the upper 80s. Southwest winds 5 to 10 mph. Sunday Night: Partly cloudy. Lows in the mid 60s. South winds 5 to 10 mph.
Today at a Glance:
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village: The city’s only farmers’ market is open every Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. at European Village, 101 Palm Harbor Pkwy, Palm Coast. With fruit, veggies, other goodies and live music. For Vendor Information email [email protected]
“Scapino,” at Palm Coast’s City Repertory Theatre, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite B207 (City Marketplace). The 1974 play is an adaptation of Moliere, set in modern-day Naples, and features a quick-thinking rascal (Scapino) who cleverly manipulates and cajoles everyone into doing exactly what he wants. There will be tall tales, bad impersonations, ridiculous chase scenes, disgruntled waiters, lovable panhandlers, melodic macaroni, and misbehaving sausages. Tickets are $15 to $20. Sunday performances at 3 p.m. Book tickets here.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 1 to 4 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
Al-Anon Family Groups: Help and hope for families and friends of alcoholics. Meetings are every Sunday at Silver Dollar II Club, Suite 707, 2729 E Moody Blvd., Bunnell, and on zoom. More local meetings available and online too. Call 904-315-0233 or see the list of Flagler, Volusia, Putnam and St. Johns County meetings here.
In Coming Days:
Flagler Pride Weekend: All applications (Vendor, Sponsor, Volunteer, Speaker, Entertainment) for Flagler Pride Weekend are now open until midnight on May 20th, 2023. No late applications will be accepted or considered. Vendors, apply here. Flagler Pride weekend is scheduled for June 10-12, at Palm Coast’s Central Park.
Michael Butler at AAUW: What is Academic Freedom and Why Does It Matter? American Association of University Women Flagler’s April 1 meeting is from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Cypress Knoll Golf and Country Club, 53 East Hampton, Palm Coast. The guest is Dr. Michael Butler, Professor of History Chair of Humanities, Flagler College. The presentation is $5 to attend, $25 with lunch. Please check the website for more information. “It’s easy to ridicule Florida, or cite ‘Florida Man.’ But the Florida of today is the America of tomorrow,” Butler told Vanity Fair in an article about Gov. Ron DeSantis’s assaults on academic freedom. “If you put these culture wars into context, there’s always a bigger issue at play. This time, it’s 2024, and Florida is being used as a laboratory for policies and practices concerning higher education that will be unveiled at the national level.”
April 15: The University Women of Flagler’s general membership meets at 9:30 a.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn, 55 Town Center Blvd., Palm Coast. Guests are welcome. Cost is $17 if paying by check; $18 if paying through this link. The April 15 speaker is Lt. General Mark Hertling, a retired three star general living in Flagler Beach having had global military and other responsibilities on behalf of the United States, positions on Presidential councils and Boards of Directors, a true winner in the sports arena, and an ace commentator on national television news outlets.
Byblos: Amin Maalouf is a Lebanese author who writes in French. He won France’s leading Prix Goncourt for a 1993 novel, was elected to the French Academy in 2012, and keeps being short-listed for the Nobel Prize, but a bit far down the list. He writes novels and non-fiction, most notably in the non-fiction category a trilogy that can be summed up by his last, in 2020: Adrift: How Our World Has Lost Its Way. His works have been translated in about 40 languages. Most of them have their American translation, but not his last novel, published in late 2020, called Nos frères inattendus, which can be translated either as Our Unexpected Brothers or our Uninvited Brethren. No doubt the translation is on its way. It’s not a strong novel, certainly not as strong as his many previous ones. I’d characterize it more as a tale, borrowing elements from Jules Verne at that, otherwise he couldn’t have pulled off the premise, which does make for an interesting thought experiment: the world is about to blow itself up with a nuclear exchange. But these mysterious men (there are no women in their cast) suddenly appear–human beings like you and me, but so far evolved that their intelligence and technology is capable of immobilizing all other human agencies at the snap of a finger. They can also cure cancer, rehabilitate the sick, even bring back the recently dead. And they all bear Greek names, as if they are descendants of Greece’s 5th century, but without the intervening religious and ideological retardants on the ability of progress and intellect to flourish freely. Maalouf, a humanist, is taking up in his tale a way out of the prisonhouse he explored in Adrift and his two previous non-fiction works (Disordered World: Setting a New Course for the Twenty-First Century came in 2011): what if the world could be saved by an unexpected, all-powerful “intervention” (a word that recurs in the novel) that is neither extra-terrestrial nor supernatural, but made of human flesh and blood, a sort of better angels of our nature that held out in abeyance in mysterious parts of the planet until the imminence of an obliterated planet made the intervention necessary. It’s an attractive idea, straight out of Maalouf’s civil war sensibility as a Lebanese: under the bombs, we all wished and prayed for one such intervention, if not one so far-fetched. We thought the French, the Americans, even the Israelis could save us if only… As it turned out, all three did intervene in the Lebanese civil war, all three left after catastrophic results, leaving behind a country more ruined than before they intervened. So it is in this tale: the strangers cause more upheavals than they resolve. They retreat whence they came (the novel lacks too much versimilitude to make it worth debating on those terms), seemingly leaving humanity on its own again. I have a few pages to go, so maybe there’s an even stranger twist at the end. I hope not. (There wasn’t. I add these lines after finishing the book, with an ending sentimental and cheesy). The thought experiment is enough as it is: what would we do with ourselves if an overpoweringly intelligent force were to overwhelm us? One of the answers is from an excerpt from the book, in the quote below: the Aztecs and Incas sure found out. Freeman Dyson used to warn against wishing for any encounters with extra-terrestrial life, or at least intelligent extra-terrestrial life: it would wipe us out as surely as Europe did the Incas. So Our unexpected brothers ends up being an appeal to Camus’ existentialism: live it up on your terms, courageously, humanely, and without the distorting, self-deluding presumptions of forces beyond yourself, beyond your world. Find it in yourself to save yourself, yourselves. There are no saviors in any form but ourselves, if we manage not to self-destruct first. We’ve made it this far, those of us in the fortunate dominant cultures, but for how long? And anyway—a question also raised by Maalouf’s only female character—how deserving are we to be saved, whether by ourselves or anyone else? That the answer can only be ambiguous is indictment enough.
—P.T.
Now this:
Flagler Beach Webcam:
The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
John Garrison Sentencing
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Ashley Estevez at The Stage in Palm Coast’s Town Center
‘The Country Girl’ at City Repertory Theatre
A Christmas Carol at Athens Theatre
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
First Friday Garden Walks at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
Blue 24 Forum
First Friday in Flagler Beach
Free Family Art Night at Ormond Memorial Art Museum and Gardens
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
What the Aztecs or Incas learned is now happening under our eyes to the entirety of human societies: a brutal de-valorization of knowledge, of our vision of the world, of our identity, of our dignity.
–From Amin Maalouf’s Our Unexpected Brethren, or Nos frères inattendus (2020).
Pogo says
@PT c/o FlaglerLive
Bonjour mes amis! Pogo non parlez vous francais (His French teacher did quite well, from what I was told.)
We have met the enemy… Maybe every other living thing will be saved when human failure eliminates itself.
Bon chance.
Pogo says
@Opinion Leaders: anyone home?
It is a pleasant task to gaze at, and speak of, aesthetics. It passes the time on the way to the slaughterhouse:
“Fear of new limits prompts flood of lawsuits before DeSantis signed restrictions into law
John Kennedy
Capital Bureau | USA TODAY NETWORK – FLORIDA”
https://www.news-journalonline.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/24/thousands-lawsuits-filed-florida-before-limits-kick-in-desantis/70045705007/