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Weather: Showers and thunderstorms. Highs in the lower 90s. Northwest winds around 5 mph, becoming east around 5 mph in the afternoon. Chance of rain 80 percent. Heat index values up to 108. Sunday Night: Partly cloudy. Showers and thunderstorms likely, mainly in the evening. Lows in the mid 70s. South winds around 5 mph in the evening, becoming light and variable. Chance of rain 70 percent.
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]
St. Augustine Music Festival, a series of six free concerts held throughout two weekends in the historic Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine. The concerts take place Friday – Sunday at 7:30 p.m. with a different performance each evening. Doors open 30 minutes prior to showtime. 38 Cathedral Place, St. Augustine. 904-484-4960
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.
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.
| In Coming Days: Rally for Reproductive Rights: Members and friends of the Atlantic Coast Chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State (www.au.org) will gather to rally for Women’s Reproductive Rights from 4 to 5 p.m. on Wednesday, July 3, at the northwest corner of Belle Terre and Pine Lake Parkways in Palm Coast. They protest Florida’s six-week abortion ban and urge voters to vote “Yes” on Florida Amendment 4, Right to Abortion Initiative. This event will last an hour and is open to the public; all are welcome. There is no charge. Participants are invited to bring US flags and their own signs promoting religious freedom, separation of church and state, and reproductive rights. For further information email [email protected] or call 804-914-4460. July 4: Choral Arts Society Presents “Celebrate America”, 1 p.m. at St Thomas Episcopal Church, 5400 Belle Terre Parkway, Palm Coast. Choral Arts Society provides a wonderful concert of “Music from the Stage” with many of your favorites. There is no admission charge, but tax-free donations are accepted to assist in providing scholarships to local college-bound students. Please go to www.casfl.org for more information, or send an email to [email protected] July 16: Identity Theft/Scams/Fraud Workshop at Flagler Woman’s Club, 10 a.m. at the clubhouse, 1524 S Central Ave, Flagler Beach. The Flagler Woman’s Club invites you to join us for a workshop on Preventing Identity Theft, Scams and Fraud. Cmdr. Frank Lutz of the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office will present. Please call Mary at 386-569-7813 to reserve your spot. |
Byblos: In V.S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers, the late Nobel laureate’s 1981 surly, condescending account of his travels in Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia in quest of a better understanding of Islam, which he insistently confuses with Islamic fundamentalism, to not say Islamists, he writes of a young man in Malaysia who complains about having left his village for city life. “Sometimes my wife feels that we should go back to the village, and I also feel the same. Not running away from the modern world, but trying to live a simpler, more meaningful life than coming to the city, where you have lots of waste and lots of things that is not real probably,” Naipaul quotes the man as saying, preserving the man’s syntax. “Village life–wouldn’t you say it is dull for most people?” Naipaul asks him. He replies: “”The village? It’s simple. It’s devoid of–what shall I say?– wastefulness. You shouldn’t waste. You don’t have to rush for things. My point about going back to the kampong is to stay with the community and not to run away from development. The society is well knit. If someone passed away there is an alarm in the kampong, where most of us would know who passed away and when he is going to be buried, what is the cause of death, and what happened to the next of kin–are they around? It’s not polluted in the village. Physical pollution, mental, social.” I happen to have been reading Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater at the same time. (We can read seventeen different articles in a single sitting from one newspaper–well, these days it takes three or four newspapers to add up to 17 articles, since newspapers have become so threadbare. Point being: why can;t we read 7 books simultaneously? Of course we can.) The coincidence that morning was too much. I’d had enough of Naipaul for the day. I turned to Roth. And within pages, arrived at his description of Manhattan as he returns to the city after many years in his isolated “village.” Roth writes: Sabbath “had missed the transformation of New York into a place utterly antagonistic to sanity and civil life, a city that by the 1990s had brought to perfection the art of killing the soul. If you had a living soul (and Sabbath no longer made such a claim for himself), it could die here in a thousand different ways at any hour of the day or night. And that was not to speak of unmetaphorical death, of citizens as prey, of everyone from the helpless elderly to the littlest of schoolchildren infected with fear, nothing in the whole city, not even the turbines of Con Ed, as mighty and galvanic as fear. New York was a city completely gone wrong, where nothing but the subway was subterranean anymore.” I thought the coincidence remarkable in itself, though we tend to find coincidences strange or somehow metaphysical, when, like Magritte’s pipe, all they are are coincidences: they are mathematically inevitable. But I also found Roth’s passage useful to deflate Naipaul’s, who would impose those assumptions he has about “the village” and “the city” through the eyes of his Malay man as if they were revealing of a Malay dichotomy, as if they were one more example of those Muslim’s backwardness (a point he likes to make), as if he was not reflecting a dichotomy that has nothing to do with Islam, or that particular Muslim he’s talking to, but with all sorts of perceptions of country and city life anywhere on the planet, even y some of the planet’s most advanced intellects–even by those intellects more advanced than Naipaul’s, as Roth’s, for all its narcissism and scabrous leaks, was.
—P.T.
Now this:
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The news told him nothing. The news was for people to talk about, and Sabbath, indifferent to the untransgressive run of normalized pursuits, did not wish to talk to people. He didn’t care who was at war with whom or where a plane had crashed or what had befallen Bangladesh. He did not even want to know who the president was of the United States. He’d rather fuck Drenka, he’d rather fuck anyone, than watch Tom Brokaw. His range of pleasures was narrow and never did extend to the evening news. Sabbath was reduced the way a sauce is reduced, boiled down by his burners, the better to concentrate his essence and be defiantly himself.
–From Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater (1995).
The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.
