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Weather: Showers likely with a slight chance of thunderstorms. Highs in the lower 70s. Southeast winds around 10 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. Monday Night: Cloudy with a chance of thunderstorms. Showers likely, mainly in the evening. Lows in the lower 60s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
Merry Christmas.
The Bach Festival Continues: The annual Bach Festival on WKCR runs uninterrupted, commercial free, 24 hours a day, until Dec. 31 at 11:59 p.m. It is accessible online here. No app, no hassles. Just click on “Listen.” WKCR is the radio station of Columbia University. It has been producing the Bach festival since 1980, with students and guests hosting. And if 170 hours aren’t enough, the 89th Annual Bach Festival at Rollins College (it’s been going strong since 1935) begins February 2 and runs through March 3, under the artistic direction of John V. Sinclair. Concerts will include performances by the 160-voice Bach Festival Choir and Orchestra, and guest soloists. It’s presented by the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park. See every concert here, with some of them free and open to the public, but you must reserve ahead of time. See: “Putting Bach Back in Christmas.”
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.
In Coming Days:
Notably: Odd, the number of coronations that took place on Christmas; Charlemagne in 800, a king of Poland in 1025, Henry III (holy Roman emperor), in 1046, crowned by the Pope Clement II, himself impaled by the papacy the same day, and for less than a year (he would die the following October, after what was an unholy marriage to Henry, at least in political and military terms, but what pope wasn’t unholy for all those centuries?), William the Conqueror, crowned at Westminster Abbey in 1066 after his Normandy Invasion in reverse through Hastings, and yet another Polish king in 1076, then the truly repulsive Baldwin, “king” of Jerusalem, who forced the patriarch there to crown him on Christmas day in in 1100, not long after he and his crusaders had massacred everything that moved in the city, then Roger II in Sicily in 1130, and in the last days of the crusaders’ “kingdom,” Hugh III of Cyprus, crowned on Christmas day in 1267, and so on. It’s a wonder Napoleon didn’t do it on Christmas. He couldn’t wait. He did it on Dec. 2. Maybe not so odd: in every case, the arrogance of power weds messianic presumption. There’s a redundance in the motive, a symmetry of pettiness aggrandized into the greatest spectacle on the planet. Napoleon at his coronation vented his contempt for the masses: “The presidents of the cantons and the presidents of the electoral colleges, the army–these are the true people of France,” he said, not “20,000 or 30,000 fishmongers and people of that ilk…; they are only the corrupt and ignorant dregs of society.” Hmmm, who does that sound like?
—P.T.
Now this: Bach’s Cantata BWV 105, “Herr, gehe nicht ins Gericht mit deinem Knecht,” “Lord, do not pass judgment on Your servant.”
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Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
“That itself was a piece of luck,” he listened to himself inanely remark, and then they had their breakfast, some sausages and bacon, the dinner would be the next meal and late. When they’d eaten he hung idle about the kitchen in Elizabeth’s way. He tried to enthuse with the children over their presents, read through the long lists of programmes in walk ten paces to hear, and then he went to the window to watch the grey winter light outside and the withered river grass through the meshes of the netting-wire. How black and silent and purposeful the river flowed, a water-hen close to the far bank, scatters of small brown birds, whose names never interested him, about the whitethorns half-way up the hill beyond, the fields bare and dark with hoof-tracks. His eyes tried to follow the radio aerial from where it left the kitchen at the corner of the window till it disappeared into the sycamore branches, it broke in stormy weather and was often left trail in the earth for days. Tired looking out the window, he went down to the dayroom to search idly through the books, and watched the few people come from last Mass, the sky full of rain or snow. Not even Quirke would come today. All day the doors to the dayroom would remain open. All day they’d have to be alone with each other in the kitchen.
–From John McGahern’s The Barracks (1963).
Pogo says
@P.T.
Happy holidays. Sincerely. Today’s quote inspired a question (there you go again, you rascal) and so, here it is:
https://www.google.com/search?q=irish+authors+banned+in+fl+schools
“There are boys here who have to mend their shoes whatever way they can. There are boys in this class with no shoes at all. It’s not their fault and it’s no shame. Our Lord had no shoes. He died shoeless. Do you see Him hanging on the cross sporting shoes? Do you, boys?”
― Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes
Related
John McGahern
https://www.google.com/search?q=John+McGahern
Frank McCourt
https://www.google.com/search?q=Frank+McCourt
As stated
https://www.google.com/search?q=100+great+irish+authors
Ray W. says
Thank you, Pogo!
Happy Holidays, everyone.
A small budget Irish film, Ondine, is quite good.