weekly digest #20
may 11-17, 2026: on the calculation of volume iv, loved and missed, virtual graduation, a finished sewing project
I’ve been feeling very tired this past week – bogged down. I’m always fatigued, but fatigue has different faces. I try to describe them but only come up with empty metaphors. The most accurate words – foggy, slow, muddy – seem almost romantic, dreamlike. I do feel like I’m moving through a dream sometimes, but there’s nothing romantic about it. Time doesn’t always flow right, everything feels just a little disjointed, but it’s all very mundane. It’s insulting, somehow, that despite being all-consuming, chronic illness is not at all interesting.
The trip to Augusta was bad for me, too much. I hope that something positive comes from it and my disability application is approved. I don’t have much faith in the process. I’m sure it will be a while before I have any answers.
reading
I read On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (published 2022, translation 2026), the fourth of seven books about Tara Selter, an antiquarian bookseller trapped in a timeloop on the eighteenth of November. Spoilers ahead for the entire series so far – if you’re at all interested in reading these and haven’t yet, I highly recommend you pick them up immediately, with as little further information as possible.
Balle’s brilliance – beyond her wonderful prose – is how she takes the familiar shape of the timeloop and gradually expands it book by book. The expected narrative is one person alone in the loop, among familiar people and places rendered alien by their repetition. This is, more or less, how the first book goes – as each day passes, Tara is further removed from her husband, who cannot change or remember that she has. Then the second book questions what if we move out of the familiar and explore an unchanging world, insert yourself into other loops in other places in an attempt to feel like time is continuing? But that doesn’t work, it only makes time’s stagnancy clearer. In the third book, Tara realizes she isn’t alone, that there are other people trapped in the eighteenth with her. And in the fourth book, she realizes she is not only not alone, but there are so many others they now have to figure out the rules and language of a new society of people who are all marooned in time. And after all, what are the connections between strangers who have not chosen each other? Their connection is deeper than one of pure circumstance or proximity, but they have not sought each other out for any other reason.
What do we think of one another? I do not know. Have we become friends? I think so. What else could we be called? Housemates? We are more than that. We are tied together by a shared history. Not a family history, nor a childhood story. We are not like pupils in the same grade: people bound together by birth year or geography. We haven’t chosen one another or signed up for a club from which we can resign, we are not a sports team that we can quit or be dropped from. It is not a workers’ union, we are not classmates or colleagues. We are joined together by the unpredictability or time, or that is how we think of it—we have fallen out of the world, each of us plummeting, all of us dizzy. Our lonely wanderings in the eighteenth. And our meetings. Not being alone anymore. All the things we do not need to explain.
There is no easy word for their relationships – no words for many things in this new world. Language is incomplete, insufficient, especially when most of the characters speak different mother tongues. It’s fascinating what Balle chooses to focus on, both the practical and philosophical problems and questions of a life on permanent repeat. I can’t wait for the next book, which won’t be available in English until November.
I also read Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt (published 2021). Ruth, a lonely part-time schoolteacher, is estranged from her daughter Eleanor, who is addicted to heroin. When Eleanor has a baby and proves unable to properly care for her, Ruth manipulates her way into custody. She’s frustrated by her own pain, decades worth of agonizing over her daughter’s choices. Looking at her granddaughter, she thinks:
Lily’s outlook was healthy, she was very taken with life, squeezing delight out of a mushroom or a cotton reel, pretty amazing when you consider she was half poisoned before she was even born.
I felt arrows of rage rising in me, fraught images spreading like bloodstains. There’s no point, I told myself. I reached for the ordinary decoys. It won’t get you anywhere. Think of the outcome you want and make sure you are moving towards it. Got to be practical. That was what I always told the girls at school. There is so much in life that doesn’t matter, so many things that hold you back, hem you in and throw you off the scent of what’s important. Don’t get too bogged down in things that don’t count or things you cannot influence, and specifically don’t worry too much about making sure others know you’re in the right, because it so easily gets in the way of what you want and need.
She pushes her grief to the side, relegates it to a constant background ache. As Lily grows up, the two form an easy bond, a love that is essential and nourishing to them both, but Eleanor’s absence is always there, a shadow over both their lives. Boyt’s writing is beautifully restrained, not trying to provide neat psychological answers for her characters’ struggles. It’s an honest, devastating novel.
watching
I started watching Hacks again, another show that I abandoned more or less at random. I like dramedies, but it’s hard to hit the right balance between comedy and drama. I often find myself wishing that Hacks leaned more towards comedy than it does. When a show is about comedy, I just want there to be more jokes per episode than what we’re getting here.
I also watched the livestream of my younger sibling’s graduation from their master’s program. Most people in the auditorium didn’t realize they were being recorded; there were a lot of blank, bored faces. Some of the graduates stated directly into the camera. Processionals are boring in person, but there’s at least a sense of occasion, the scale of the student body, the feeling of being in a crowd. On a computer screen it’s just a lot of chairs and faces. The rest of my family was there in person. Sometimes illness gets you out of things – driving to Boston, sitting in a hot auditorium – but the cost is always you, at home, alone, again. Maybe I’m just having a bad day, but I miss being a person in the world.
listening
I’m still on an Otis Redding kick. The way I listen to music frequently borders on obsessive. This week I alternated between Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul and The Dock of the Bay on repeat. I can’t get enough of his voice.
eating & drinking
Highlights of this week included sourdough cinnamon rolls, chipotle chicken with pistachio avocado sauce (crucially, my dad also sauteed some corn and peppers, which this dish would not have been nearly as good without), tofu and veggies with peanut sauce, carnitas tacos, and cinnamon sugar toast. For the best cinnamon sugar toast, you need to use salted butter and add a pinch of salt to your cinnamon sugar mixture. I like to mix a little brown sugar in with the granulated. If you have a toaster oven, you can put the toast back under the heat once you’ve topped it for just a couple of seconds to get the sugar to melt.
making
I finished sewing my Mary Quant-inspired dress. I don’t love it! The fit isn’t amazing – I should have made a toile. I’m going to wear it a few times and see what I think. I might shorten it a couple inches or I might end up taking it apart and reusing the fabric for something else.
I’m glad I made it, though. The process was interesting and I learned a lot. It was something to do with my hands and a way to learn new skills without tiring myself out too much, and that was all more important than the end result, which is at the end of the day a perfectly wearable dress.
shopping
I’m looking at rugs again but I still haven’t found the right one. Secondhand shopping (especially online) is all about patience.
kitsch corner
I love this goofy pool-shaped chip and dip that I saw on pinterest. As far as I can tell, it was originally sold by some brand called Lotus in the 90’s, but by the time any image makes the rounds on pinterest sourcing information becomes bleak. Someone else posted a video of a whole set. Wonderful.
See you next week.
xoxo,
Franny 💋🏊🏻