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Weather: Mostly sunny. A chance of showers in the morning, then showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 90s. Temperature falling into the mid 80s in the afternoon. Chance of rain 90 percent. Sunday Night: Mostly cloudy with showers and thunderstorms. Lows in the lower 70s. Rainy.
- 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:
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]
A Freedom Walk is scheduled for 10 a.m. from the St. Joe Walkway trailhead, directly across from the European Village Farmer’s Market, today marking Pride Month’s finale. The event is organized by Flagler 50501. For other related marches in surrounding counties go here.
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students: 9:30 to 10:25 a.m. at Grace Presbyterian Church, 1225 Royal Palms Parkway, Palm Coast. Improve your English skills while studying the Bible. This study is geared toward intermediate and advanced level English Language Learners.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from noon to 3 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.
Notably: during his stay in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) in 1745 Casanova would meet the great Josuff Ali, an urbane philosopher with whom he’d have long conversations about belief, atheism, women, tobacco. Josuf Ali’s description of pipe-smoking is even more beautiful than Flaubert’s who, in a letter to his friend Ernest Chevalier in 1842, when Flaubert was 20, wrote him: “Moderate your ardor for science and always devote yourself to the pipe. It is something for which I nourish an increasingly fervent religion. — There is nothing in the world worth the smoke that flies from it, nor the nerve that garnishes it. It breaks, it is true, but it is replaced; illusions are not the same.” The following year he tells Chevalier: “Ah! Without the pipe life would be arid, without the cigar it would be colorless, without the quid it would be intolerable.” John Updike in Roger’s Version has a few choice lines about it: “The pleasures of a pipe. The tapping, the poking, the twisting, the cleaning, the stuffing, the lighting: those first cheek-hollowing puffs, and the dramatic way the match flame is sucked deep into the tobacco, leaps high in release, and is sucked deep again. And then the mouth-filling perfume, the commanding clouds of smoke. Oddly, I find the facial expressions and mannerisms of other men who smoke pipes stagy, prissy, preening, and offensive. But ever since I, as an unheeded admonition to Esther some years ago, gave up cigarettes, the pipe has been my comfort, my steeplejack’s grab, my handhold on the precipitous cliff of life.” But here’s what Josuff Ali tells Casanova: “The perfection of tobacco is certainly necessary for the pleasure of smoking; but it is not the principal one, for the pleasure that good tobacco gives is only sensual. True pleasures are those that affect only the soul, entirely independent of the senses. Is it not true that you feel satisfied when you put it down only after having completely finished it? You are very pleased when you see that what remains is only ash. Here are two, from which your senses are certainly not apart; but I beg you to guess the third, which is the principal one. It’s a pleasure of the sense of smell: it’s sensual. The principal pleasure of smoking consists in the sight of the smoke. You must never see it coming out of the pipe; but all from the corner of your mouth at just the right intervals, never too frequent. It’s so true that this pleasure is the principal one, that you will nowhere see a blind man enjoying smoking. Try smoking yourself at night in your room without a light, and a moment after lighting your pipe, put it down.” Tow hich Casano tells him: “What you say is quite true; but you will forgive me if I find that several pleasures that interest my senses deserve my preference over those that interest only the soul.” Josuff replies: “I have thought like you for forty years.”
—P.T.
Now this:
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As for Simenon himself, he smoked Dunhills and Charatans, among others, and kept racks of pipes on the walls of his offices. He built an affection for Granger tobacco while living in the U.S., and a tin of Royal Yacht is seen on his desk in at least one photo. Simenon wrote a letter about his pipes in 1951, and it was reproduced by Tom Dunn of The Pipe Smoker’s Ephemeris. Part of it is online at the forum Pipe Smoker’s Den (scroll to message number 53, posted by MLC). In that letter, Simeon explains why he always has two pipes, one small and one large, in the same brand and shape: “It is that my wife gives me, each time, the same pipe in the large and small size both. The large one is for the house, the small one to carry around.” In that same post, Simenon explains his preference for Bruyere pipes, “Which does not preclude my smoking occasionally pipes of clay, wild cherry tree and even corncob. Though all the briar comes from France and North Africa, the English buy the best of the stock and, up to now, are the only ones to know how to turn out a perfectly balanced pipe. Neither in France nor in the U.S. has a perfectly balanced pipe been as yet produced. For a long time, Dunhill was the best in the field. They now go in for women’s handbags, painted neckties, etc., and pipes have been pushed into the background. I think that the best pipe, at present, is made by Charatan, in London.”
–From Chuck Stanion’s “A True Pipe Smoker: Georges Simenon,” in Smokingpipes, Oct. 22, 2021.
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