change the pear 🍐

change the pear vol. 35 5 Mar 2026

Natalia Goncharova, 1911, Peasants Dancing
natalia goncharova, 1911, peasants dancing

hi! it’s been a little while. i can’t lie, i’m slightly perturbed by the fact that it’s already march, and we’re almost a month into the year of the horse. a time for gathering in herds, for trampling our enemies, for action and courage and independence.

on repeat

IVE have never made a bad song in their lives. there’s something about the production of their tracks that is so pleasing to me even if i don’t 100% vibe with the song. their mini album from 2025 has truly been on repeat for me, but here’s an expanded playlist:

last seen

THE WINTER OLYMPICS!!! not quite as delightful to me as the summer ones [pause here while iman strikes me down in a fit of rage] but i had an absolute blast. yes i paid for a subscription service so i could watch every sport on demand. some favourite bits:

currently watching

da pitt! hana and i are keeping up with it weekly, which is a marked change to how we watched season 1 in a matter of days. hana thinks the slow, drawn out wait between episodes has contributed to it feeling less tight and dramatic. there’s still half a season to go so maybe it’s too early to call it yet, but i don’t know they’ve reached the heights of season 1.

i love the conceit of the whole season taking place in a single day, but i’m not sure if it really works when you are also trying to get continuity between the seasons. the resulting exposition ends up feeling heavy-handed at times, whereas what i loved about season 1 was the way characters and their histories were subtly, slowly revealed throughout the shift: collins and her abortion, samira and her dad, mel and her sister, etc. i understand the writers’ dilemma—now that we already know the characters, how can we push forward in their storylines while staying within the format of the show? i’m not quite sure they’ve managed to do this successfully to be quite honest. santos was one of my favourite characters from the first season, because i thought she was a really complex and interesting and flawed person. this time around, we’ve basically seen her being snappy and cranky because she’s struggling to keep up with her charting. other characters that seem to have fallen by the wayside are mohan and mel (i felt like there was a whole episode where i barely saw mel!)

another question is how can we keep it interesting and fresh? introducing new characters is one way to do this, and while i love al-hashimi and emma (tall evil whitaker will be killed on sight), again i don’t think we can have the same investment in the newbies than we did for all the characters in season 1, especially when it cuts into our faves’ screentime.

is this a sophomore slump or is the pitt reaching the limits of its form? or am i being too harsh on the show? also, can they stop fucking showing me that ex-iof soldier? would love to hear thoughts from fellow pitters.

reading

it hasn’t been an amazing year for books so far; i think my favourite reads have been rereads. but i did read my first iris murdoch in january (her debut novel, under the net) and while it wasn’t a five star book, i enjoyed it enough that i’m excited to check out the rest of her work. it is such a relief to read a novel by someone who is very skilled at writing prose, who can construct interesting and exciting sentences, who isn’t just writing with an eye to an eventual screen adaptation but is instead concerned with the literary form in and of itself. we expect too little from our debut authors these days. let’s bring back sentences!!! let’s bring back paragraphs!!! a lot of you guys would probably be happier writing screenplays!

in february i read two very different novels set at boarding schools. the first, the incandescent by emily tesh, is a fantasy book, narrated by a teacher whose subject is the art of summoning demons. the school is an elite private school of the eton/wycombe abbey kind, and our protagonist walden is an alumna, and also an oxford graduate with a phd (this is very important and stressed at many points). other principal characters include her sixth former nikki (a scholarship student) and laura (essentially a magical cop employed by the school, also walden’s nemesis). when nikki is manipulated into summoning a very large demon, laura and walden have to work together to banish it. in the process walden reveals that she has actually leashed a demon to herself and this demon helps them win the battle. oh and laura and walden kiss.

all of this happens in the first half of the book, and definitely should have been a stand-alone novel. there’s easily enough world-building to expand on that could have filled a whole book, as well as adding more character work (nikki in particular has no personality, and laura isn’t much better) and building up the tension between walden and laura more. the second half sees laura fired over the incident, and mark (an ex-military “consultant”) brought in to advise on school safety. this man could not have been more obviously a villain who is manipulating walden and her pet demon, but walden misses all the signs and they enter into a romantic and sexual entanglement. i think it was a terrible idea to remove laura from this arc entirely aside from one dubiously coincidental meeting at the staff xmas party. it means the eventual romantic denoument between them feels unearned and forced, and in general walden’s sexual desire for mark in the second half gave me the serious ick. i mean… lord above. "he was so good at going down on her and he knew how to use a vibrator”. IS THE BAR SO LOW???

my main issue with the book was the class/privilege discourse, mainly because of all the heavy-handed statements like “oh of course people who go to a state comprehensive and get 3 As deserve it more than people who go to this posh boarding school and get 3 A*s”. which i’m sure emily tesh herself believes. but the problem is that walden, her narrating character, has clearly got terrible class politics if she’s so dickmatised by this man for “cultural reasons” (aka: he also went to oxbridge) that she fails to see he is manipulating her in a very obvious way. idk it just didn’t ring very true that this woman could love her boarding school and her status as an oxford graduate and her fancy degrees and have this mile-wide superiority complex (none of which are REALLY challenged in any way—a whole side-arc is dedicated to her making sure nikki goes to oxford even though nikki herself has big doubts about it) and yet also manage to deliver these smart little asides on class mobility and privilege. it would have been a stronger book if emily tesh had leant more into walden’s prejudices and then spent a little time deconstructing them. again, laura’s whole deal would have been a perfectly good way to explore this if she hadn’t been exised from half the novel.

other miscellaneous things that bothered me:

  1. walden’s ex-girlfriend being ushered in to deliver a smarmy “privileged white people have the luxury to have principles, unlike me a poor immigrant woman of colour who simply HAS to get a big paycheck from the US military because i have no other options” MISS ME WITH THIS!!!

  2. the entire page where mark and walden discuss what oxford and cambridge colleges they went to in great detail and with gusto

  3. walden being like to nikki “my actions had no consequences so don’t worry yours shouldn’t either!” girl….that’s not….

  4. isaac newton being a magician. can’t the scientists have anything

the second boarding school novel i read was havoc (or cry havoc in the US) by rebecca wait. this time we’re in the 80s at an all-girls’ school. think mallory towers but crumbling into pieces, under-funded and staffed by a bunch of teachers hanging onto sanity by their fingertips, where none of the girls really learn anything and the board of directors is headed by a man obsessed with the navy. it’s narrated half by eleanor, a geography teacher, and ida, a new girl at the school who gets her place through fairly unorthodox means to escape her wretched home life. also new on the scene is matthew, a shifty history teacher of dubious origins. not long after the start of term, the girls, one after another, begin to fall seriously ill.

i loved this novel, not because it’s necessarily trying to say anything deep or profound but because it’s just a lot of fun. the headteacher is obsessed with impending nuclear war, ida is concerned that her new roommate louise is going to set off a molotov cocktail in assembly, matthew pathetically attempts to befriend eleanor, eleanor’s scumbag ex-fiance comes nosing around, and a romance is conducted via fax between two neurologists trying to figure out what’s wrong with the girls. the characterisation is vivid and there are moments of real poignancy. i loved louise and ida’s friendship in particular.

i think havoc worked better than the incandescent because it didn’t feel like it was insisting on itself. it had confidence as a narrative that the incandescent lacked; if you’re going to write about a boarding school just bloody do it, don’t wring your hands and try to make sure everyone knows you’re Woke I Promise I Just Also Want My Characters To Tell You Facts About St John’s College Cambridge. havoc has class commentary of its own, it’s just subtler about it. and it’s funny!

miscellaneous

my new mullet! hiking in tidbinbilla with my dad. the herb plants my parents bought us. outdoor swimming in the summer heat. christmas trees blooming in perth. dude, like the world. a cackling chorus of kookaburras at dusk. collective action gets the goods! getting in the sea on new year’s day. visiting our nephew ziggybat in wollongong. banh xeo with bee. glaction with amy. black garlic aioli. grilled pork belly with meigan cai. hello hockey fans in china. fish and chips on the beach. walking through the rainforest at minamurra. hearing a lyrebird practice its calls. tteokguk. seeing a tawny frogmouth at mulligan’s flat with bob and hana. getting thrown around by the pacific ocean waves. ballerina cappuchina. this toni morrison quote. this isabella desendi poem. this richard siken quote. this article by bikrum gill. the one who resists is the one who has the final say…all spectators have no right to discuss any topic.

🍐 thank you for reading. i hope the new year has been treating you well. i'll see you soon!