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Weather: Sunny. Highs in the lower 90s. Friday Night: Clear. Lows in the mid 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:
Free For All Fridays with Host David Ayres, an hour-long public affairs radio show featuring local newsmakers, personalities, public health updates and the occasional surprise guest, starts a little after 9 a.m. after FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam’s Reality Check. (Hear this week’s commentary, on the end of the American democratic moment, here.) Today: School Board member Janie Ruddy, Rep. Sam Greco and John Phillips. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM, 1550 AM, and live at Flagler Broadcasting’s YouTube channel.
The Scenic A1A Pride Committee meets at 9 a.m. at the Hammock Community Center, 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. The meetings are open to the public.
The Friday Blue Forum, a discussion group organized by local Democrats, meets at 12:15 p.m. at the Flagler Democratic Office at 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214 (above Cue Note) at City Marketplace. Come and add your voice to local, state and national political issues.
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock, 2 to 5 p.m., Picnic Shelter behind the Hammock Community Center at 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. It’s a free event. Bring your Acoustic stringed Instrument (no amplifiers), and a folding chair and join other local amateur musicians for a jam session. Audiences and singers are also welcome. A “Jam Circle” format is where musicians sit around the circle. Each musician in turn gets to call out a song and musical key, and then lead the rest in singing/playing. Then it’s on to the next person in the circle. Depending upon the song, the musicians may take turns playing/improvising a verse and a chorus. It’s lots of Fun! Folks who just want to watch or sing generally sit on the periphery or next to their musician partner. This is a monthly event on the 4th Friday of every month.
Notebook: It’s one of the most well-meaning but annoying flatteries: someone tells me they’re in complete agreement with a column. It stops the conversation dead. Complete agreement is as dull as it gets, and as pointless, for the same reason that I don’t think I’d have been nearly as interested–or useful–had FlaglerLive been, say, BethesdaLive, though I don’t think I could stand to live in a liberal enclave anymore. Too oppressive. Too conformist. Too sanctimonious. We have our Puritan mullahs in the South, as Mencken put it (about mullahs anywhere in the country), but it was of the north, and of Massachusetts in particular, that Hawthorne wrote of “the persecuting spirit.” So I was in 100 percent agreement with Carlos Lozada’s January piece in The Times, his “73 Percent Solution”: “If you react to something I’ve said or written with “100 percent” — in written, oral or emoji form — all you’re telling me is that I probably did not persuade you of anything. Instead of changing your thinking, I affirmed it. “100 percent” lets me know that I’ve accomplished nothing but scratch your ideological itches, confirm your convictions, pinpoint your intellectual erogenous zones. One hundred percent — really? Even if you agreed in the main, did you find nothing at all worthy of disagreement? Not even, say 3 to 5 percent? If so, why should I bother writing, and why would you bother reading? One hundred percent agreement is a high-percentage failure.” I don’t want to say that we’ve lost the art of disagreement. I don’t like that sort of golden-age implication that something was working 10, 30, 50 years ago but isn’t now. I don’t know that we’ve ever mastered that art, which is itself heartening: we should always be pushing for something. Attaining it would be like 100 percent agreement. So we may not have lost the art of disagreement, but we’ve probably never had it, and should foster it a bit more. It’s more interesting to disagree, to argue, to debate–especially on fundamental subjects. It drives me nuts to come into a group of people for a little socializing, only to hear that politics, religion and sex are off the table. What’s left? Taylor Swift? A little less uniformity. A little more disagreement–as long as it’s the sort of disagreement that forecloses neither conversation nor mutual appreciation, otherwise–again–what’s the point? Let’s picket echo chambers and get back to arguing. We’ll live longer. We’ll be happier.
—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.
May 2025
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Scenic A1A Pride Meeting
Friday Blue Forum
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Peps Art Walk Near Beachfront Grille
For the full calendar, go here.
The prevailing style of nonfiction prose today seems quite the opposite of exploratory or experimental, is less interested in compositional challenges or literary playfulness and much more intent upon sustaining a sincere-sounding, unambiguous, straightforward documentation of largely painful personal narratives. Well and good; but one would hope that literary nonfiction would welcome a larger variety of models, a more diverse set of literary standards, an inclusion of more inventive styles. Yet except for a few prose variations—the prose poem (now often termed “lyric essay”), the mosaic or braided meditation, or the numerically segmented piece of nonfiction—it appears that the go-to handbook for most creative nonfiction writers remains Strunk and White’s fairly conventional Elements of Style and not Gertrude Stein’s audacious primer, How to Write.
–From André Aciman’s introduction to Best American Essays 2020 (2021).
Pogo says
@Pat Bagley
Can you spare a dime? I’ve been occupied with my preferred acquaintances — fellow travelers to a salon for navel-gazing; I desire to leave a gratuity with the washroom attendant; and cash is, well, let’s be frank, not the most sanitary of things.
Obsequiously, yours always.