Low Volume, Medium Insight, Questionable Timing — #05: August Wrap Up

Writing, Links, and a Loose Relationship to Deadlines

as always totally unrelated to text below, 2025

I went super silent there for a while. Took a bit of effort to do nothing but it was worth it, necessary and fruitful. An odd choice of word, the last one, but it seems fitting. A lot of background thinking and mulling things over. Sitting on ideas without doing anything with them. Just thinking them over. Letting them settle into the bigger picture. Can’t say I’m super excited about the back to school thing. It’s usually one of my favourite parts of the year. Not so this time. I do have things planned though. And I am excited about them, at least half of the time. The rest is spent in discomfort. The world is just too crazy right now for anything else.

But then again, discomfort seems to be a constant companion in the books I picked up this month too—characters drifting between places, between selves, half belonging and half resisting, lives lived on the margins of what they were “meant” to be. (Margins being where the interesting stuff happens anyway.)

Take Last Orders (Graham Swift, 1996), where old men ferry a dead friend’s ashes from London to Margate, trading secrets and silences as if truth were a cigarette to be passed around. “It was partly that I knew then that it didn’t make no difference, what a man does and how he lives in his head are two different things.” The second part sounds like it should be stitched into a pillow.

And then Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), which reads like the opposite kind of road trip—Karim escaping the beige banality of suburbia into London’s grimy bohemia, fueled not by grief but by the teenage itch to become someone else entirely. A book brimming with energy and the mess of Britain in the 60s and 70s, but also with moments that feel very now: “People who were only ever half right about things drove me mad. I hated the flood of opinion, the certainty, the easy talk about Cuba and Russia and the economy, because beneath the hard structure of words was an abyss of ignorance and not-knowing; and, in a sense, of not wanting to know.” Sound familiar?

Meanwhile Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore (1979) is quieter but no less destabilising. People living on houseboats, anchored and unanchored at once, as tides stand in for all the decisions not made. “There isn’t one kind of happiness, there’s all kinds. Decision is torment for anyone with imagination. When you decide, you multiply the things you might have done and now never can.” That one hit home. The novel is spare, poetic, and slightly soggy around the edges, in the best way. Fitzgerald didn’t publish until she was almost 60, which is its own kind of radical: the permission slip for taking your time, though she’d probably wrinkle her nose at that phrasing.

Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through (2020) ended up tangled in my head with Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door (loosely based on it, mixed reviews, I liked it—especially the end, which I now can’t explain because I’ve already forgotten why). The novel itself has this: “Understood: language would end up falsifying everything, as language always does. Writers know this only too well, they know it better than anyone else, and that is why the good ones sweat and bleed over their sentences, the best ones break themselves into pieces over their sentences, because if there is any truth to be found they believe it will be found there.” Writers breaking themselves into pieces over their sentences, yes, and readers like me breaking themselves trying to remember them.

The music was no less slippery. Carlos Cipa: German pianist, teenage rock drummer, beautiful in-between compositions that refuse to settle into anything. A good companion to Fitzgerald, actually. Both working in the quiet but decisive space of “neither this nor that.”

Kassa Overall: a jazz+funk+something-else mash, though since I don’t speak music fluently I can’t tell you what the “something else” is, only that I liked it. Which is the least helpful endorsement, I know, but honesty counts for something. Theo Croker, easier listening but still jagged in interesting places, cropped up on the same path.

So August became a collection of threshold states: ashes on the road to Margate, teenagers between suburbs and cities, houseboats between land and water, writers on the edge of saying something true but never quite trusting the words to do it. Even the music felt in-between, hard to shelve. A good month for thresholds, even if my own threshold into September feels less like a doorway and more like a revolving one.

Speaking of September: I’ve started Tony Judt’s Postwar, which is over a thousand pages and already has the kind of weight that makes you wonder why you ever thought your spine was up to the task. It puts things in perspective but also makes you wonder what the hell we’re doing, still, again. At the same time I’m reading Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. Great writing, sharp as anything, but unfortunately American, and it’s not their fault, but with all that’s going on I find more and more things American—no matter how critical or insightful or un-orange—harder and harder to stomach. I’m also looking forward to Late Shift, a Swiss movie about a nurse. I don’t know what it’s about really because I skim reviews just enough to make sure it’s worth seeing, but not enough to ruin the actual film. Has anyone seen it? And what else have you been reading, watching, listening to, or looking at lately.