change the pear vol. 5 28 Oct 2022

hello, welcome to volume 5. it truly brings me indescribable joy that people read this and share their own reflections on it! thanks for sticking with me.

on repeat

i can’t talk about how i feel about BTS right now because i fear it will turn into a painfully vulnerable and unbearably earnest personal essay. maybe i’ll be ready to write that someday. but for now let’s just say i love them and i love their love and i love their music and i will always be grateful for the joy they brought me during some of the worst times of my life. here’s a small playlist:

1. magic shop. you gave me the best of me / so you’ll give you the best of you

2. mikrokosmos. shine dream smile / oh let us light up the night

3. dis-ease. sick and tired but i don’t wanna mess up / life goes on

4. 00:00 (zero o’clock). and you gonna be happy / turn this all around

5. life goes on. like an echo in the forest / another day will come

6. spring day. you know it all / you’re my best friend

currently watching

so true bestie!!! sorry that this segment of the newsletter is just me keeping everyone updated on my watch of the sopranos. but also i’m not sorry at all because it really is that good. moments i’ve loved recently: tony staring down his therapist in silence before attempting to end the session early because he has “nothing to say”; anthony jr discovering existentialism; chris moltisani in his acting for writers class; richie and his insane short man syndrome; paulie attending a seance; the way carmela enunciates fucking. more generally, something i think that this show is so good at is weaving together multiple character arcs at once and not letting them drop. even when a character spends an episode on the back burner, there’s always still a moment or two where you’re reminded of what’s going on with them. i’m really enjoying both chris and pussy’s storylines this season.

last seen

loving knives out is pretty much part of my personality at this point, so i was vibrating with excitement to see the second film, the glass onion, with hareem, knives out’s other biggest fan. we were terrified it was going to flop, but after seeing all the actors on the red carpet being like, “rian johnson is the mother i never had, the sister i always wanted, the father i deserve, i would do anything to work with him again, and this film SLAPS,” i was pretty confident it would deliver. and it DID. i can’t remember the last time i was so thoroughly and completely entertained by a film. engrossed and enthralled, even! i want my entire life to be narrated by daniel craig in his southern accent. i don’t want to spoil anything for anyone because i think it’s best to go in without any idea of what will happen, but i will say that the glass onion is a fantastic title and also that i think it’s a movie that is very of our present moment in a really specific and fun way. i love films where everybody clearly had a fantastic time making it and are revelling in playing their specific characters. i love how well rian johnson understands what makes a good, clever murder mystery—both the glass onion and knives out could only be made by someone with a deep affection for the genre. i loved this film so much guys. no notes whatsoever.

reading

recently i’ve been thinking about the endings of books. on the rare occasions when i write fiction, i find it almost impossibly difficult to know how or where to end a story. life itself doesn’t have defined beginnings or endings, and yet somehow beginnings feel easier—you have to start somewhere, right? but to end a book or a story, you’re drawing everything to a close. you’re summing up a world the reader has lived in, a journey you’ve taken them on.

anyway, then i was thinking about how there are a lot of iconic beginning lines of books: it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man…, call me ishmael, it was the best of times it was the worst of times etc etc, but how many closing sentences/paragraphs can i recall?

one of the endings that has stayed with me is the final paragraph of annie proulx’s the shipping news:

For […] if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat’s blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.

as beautiful as this paragraph is on its own, as an ending to the novel specifically, it is perfect. it answers the central question of the book, a question that you didn’t even realise was being asked, right until the moment you read that final line. just so good.

the left hand of darkness by ursula le guin ends like this:

“You crossed the Gobrin Ice together,” Sorve demanded, “you and he?”

“We did.”

“I should like to hear that tale, my Lord Envoy,” said old Esvans, very calm. But the boy, Therem’s son, said stammering, “Will you tell us how he died?—Will you tell us about the other worlds out among the stars—the other kinds of men; the other lives?”

what an ending. WHAT an ENDING! again, a perfect summary of the themes and questions the book is considering. of the love that was found during the telling of the story. and of le guin’s own preoccupations throughout her work: how to live, how to look at the other worlds, the other kinds of men, the other lives.

i of course have to mention hilary mantel. i reread the final pages of a place of greater safety just now as i was writing this and as always, my heart is in my mouth. the final paragraphs return to robespierre, after the deaths of camille and danton:

Rue Honoré: One day, a long time ago, his mother sat by a window, making lace. The broad morning light streamed in on both of them. He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves. ‘Show me how to do it, he said. ‘I want to learn.’

‘Boys don’t do it,’ she said. Her face was composed; her work continued. His throat closed at the exclusion.

Now, whenever he looks at a piece of lace — even though his eyes are bad — he seems to see every thread in the work. At the Committee table, the image rises at the back of his mind, and forces him to look far, far back into his childhood. He sees the girl on the window-seat, her body swollen, pregnant with death; he sees the light on her bent head; beneath her fingers the airy pattern, going nowhere, flying away.

spectacular. it says everything, but in that subtle hilary mantel way where you feel as though you’ve caught the end of a piece of silk and it has run smoothly through your fingers and away. but you had it, just for a moment.

i think the ending of wolf hall is brilliant because, during the entire book, wolf hall (the home of the seymour family) scarcely features. it’s only mentioned to allude to some scandalous gossip. and yet it’s the title of the novel! what’s all that about. and then here are the final lines:

He writes it down.

Early September. Five days. Wolf Hall.

like i said, i think this is brilliant but i wasn’t sure i quite understood why, so i asked arenike what she thought. she said: “I think it’s interesting in terms of the books being so determined by future events. Like we’re so deeply in the present moment w Cromwell and she captures this feeling of uncertainty and spontaneity but he doesn’t know and we know that everything is leading to that point. The characters at the time are just vibing and she keeps that aliveness and uncertainty going despite the determinism of us knowing the outcome!” this really clarified things for me. when you read those final words, you think of course this is where we ended up. it gives the ending this feeling of inevitability. and as the reader we then remember that although henry is desperate to marry anne and make her queen, he will eventually move on to jane and the history we are all familiar with marches on. but throughout the book it’s told in such an immediate and urgent way that we almost forget that all of this has already happened. we were always headed to wolf hall.

other endings i won’t quote because i don’t have the books to hand or they spoil the events of the book are the round house by louise erdrich, normal people by sally rooney (fight me!), less by andrew sean greer, gilead by marilynne robinson.

i would like to know what endings of books have stayed with you! please tell me!

miscellaneous

phoebe telling me her 14 year old sister loves my bookstagram so much she started one of her own. visiting the cézanne exhibition with hareem and seeing her eyes light up when she spotted an orange in one of the paintings. the vegan blueberry cake henry made for claire’s birthday. watching the final BTS concert with hayley and experiencing the entire spectrum of human emotion in the space of 2 hours. rian johnson’s upcoming murder mystery tv show. sarah reading poetry to live music at somerset house. the enthusiastic american man at the climbing centre who yelled at me the climb is yours! you stan a kpop group; i’m part of an underground anarchist uprising etc etc. this poem by timothy liu. finding out the region i’ve been working on lately looks like this in real life. warm kitchens filled with people on cold autumn evenings. small plates of fancy thai food. stir-frying mushrooms in tahini + gochujang + soy. cooking with stella on a sunday night. big red angry october sunrises.

thank you so much for reading. see you in 2 weeks!