change the pear vol. 8 9 Dec 2022

hello. can you believe the days are still getting shorter? i don’t know why the brutality of the winter dark always surprises me like this—surely i should remember that 4pm in december feels like the middle of the night, when it happens every year. anyway, i hope you’re all surviving and managing to find joy and light where you can. everything passes, even december.

on repeat

indigo by RM. so here’s the thing. when i heard that kim namjoon, king of introspection, was doing his first solo album reflecting on the years 2019–2022, i thought thank god. i thought, this is going to be cathartic. but even with that expectation i was not prepared at all for how comprehensively this album eviscerated me. i heard the opening lines of wild flower: open land, that’s where i’m at / no name, that’s what i have / no shame, i’m on my grave and started crying, which is possibly the most visceral immediate reaction i’ve had to a song. and what a song. what an album. what an incredible raw meaningful beautiful bold determined angry melancholy courageous reflexive work of art.

this album contains all of what life is, the heartache and the hope, the bitterness and the joy, the anger and the delight—and most importantly this incredible, overwhelming resolve to survive. namjoon shows us his heart in every single track, openly, without shame. he says, i know how hard it is. i know how difficult it is to figure out who you are and who you want to be and what your dreams are. i know it’s lonely. i know it hurts. but i’m not giving up and neither should you.

that resolute determination to keep going is a triumphant and beautiful thing, and the album expresses that too. LET’S GO! / light a flowerwork. the first thing hayley said to me about indigo was, “he’s raging to want to live”. and he is. life is better than death, i’ll prove it. namjoon is trying so hard to want to be alive, and there is joy to be found in that struggle. i’m fighting all day / i’m living my way. he’s trying so hard to create, to express himself. poetry / my one and only strength and dream. i wanna be a human before i do some art. he’s looking forward to the future, he’s letting go of the past, he refuses to turn back. now you will protect you / so no, no looking back. even a still life moves.

and the art he made in the process is a masterpiece: lyrically complex and sonically diverse, full of raw emotion and bold exhilaration. it feels so whole and complete as a project. listening to it makes me cry, and dance around my kitchen, and snap my fingers walking down the street in the cold december night. it makes me feel less alone. it makes me feel brave. it makes me want to keep trying.

reading

i saw transit by rachel cusk in the library and got it out to reread. i read all of cusk’s outline trilogy a few years ago and the scene that most stuck in my mind was one from this book, where a man spends a few pages telling the narrator about the saluki, a breed of hunting dog. at the time, this scene stood out to me as an example of cusk at her best, or, maybe more precisely, at the pinnacle of what she was trying to achieve in these novels. but honestly i couldn’t quite remember what that aim exactly was, nor what it was about the scene that so perfectly captured it, so i thought i’d reread the book and see what i thought. and actually, overall i enjoyed the book a lot more than i did on first read—i bumped it up from four to five stars on my highly subjective, extremely chaotic goodreads rating scale. honestly, the book isn’t perfect and sometimes it can be annoying, but i think i’ve grown to appreciate how cusk has a clear vision of what she wants to achieve in these novels, and her clean, precise prose.

anyway. the novel is told through a series of conversations that the narrator has with various people: a builder, an estate agent, her ex-boyfriend, her cousin, a student who hopes to write a novel. through these conversations, each person reveals a lot about themselves, both in what they say and what they leave unsaid. the narrator herself is almost anonymous. most of the time she joins the conversation simply to ask pertinent questions to direct her interlocutor’s thoughts. it’s a clever narrative trick, one that gives the reader freedom to interpret these conversations as they like. but always, you have the sense that there is some framework behind the novel, that you are being carefully directed towards some underlying perceptive truth beneath the layers.

and i think that’s what is so clever about the scene where the hunting dogs are described. it occurs during a writing class the narrator is teaching. at the beginning, a student says that his dog is beautiful. another student tells him that he can’t just say his dog is beautiful, he has to show it. at this point the narrator steps in and asks the student for more detail about the dog. he talks for a long time about how he came to adopt this dog, about the woman who sold it to him and her experience of seeing the dogs hunt for the first time. through this telling, we of course realise the beauty of the dog. QED, right? well, yes, but i think there’s a more subtle point here that cusk is trying to make. the key is that we are able to see the dog through his eyes simply by how he talks about his personal feelings towards the dog. it’s not that he’s describing the dog in physical detail in order to make us share his feeling that the dog is beautiful. but we understand deeply why he believes the dog to be beautiful, and therefore we consider it beautiful too. i don’t know if i’ve managed to articulate this well; perhaps it’s a scene that needs to be read within the context of the novel. but i’m glad i reread it and tried to grasp what exactly was so memorable about that moment.

currently watching

maybe season 3 of the sopranos isn’t really what i should be watching in the final dwindling days of the year. i need comfort and joy, not watching the brutal death of one of the bada bing dancers after she gets a little too close to the increasingly unstable and volatile ralph cifaretto. honestly i can’t wait for this man to get OUT of the show (aka die). he’s so unpleasant and mean, seemingly just for the sake of it. even richie was better, something i never thought i would say. anyway, i haven’t really been able to watch again since that episode. the contrast between the 20-year-old single mom tracey’s terrible end and meadow’s mundane university problems (she finds her roommate annoying, her boyfriend breaks up with her for no reason) was quite tough to watch. it’s still really brilliant TV, don’t get me wrong, but if anyone has recommendations for something a little lighter (and to prevent me rewatching yuri on ice for the 6th time) please let me know.

okay so i wrote the above on monday and then tuesday night abeera came home and we drank red wine and watched one of THE best sopranos episodes i’ve seen, the one where carmela goes to see a therapist. absolutely fantastic television. i was floored. that’s the sopranos content i’ve been craving: complicated moral choices and hard conversations and people grappling with the consequences of the life they’re living. plus the scene where tony complains about the orange juice with bits in? chef’s absolute kiss. i’m hooked once more.

last seen

abeera and i went to see aftersun last night, in my ideal cinema setup: a 90 minute movie beginning at 6pm. the film itself was beautiful and moving, an 11-year-old being taken on holiday to a turkish resort by her young father. it’s slow-moving and restrained, but because the film itself isn’t long it doesn’t drag. i thought it was brilliant in the way it reveals details about sophie & her father and their lives without lots of exposition, helped by paul mescal’s incredible, sensitive acting. i was wondering whether it was perhaps too subtle, given the ending, but abeera reminded me on our way out that it being from sophie’s perspective means that it’s centred on the things she’s aware of or would pick up on. and i think if it was any more obvious it would feel over-explained and excessive. i loved the way it hints at sophie’s burgeoning sexual awakening, right on the borderline of adolescence but still childish and silly; loved all the Brits Abroad details; loved the camcorder footage. one of my favourite scenes was right after sophie drops a snorkelling mask into the sea. she apologises to her dad, saying, i know it was expensive. he pauses for a few seconds, and you can see him visibly wrestling with his annoyance and frustration before choosing to be tender and kind to his daughter. i really love seeing moments where people actively try to be better.

miscellaneous

saskia cooking us the most beautiful christmas meal. seeing zachary quinto on stage and alfie leaning across to whisper, “incandescent” to me (if you know you know!) ATEEZ finally dropping their europe tour dates (relatedly: the mics are ON). a reflexive, fulfilling, 3.5 hour long conversation with hayley about what BTS means to us. watching the football in the pub with dorothy. drinking red wine on the sofa with abeera. morocco beating spain on penalties. working in a bougie department store with arenike and sitting in their £6000 tan leather armchairs afterwards. hareem’s excitement at getting my christmas presents. my new purple fleece that makes me feel like a baby sheep. this denise levertov poem. this richard shelton poem. this frank o’hara poem. and another one from frank.

thank you, as always, for reading.