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Weather: Showers and thunderstorms likely, mainly after 2pm. Mostly sunny, with a high near 91. Chance of precipitation is 70%. Monday Night: Showers and thunderstorms likely, mainly before 8pm. Partly cloudy, with a low around 75. Chance of precipitation is 60%.
- 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 Flagler County Commission holds a 1 p.m. workshop to discuss the potential leasing of Bull Creek, and to discuss next year’s budget. The commission meets again in a regular session at 5 p.m. Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell.
The Flagler County Library Board of Trustees meets at 4:30 p.m. at the Flagler County Public Library, 2500 Palm Coast Pkwy NW, Palm Coast. The meeting of the seven-member board is open to the public.
The Bunnell City Commission meets at 7 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell, where the City Commission is holding its meetings until it is able to occupy its own City Hall on Commerce Parkway in 2025. To access meeting agendas, materials and minutes, go here.
Nar-Anon Family Groups offers hope and help for families and friends of addicts through a 12-step program, 6 p.m. at St. Mark by the Sea Lutheran Church, 303 Palm Coast Pkwy NE, Palm Coast, Fellowship Hall Entrance. See the website, www.nar-anon.org, or call (800) 477-6291. Find virtual meetings here.
Notably: Carnac. It is one of my favorite places in France, in the world. It’s one of my favorite place names. It is like the Fargo, North Dakota of pre-historic Brittany, its Neolithic dolmens as enigmatic and beautiful in their own way as the caves of Lascaux and Altamira, even without the refinement of the cave paintings. The emotion is there, but it’s different. The cave paintings could have been painted yesterday. They are so alive that you can see the bison breathe and the horses fly. The stones are rooted in time and place with a weight of history you can rarely taste so ruggedly anywhere else. It is those same stones, 2,934 of them, that men and probably women of those tens of thousands of years ago brought here and lined up straight, not with as much symmetry as Stonehenge. The stones of Carnac remind me of the endless caravans of matchbox cars my son used to create across our carpeting in what now feels like our own family pre-history, when we were all so foreign to wrinkles. It’s funny. George Sand didn;t like the dolmens. From her memoirs: “We were indignant about dolmens and menhirs, and we came across festivals where we saw all the costumes that are said to have been abolished and that the old people still wear. Well, it’s ugly, these men of the past with their canvas breeches, their long hair, their jackets with pockets under the arms, their stupid look, half drunk, half devout. And the Celtic debris, undeniably curious for the archaeologist, has nothing for the artist, it is poorly framed, poorly composed, Carnac and Erdeven have no physiognomy. In short, Brittany will not have my bones, I would like your opulent Normandy a thousand times better.” I’m not certain the translation does her justice, but you get the idea. Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban novelist who spent most of his productive years in France (he died in 1980) called them “a few menhirs–piles of stones without art or charm.” Flaubert, in a more jovial mood, called them, with a wink to Onan, “pierres branlantes” (“branler” is the French verb for wanking). Of course on this side of the Atlantic any “Carnac” search usually brings up Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon. The magnificence, however, is elsewhere. Like that magnificent scene from Casablanca, below, which one day will drown out our own maggoty maga era. Happy Bastille Day.
—P.T.
Now this:
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At nightfall I go alone to the menhirs: the last harvesters returned on carts full of hay, with songs that were lost in the distance, songs that answered each other, the wheat rustled with the cries of crickets. In a bend in the path, indistinct by the darkness, the gray mass of the menhir, lying on the ground in a collapse of four enormous rocks, broken from the same monolith: the impression of a titan knocked down by lightning, fierce and still proud despite its fall. Climbing to the highest point, for a long time I saw the headlights light up one by one in the night, then the stars clearer.
–From André Gide’s Journal, 1887-1925 (1996).
The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.
