It has been a rather bleak month for many of our friends here, and we've been a bit sideswiped by so much sadness striking so close to home in such a short period of time.

Apart from that, for us, it has predominantly been a busy month, with long to-do lists that we're slowly chugging our way through, en route to a goal in mid-September when we will have vacated our apartment, put everything in store, and headed off to Europe for a few months (health and other emergencies permitting).

So it has been a humdrum kind of period.

The Chinese opera at our nearby temple was definitely one of its highlights; another string of visits to various medical practitioners cumulatively weigh in as its least desirable elements.


Kuching's seemingly permanent festival mood continues:




And it has been incredibly rainy... Which is odd for August. Although it does mean we've escaped the smoke pollution of last year's August.


Despite all the busy-busy, it has been a good reading month. In fact, reading as escapism has been more necessary than ever. When you're doing some tedious sorting task, an audio-book will sweeten the pill; and when you're startled out of sleep by all the lists flicking through your brain, a book will tide you over the wakeful hours.

Appearing in the crime category this month were the gruesome but highly atmospheric Generation Loss, by Elizabeth Hand; Maigret and the Port of Fog, a classic by Georges Simenon; and the slightly disappointing Lethal White, by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling).

Book notes made a third bow, mostly focusing on brilliant people. There was a long and rambly film post on Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso. And I've begun a bit of a Franz Kafka quest (June saw the 100th anniversary of his death, sparking a fair amount of razzmatazz in various places).

In the memorably moving category were Stoner, by John Williams (doubly interesting because set in academia), and Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid (doubly interesting because dealing with migrants). And in the highly-readable-but-slightly-weird category were The Extinction of Irena Rey, by Jennifer Croft, and The New York Trilogy, by Paul Auster (about translating and writing, respectively, and therefore also very much in PT's zone).




I'm still just about keeping up with the online book group that's working its way through Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy under the estimable leadership of Simon Haisell. It's to him that I owe the memory-jog about a painting I recall seeing somewhere before. It's by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and it's called Landscape With the Fall of Icarus (you can see it here). It was also the inspiration for a poem, called Musee des Beaux Arts, by W.H. Auden.

Most of the painting is taken up with the depiction of a peasant working his plough, and a huge bay on which boats are going about their business. Down in the bottom right-hand corner, however, so tiny they're hardly visible, are the white legs of Icarus, who has just crashed into the sea because his wings have melted...

Auden says:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window
or just walking dully along...

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

They're interesting pieces because you can see them in different ways. I wonder whether, in our busyness, with our noses to the grindstone, we are failing to spot, or comprehend, or sufficiently give credence to, the latest equivalent of some epochal Icarus event. Or maybe WE'RE Icarus, with our flailing legs and our desperate cries, and it makes sense that no-one's taking any notice, because the ploughman and the shepherd and the fisherman and all the guys toiling away on the boats -- they're where it's at, and white-legged dudes with fancy wax wings don't actually matter one jot.


Anyway, assuming sun-resistant wings and a sturdy vessel, the end of next month should find us on the Isle of Man. May it be.