change the pear vol. 3 30 Sep 2022

hello! volume 3 turned out way more earnest than the other two. sorry about that. blame it on the seasons changing and the fact that i’ve been listening to angel of realtime by gang of youths for 3 days straight.

on repeat

1. go UP by jay b. you know when you’ve been in a depressive episode for a while and then one day you wake up and the sun is shining and maybe you’re on the way to see someone you love and you suddenly think hey this life is pretty good actually. listen to this song to hear that feeling captured perfectly. or read this poem [cn: suicide].

2. 2 baddies by NCT 127. this is the stupidest song i’ve ever heard (positive).

3. goal of the century by gang of youths. moving on from kpop to my other favourite genre of music: depressed and fucked up men working through their many issues. the crescendo this song builds to of wondering how to carry on and what being true to yourself means and whether you might actually be capable of making something good….i’m fucked up about it thanks! you wanna know what a life is? god, yeah. yeah, i do.

currently watching

i have nothing to write here because, in a very uncharacteristic move, i haven’t watched a single episode of TV since i last wrote this newsletter, unless you count ATEEZ’s reality shows where they do missions inside a “haunted” house and reenact famous k-dramas. i won’t subject you to my reflections on those but please rest assured that i have never had a normal thought about this boyband in my life and i don’t intend to start now!

last seen

while sarah and i were in florence, we saw some of michelangelo’s works: david, and the tombs of the medici. i’ve seen them before, but i felt overwhelmed all over again standing there in front of them. there’s something just so special about seeing those sculptures in real life—the physicality of them, the way they take up space in a room.

when you approach david, you go past some of michelangelo’s unfinished works. i love those sculptures so much. even unfinished, they manage to be dynamic, alive: they look as though they’re clawing themselves out of stone, prising the marble away, bringing themselves into being. when you get close, you can see the chisel marks on the stone. it’s a reminder that these statues are made out of hard rock, as soft and malleable as they might look in their finished form, and of the work and craft and effort that it took to chip away at something so hard and unyielding.

sarah described michelangelo as having “a reverence for the body”, which i think is a perfect descriptor. it’s the attention to detail that really gets me, the depth of understanding of how bodies look and move and are held together. the way the muscles in your back move when you look over your shoulder. the folds in your stomach when you lie down. the vein running down your hand. the tendon behind your knee. your ankle bone. michelangelo saw it all, every detail, and he cared enough to learn how to carve it all out of stone and immortalise it in the most beautiful sculptures ever made. there they are. and here we are, looking at them.

reading

about six different people messaged me after the news about hilary mantel passing away, probably a testament to how often i manage to corner someone to scream “SHE’S THE GREATEST LIVING WRITER” at them. everything i want to say about hilary mantel feels like hyperbole: she was a genius, her books are masterpieces that will live on forever, etc etc etc. but i mean it all. there will never be another writer like her.

many of the books i read are forgettable. sometimes i feel completely untouched by them, like my eyes are just gliding across the pages, untethered. hilary mantel’s books reach out and grab you by the neck. they are solid, weighty things. reading them is to be held inside history for a brief period of time; a total immersion. every time i emerge breathless and gasping. even when i know what’s coming, even when the history is deeply familiar to me, even when i’m reading the book for the fifth time: somehow she always manages to surprise me.

the historical figures she writes about are mercurial, slippery; somehow she gets inside their heads and makes us understand their motivations, their flaws, what prompts them to action. she could write about huge historical events with the depth and magnitude they deserve, but also zero in on the small, human details like the touch of a palm in yours, or the way the sun looks rising over the thames. she understood how we are all haunted by our past and the people we have loved. and she was funny! she was so funny.

i thought about trying to find some of my favourite parts of her books to share here, but i honestly think she’s not a writer who can be easily excerpted. i’ll leave you with this, though; a better character study in a paragraph than some authors manage in an entire book.

the best to ever do it! miss you, queen.

miscellaneous

the man in the wine bar in florence who gave us a choice of “strong or not strong” red wine and then looked twice at us and immediately went, “okay, strong”. gelato. grilled octopus. prosciutto. being brought free bread in another wine bar. walking around the duomo. sitting by the arno in the late afternoon sun. rediscovering the art shop where my dad bought some wooden whales back in 2009 to find the artist still making whales. sarah’s face when she found out jimin has the phases of the moon tattooed down his back. seeing my favourite teen at climbing. my new bedsheets. eating gochujang chicken with arenike and talking about our favourite website (the locked tomb reddit page). seeing hareem’s nephew be given a bath. & finally, autumn being described as a “beginning and a dwindling”.

thank you so much for reading. i love you!