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Weather: Partly cloudy. Highs in the upper 60s. North winds 10 to 15 mph with gusts up to 25 mph. Tuesday Night: Mostly cloudy and not as cool. Near steady temperature in the upper 50s. North winds 10 to 15 mph. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
The Palm Coast City Council meets in workshop at 9 a.m. at City Hall. It’s a long agenda, for its last of the year. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here.
The Community Traffic Safety Team led by Flagler County Commissioner Andy Dance meets at 9 a.m. in the third-floor commission conference room at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. You may also join by zoom. Meeting ID: 823 5444 1058, Passcode: 565882
The Flagler County Planning Board meets at 5:30 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. See board documents, including agendas and background materials, here. Watch the meeting or past meetings here.
The St. Johns River Water Management District Governing Board holds its regular monthly meeting at its Palatka headquarters. The public is invited to attend and to offer in-person comment on Board agenda items. 10 a.m. A livestream will also be available for members of the public to observe the meeting online. Governing Board Room, 4049 Reid St., Palatka. Click this link to access the streaming broadcast. The live video feed begins approximately five minutes before the scheduled meeting time. Meeting agendas are available online here.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center: Nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. at Palm Coast’s Central Park, with 55 lighted displays you can enjoy with a leisurely stroll around the pond in the park. Admission to Fantasy Lights is free, but donations to support Rotary’s service work are gladly accepted. Holiday music will pipe through the speaker system throughout the park, Santa’s Village, which has several elf houses for the kids to explore, will be open, with Santa’s Merry Train Ride nightly (weather permitting), and Santa will be there every Sunday night until Christmas, plus snow on weekends! On certain nights, live musical performances will be held on the stage.
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy, 8 p.m. at Cinematique Theater, 242 South Beach Street, Daytona Beach. General admission is $8.50. Every Tuesday and on the first Saturday of every month the Random Acts of Insanity Comedy Improv Troupe specializes in performing fast-paced improvised comedy.
In Coming Days:
Dec. 23: Culmination of toy drive for Toys for Tots at AW Custom Kitchens, European Village, starting at 11 a.m. A drawing for all eligible participants will take place at 2 p.m. Anyone who will have donated toys for the drive will have a chance to win various items, including a 65-inch 4K Smart TV, an Apple iPad, a pair of Apple Air Pods, and gift cards from the co-sponsors of the event. Fifty such cards have been donated. With proof of a voucher, donors also will receive a free hot dog, a free drink, a free popcorn, a free cotton candy, and a free snow cone. There will be a variety of fun things to do such as a bouncy house for children in thanks to the community for its generosity. See details here.
Notably: In 1992 one of Joyce Carol Oates’s 72 novels that year was Black Water, a short one nakedly borrowing Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick manslaughter to tell the story of Mary-Jo Kopechne by way of Kelly Kelleher, a name Oates, with her penchant for self-conscious idiosyncrasies, mentions 93 times in 140 pages. It’s rarely just Kelly, except when The Senator is tasting the name on his tongue, it’s never Kelleher. Always Kelly Kelleher. You’re never sure why, other than the sloshing alliteration that echoes the actual sloshing in the car, where we spend about half the novel as she sees her life seep away, after The Senator uses her body as leverage to get the hell out and leave her there. She thinks he’s coming back. How could he not? The Senator is never named. The book makes explicit references to the 1988 presidential race, Dukakis and the rest of them. One problem with the book, and there are many, is that the reader might find it a bit difficult to care for Kelly Kelleher, who seems to have more in common with an extra on Sex and the City than anyone you want to know much about. The passages on sex and power are very good (“he had chosen her”). Oates is good with power, though it’s as often as not about self-worth, simply self-worth (“and if men looked at her she stiffened feeling her jaws tighten her blood beat with dread and if men did not look at her, if their glances slipped past her as if she were invisible, she felt a yet deeper dread: a conviction of not merely female but human failure.”) She’s also very good at giving voices to the voiceless, and how voiceless this woman ended up being, different as she is from Mary Jo. I tried to like her. I couldn’t. Maybe it’s the association: she fell for The Senator. It doesn’t help that I’ve never cared much for the Kennedys, the whole Camelot bits, the intemperance (America dodged the bullet Bobby did not with that guy, did we not? though Nixon wasn’t exactly an improvement), and especially not the whole Chappaquiddick thing. Oates claimed the book wasn’t about that. (Every detail, from the dirt road to the narrow bridge to the pond is about that.) “I wanted the story to be somewhat mythical, the almost archetypal experience of a young woman who trusts an older man and whose trust is violated,” she was quoted in the Times as saying. I’m not seeing the mythical. Chappaquiddick is too weedy, too repulsive, to allow the mythical. Ted may have spent his decades hence atoning, and not in bad ways. But replacing the murky waters of that pond with run-on sentences doesn’t make it mythical. It’s a bit tedious and often pretentious, with the occasional flashes of great beauty and pathos, like when Kelly–Kelly Kelleher–thinks to herself how her life could possibly end just then, after so little, and, as Oates put it, How crucial for us to rehearse the future, in words. Never to doubt that you will live to utter them. Never to doubt that you will tell your story.”
—P.T.
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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.
Nar-Anon Family Group
Flagler County Beekeepers Association Meeting
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Bunnell City Commission Meeting
Palm Coast City Council Workshop
Book Dragons, the Kids’ Book Club, at Flagler Beach Public Library
NAACP Flagler Branch General Membership Meeting
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
For the full calendar, go here.
She heard the single expletive “Hey!” as the car skidded into a guardrail skidding sideways, the right rear coming around as in a demonic amusement ride and her head cracked against the window a red mist flashing across her eyes but she could not draw breath to scream as the momentum of their speed carried them down a brief but steep embankment, an angry staccato tapping against the car as if dried sticks were being broken, still she had not breath to scream as the car plunged into what appeared to be a pit, a pool, stagnant water in the marshland you might think only a few feet deep but black water was churning alive and purposeful on all sides tugging them down, the car sinking on its side, and Kelly was blinded, The Senator fell against her and their heads knocked and how long it was the two of them struggled together, stunned, desperate, in terror of what was happening out of their control and even their comprehension except to think This can’t be happening, am I going to die like this, how many seconds or minutes before The Senator moaning “Oh God. Oh God” fumbled clawing at the safety belts extricating himself by sheer strength from his seat behind the broken steering wheel and with fanatic strength forcing himself through the door, opening the door against the weight of black water and gravity that door so strangely where it should not have been, overhead, directly over their heads, as if the very earth had tilted insanely on its axis and the sky now invisible was lost in the black muck beneath—how long, in her terror and confusion Kelly Kelleher could not have said. She was fighting to escape the water, she was clutching at a man’s muscular forearm even as he shoved her away, she was clutching at his trousered leg, his foot, his foot in its crepe-soled canvas shoe heavy and crushing upon her striking the side of her head, her left temple so now she did cry out in pain and hurt grabbing at his leg frantically, her fingernails tearing, then at his ankle, his foot, his shoe, the crepe-soled canvas shoe that came off in her hand so she was left behind crying, begging, “Don’t leave me!—help me! Wait!” Having no name to call him as the black water rushed upon her to fill her lungs.
–From Joyce Carol Oates’s Black Water (1992)
Ed Stern says
This cartoon is typical of left leaning ideology
Do you take into account israel position
What a difficult war they are fighting
They are trying to survive
The evil that faces them
Shame on you for this cartoon about how American interest
Are being derailed in middle east
Israel is only ally in region
Pierre Tristam says
“They are trying to survive,” he writes of Israel, as we approach the 20,000 mark of Palestinian dead. Very convincing.