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Weather: Sunny. Highs in the lower 80s. Saturday Night: Partly cloudy. Lows in the lower 60s.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
The Saturday Flagler Beach Farmers Market is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at Wickline Park, 315 South 7th Street, featuring prepared food, fruit, vegetables , handmade products and local arts from more than 30 local merchants. The market is hosted by Flagler Strong, a non-profit.
2025 History Academy Talk Presented by the Palm Coast Historical Society, 10 a.m. at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway. To register for this free lecture, please call 386-986-2323 or register online. www.parksandrec.fun or https://secure.rec1.com/FL/palm-coast-fl/catalog. The Academy is organized by Dr. Elaine Studnicki. Today’s talk: “2025 History Academy Talk: Henry Flagler: Florida Visionary,” by Dr. Cori Convertito. Henry Flagler was a self-made millionaire and industrialist who co-founded the Standard Oil Company. In time, the Flagler name would be more associated with the development of Florida and the construction of its railroads. This presentation showcases Henry Flagler’s history and vision for the state and his contributions to the east coast of Florida.
Coffee With Commissioner Scott Spradley: Flagler Beach Commission Chairman Scott Spradley hosts his weekly informal town hall with coffee and doughnuts at 9 a.m. at his law office at 301 South Central Avenue, Flagler Beach. All subjects, all interested residents or non-residents welcome. The gatherings usually feature a special guest.
The North East Florida Jazz Association (NEFJA) Jazz Appreciation Concert: NEFJA is presenting a jazz appreciation concert on April 19 at 2:30 p.m. at Palm Coast United Methodist Church, 6500 Belle Terre Parkway, Palm Coast. The headliner will be the talented saxophone player Melvin Smith and his quintet. Melvin and his group have performed for NEFJA previously. Tickets are $40. For more than 35 years, the North East Florida Jazz Association (NEFJA) has worked diligently to keep Jazz, America’s indigenous music, alive in Northeast Florida by presenting live world-class Jazz concerts to local audiences and by providing scholarships to talented young students of Jazz. For tickets, order online at nefja.org.
Democratic Women’s Club of Flagler County meeting at 9:30 a.m. at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE.
‘Sense and Sensibility’ at St. Augustine’s Limelight Theatre, 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, with a Tuesday, April 15 performance at 7:30 p.m. Oh the story of the impoverished Dashwood family! Based on Jane Austen’s novel, this play follows Elinor and Marianne who become destitute upon the death of their father, who leaves his estate to their half-brother, John. Due to his wife’s interference, they must survive on a meager allowance.
Storytime: Ayşegül Savaş is a contemporary Turkish writer whose Anthropologists was, along with Samantha Harvey’s Orbital and Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, was apparently one of Obama’s favorite books of 2024. She writes spare, direct prose, her one possible drawback being her MFA: it’s difficult to free oneself entirely of the suspicion that people who seek degrees in writing are that many degrees distant from the essence of the craft. Her “Marseille” appears in the April 7 New Yorker (March 30 online). Amina, Lisa and Alba are friends from university, now a few years further on. Amina is married and has a young child, her life and body and schedules changed: she doesn’t mind going out with a “button-down shirt, slightly stained from the baby’s bottle that morning,” though her friends do. She lives in Lyon. Alba lives in Madrid, Lisa in Zurich. They’d studied together in England. A very cosmopolitan sort of trio written about by Savaş without self-awareness about the kind of life that allows three people so easily to cross borders across a continent for a weekend. Then again distances and travel in Europe aren’t the nightmares they are in the United States. They meet in Marseille for a two-day reunion. Lisa arranged everything–hotel, restaurants, museums–but it is Alba, always on the hunt for a score, who upends it all as she chases and thinks she’s getting chased by a bearded waiter they meet on their first day out. The waiter suggested they visit an island for its rusticity. They do, but miss the main attraction, not realizing it’s where Cézanne painted. Amina is bothered that the museums get ignored but doesn’t speak up. The waiter bails on his date with Alba, shocking her, and shocking her more when Lisa wonders: “‘Oh, my God,’ Lisa said. ‘What if . . . what if he thought we were just a bunch of aunties?’ ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Alba said. ‘I already thought about it—he’s at most five, maybe six years younger. Besides, we don’t show our age.’” Of course they do, and Alba seems unaware that she is harshly judging Amina’s age and motherhood: “Darling, you’re always fabulous. You just need some sleep. And maybe a haircut,” Alba tells her. “Amina felt a shudder of annoyance at the bluntness of the comment, and also at its blindness—that signs of her transformation should be guessed at from her appearance. She held back from saying something bitter. She shouldn’t make a big deal of it, she thought. This was the way they’d always been with one another. But it was true that she felt, at that moment, defeated.” Spare style, spare substance: the women are no longer in their late teens and early 20s, just a bit older than that, and the weariness–the sexlessness of Amina’s marriage–the little precursive shudders of terror at aging so quickly are making themselves felt in between the elbowing selfishness of Alba or the anal Lisa, who’s bored in Zurich. The reader sympathizes up to a point, but the story feels thinner than sheer muslin, like some of Sally Rooney’s less accomplished chapters. I wouldn’t want to be around when Alba and Lisa are aunties.
—P.T.
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Alba had separated from her boyfriend some months ago. She’d informed Amina and Lisa briefly of the fact, brushing away the details, as she did with every breakup. She’d known from the start it was just a fling, she’d texted their group chat, though Amina seemed to remember that there’d once been talk of having a child. She could no longer recall whether this had been a serious plan or simply a consequence of Alba’s age, at which the question could no longer be ignored. If, that is, Alba even wanted to have a child—she’d always been at once transparent and mysterious about her desires. Blunt and elusive. Lisa had taken off her shirt. She was not wearing a bra, and Amina thought that her body had not changed very much since their student years. Then, too, the three of them would gather in one another’s rooms and invent reasons to take off their clothes. Had it been a requisite for intimacy? Or a silent competition? Full-moon gatherings and menstrual rituals—they loved that sort of thing, the way it made them beautiful, brought them together. Amina had other close friends—studious types, with whom the body became invisible, or irrelevant. It was with them that she discussed serious matters: choices, strategies, philosophies. It was with them that she could be sad. Whereas her friendship with Alba and Lisa demanded cheer; it was carried forth by a constant desire to enjoy life. Alba and Lisa were still without clothes, showing each other tasteful, expensive options for outfits, so different from the flowery, tattered garments they’d worn as young women, when they borrowed dresses and shoes from one another for parties. Just like their clothes, her friends’ bodies had more purpose now, Amina thought; they were muscled and smooth, made to look that way through discipline and deliberation. She turned away, as if she could no longer examine them on equal footing. It seemed that she’d stepped off the imaginary stage where the three of them had once stood together. Finally, they left the apartment.
–From Ayşegül Savaş’s “Marseille,” The New Yorker, March 30, 2025.
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