09 Feb 2026

Oedipus & the Devil, Lyndal Roper: I'm still trying to work out if Roper's thinking/thesis is compatible with a more fluid (and less facistic) conception of gender, even as she recuperates the body and sexual difference. It's hard to argue against sexual plurality within her argument that, "Making rules ... does not guarantee conformity. Behavioural prohibitions, as Foucault has stressed, can create, even in their advocates, their own compulsions and transgressive possibilities ... Instead of seeing repression as a simple imposition of control, we need to see it as an active part of the formation of sexual identities." Then again, maybe that's ascribing permanent deviance to gender nonconformity. Then again, deviance can also be neutralised as deviation.

She's contesting the idea the gender is not a biological given but something produced in language and material conditions to the extent that "too much is made to follow from the historical," and not enough is made from the constant fact of the body, which, surely, in it's capacity to "suffer pain, illness, the process of giving birth, the effects ... of certain kinds of excercise" or to enact "particular patterns of movement, clothes, illnesses," has itself shaped culture and subjectivity. Her question is how to close the loop between history and a subjectivity composed of perceptual, embodied and discursive experience, animated, I think, by an aversion to teleologies of all kinds. "What we have," she writes, and I find this compelling, "is a history of discourses about the body; what we need is a history that can problematize the relation between the psychic and the physical."

I'm drawn to the book despite my apprehensions because I think it has something to say about transgressive bodies and, however much it hews to the male/female sexual dyad for its analysis, it's larger view seems to be that what we understand as transgression is often just the disorganisation of knowledge and boundaries. Is the body a constant fact? That's so often the shortfall of gender critcal discourse; it ignores the occurence of so much biological variation and fluctuation, taking its non-visibility as non-existence. In that sense gender plurality can't be considered a behaviour that is produced by prohibition; it's more like a biological tendency that is then elaborated by desire and subject to discipline.

08 Feb 2026

This morning I went to a service at the Holy Trinity cathedral, the first I'd been to since morning chapel at school. I'd gone in search of some kind of ritual to remember Grandma. She sung in church choirs, and had selected quite beautiful choral songs for her funeral. I can see an image of her singing quite clearly in my mind. Her face looked at once sorrowful and stern when she sang, and she had a thin, high, unpowerful voice. I thought attending the service might connect me to her and be a space to properly grieve. There was a woman there who wore the same perfume as Grandma which I kep getting wafts of despite being sat on the opposite side of the large room. It was like being sat next to her.

The service was a special one for Waitangi day and all the readings, sermons and hymns were about covenants, sharing these bountiful lands and all people being equal in the heart of God. I found this all a bit hard to swallow – the platitudes and hymns about the lofty New Zealand mountains – sitting in this enormous church in Parnell, knowing the hand the Anglican Diocese had in land grabs at Takaparawhau just up the road. But I'd chosen a seat by the open doors, so the choir song was all mixed with the shrill call of the cicadas in the trees outside, which seemed to rebalance things.

There were many old people in the congregation, most robust and busy looking in that specifically church-y way, but one or two frail as anything, who couldn't stand for the prayers. Looking at their stooped heads under the vaulted ceilings I thought mostly about how scary death is, so much that we've built all this just to cope with it. I thought, with her smell coiling around me, about how scared Grandma must have been to be dying, how scared all my grandparents must have been, with the exception maybe of Grandpa Cyprus who went off to sleep just like any other night. I wondered if maybe one can get so sick and ill-equipped for living that you pass through this fear and death becomes a kind of comfort. In his sermon the reverend spoke about how fear in the bible is not terror or worry or a feeling of being scared, but of being awestruck and humbled by something larger than yourself – a state of surrender. Is God just a personification of death? That's maybe the only way I could make sense of it all. Generally I think I'm too sensitive to the places the spell lapses, like how the robes of the clergy seemed like they were the wrong colour, cheap polyester fabrications in apple green and tomato red instead of the rich, lustrous tones and ambiance of chiaroscuro that seem warranted, the gracelessness of the man who carried one of the candles in the way he draped the napkin over his colleagues arm during the communion, or the fact that the tenor looked like Beniico del Toro (...). I don't say this to shore up my own doubts, but to point out how much rests on these details. Religion is so lofty and heavy at once. There was a moment where I felt the tide shift, when the reverend asked us to turn to our neighbour and give them our blessings. I was preparing to nod politely to those around me, the way people usually do when instructed to turn to their neighbour in a class or conference, only to be met by people crossing the room to take my hand, look me in the eye and tell me that peace be upon me.

Peace apparently is upon me because I spent the evening at the beach having a picnic with Belle and George. We ate watermelon, ika mata and bbq'd pineapple with vanilla ice cream, the latter I dreamt up while in church. Call it a divine message.

05 Feb 2026

'The Agrarian Mind', Ou Ning: VWJ sent me a post today which this reading linked. "In essence," Ou Ning writes, "politics is the distribution of human survival resources. Why has land ownership become the basic yardstick for defining various political systems? Precisely because all the resources that humans depend on for living, producing, and harnessing food and energy are attached to the land. Politics itself originates in the need to control scarce resources, yet politics also relies on that scarcity. When a society develops to a certain level, new technologies liberate its productive forces, introducing a degree of abundance, thus reducing scarcity. This allows market circulation to be gradually decentralized, weakening the need for political controls on scarcity. In order to maintain power, governing forces will then need to produce scarcity." "When food is abundant" they continue, "when anyone with the means can eat at a restaurant or buy food from a supermarket – you have the freedom to cook an exotic recipe or read Isabelle Allende's book on food and sex, Aphrodite. But when there is no food to fill your stomach, even a common green onion exposes its cruel political nature."

It's their argument that agriculture is traditionally a stabilising force. Famines, climate disaster, epidemics and a peasant class with nothing to lose were the undoing of many dynasties. With industry, agriculture has been progressively pushed to the periphery of the political imagination and collective psyche, even if it remains, in real terms, the centre of all production. I find this analysis, if not revelatory, at least clear. By its end the piece seems to lose it's analysis (and its style), concluding on vague thoughts about interdependence, seasonal cycles and Wendell Berry. They seem to have forgotten to say the part about distribution and scarcity as it applies to the land itself as well as its products, beyond their wish that each of Shanghai's residents might have a plot of their own. Sounds a bit like the quarter-acre dream.

Still, it's got me thinking again about pastoralism and agrarianism here in NZ. That conversation I had with Philippa about how we have no Right to Roam laws here like they do in Scotland, and so no greenways that would make our landscape passable on foot to non-landowning citizens. If you are brave you could walk in a drain ditch alongside a motorway, but there'd be no point because eventually you'd come up against a fence. (I'm thinking now about how so many of our worst invasive plants were brought here for use as windbreaks, their propensity to grow quickly being a drawcard for settlers needing to mark property boundaries.) Laws like the Right to Roam came about as concessions from the ruling class to the agrarian masses, meant to avert uprisings by enshrining basic rights to things like mobility and, in the case of gleaning, to the literal slim pickings. We have so little residue of a peasant class in this country, and so very little sense of the land as a collective resource or good. By the time NZ was colonised the industrial revolution was in motion and the enclosure of the commons came definitively. I'm still working through Nga Ururoa but it's helping me to think through what pastoralism might mean here. It at very least exposes the limits of Ning's to-each-their-own-plot fantasy – there has to be some kind of network between them, the peasant's greenway, or even a creeping expanse of kahikatea swamp.

Oedipus & the Devil, Lyndal Roper: I picked this up from my bedside mostly out of curiousity for what I'd got in this quite random library find. I'm unsure of the blurb, which promises to reinstate sexual difference and the gendered body as a historical category. Dicey. But the list of plates caught my attention with a work titled 'The Dance of Noses at Gimpelsbrum' at the top. I love to see a nose represented largely. The woodcut it belongs to is from the sixteenth century and depicts some kind of festive occasion in which many bulbous-nosed men and one woman (I think; they all wear skirts) dance around a maypole hung with a pair of underwear that I first mistook for an animal skull, a wreath of flowers and a rather impressive nose that's dangling like a keychain. There is a feast taking place and a few figures holding bagpipes. It looks like a happy affair, though in the background there's a tussle taking place in the field between two groups of peasants and spikes lining the grass, some toppled by a ball – perhaps tensions arose in the middle of a friendly game. This is a spiky scene in general. The woodcut artist has enjoyed whittling spires, sword tips and flax leaves into his picture. As the caption notes: "This woodcut is crammed with phallic imagery: cock, breeches etc. with the wreath/vagina speared triumphantly below the nose/penis." I haven't got to the point in the text where she tells me for what rites one would dance the the dance of noses, or what might be taking place out of frame that's causing one figure to cower in fear, and another to swivel his head on his neck like a fruit knocked partly from the bough. I started the chapter to find out but was arrested by this line on the first page: "We cannot do justice to women's erotic feelings and desires if we see heterosexuality as a social construct with fixed terms and immovable parameters, one that imposed itself on women so that they, like sexual automata, acted out a script of male domination." She's thinking as the historian: we mustn't read history through heterosexual relations as we know them, because in so doing we miss seeing how what we know came about, through, yes, the assertion of the patriarchal will, but also all the erotic transgressions that certain powers saw fit to police and exile. To call back to Michelle Tea: what ground mightv'e been gained in that transgression?

What actually stuck me wasn't this historical assertion so much as the personal revelation that I've never experienced sexuality to be a space of agency. That's sad, but beside the point, which is that I'm always railing against the idea that we need to accomodate the feelings of men who feel 'lost in a changing world' on the basis that it's a disavowal of agency and the possibility, inevitability even, of change, but reading this I wondered with horror whether I'd not been doing the same thing. In being such a downer on how sexuality is and therefore has to be, have I been playing by the script, albiet as a wicked, sexless crone or something?

03 Feb 2026

Valencia, Michelle Tea: Michelle Tea spends the whole of this book staring directly into the sun. All the descriptions I can think of involve an intense void: storm eyes, abysses, black outs, vaginas. I wish I had an ounce of her calm in its presence. Maybe the better word is her hunger – she just had to be near it and in the throng. She said this great thing about transgression, not in the book but an interview: "in the mainstream popular consciousness, certain things are like irredeemably bad. Like getting strung out on drugs is bad, and you've lost something if you've gotten addicted on drugs. This idea that you've lost control, or you've lost your mind, or something. Or you've lost your virginity, you know how girls always 'lose' their virginity. Or if you do sex work, you've somehow lost ... Any transgression get marked as a sort of loss. And what's never talked about is what you get from it." I've been feeling lately that I've spent so long managing shame around sex that I've effectively erased it from my body. That I'm some kind of blank or grey spot in peoples' erotic vision. My only hope is that I'm something like Tommy, who Tea describes as: "either tightly asexual or profoundly sexy ... her sexiness was like a laser, a thin beam ... if it wasn't shot at you, you might miss it." I love how she describes all these women. So much peculiarity but all of them so beautiful. Do people like this still exist? Cities like this definitely don't, but I'm hopeful that it's maybe not a way of being that Valencia documents and rather Tea's way of seeing the wild intensity that everybody has about them.

02 Feb 2026

It was just an accident, Jafar Panahi: Watched at the Academy with Jack. The scene I keep thinking about is the one where Hamid feels Equbal's leg and recognises his abuser by touch. I keep thinking about it because I keep thinking about the image it entails of this ritual taking place repeatedly in the prison as part of the torture, so often, we have to assume, that Hamid knows what he's touching in the same way the baker knows his dough is right. There's an insane intimacy to doing this kind of violence and all the tension in this film comes from throwing it into contact with the facelessness of the administrative state. Who's steps but your loved ones' would you recognise as instantly as Vahid does Equbal's? Why is it Shiva's interrogation that breaks him, whispered into his ear almost like a lover's confidences? The animating doubt of the film is nominally whether they've got the right guy but really where this man ends and the state on whose behalf he acted begins; whether revenge taken against this life andfamiliar body could ever account for the wrongs of the regime, or would become just another.

23 Jan 2026

The Piano Teacher, Elfriede Jelenik: I'm trying to figure out Erika's lust for violence. Was it that she felt so humiliated by the world already that having someone be the executor of her humuliation, exactly as prescribed, by the book and to the letter, would somehow make it better, or return to her a feeling of control? Or better yet complicity – was that her request to Walter: recognise my pain? But he couldn't/wouldn't, or could only see it as a perversion. He fundamentally felt a rightness in the ways of the world that she experienced as wrong and abject. Otherwise, and I think this is it, I think she needed to give him total permission to abuse her, to be the worst that she expected of him, and for him to reject the offer, to turn away from the potential in himself to harm her. That would mean her lust for violence was actually a lust for its eradication. Because he never really needed her permission.

That's the shadowwork that Jelenik does so well, but is it the aged who haunt the young or the other way around? There's this passage: "At night, Erika sweatily turns on the spit of anger over the blazing fire: maternal love. She is regularly basted with the pungent gravy of musical art. Nothing alters this immovable difference: old/young. Nor can anything be altered in the notation of music by dead masters. What you see is what you get. Erika has been harnessed in this notation system since earliest childhood. Those five lines have been controlling her ever since she first began to think. She mustn't think of anything but those five black lines. This grid system, together with her mother, has hamstrung her in an untearable net of diretions, directives, precise commandments, like a rosy ham on a butcher's hook. This provides security, and security creates fear of uncertainty. Erika is afraid that everything will remain as it is, and she is afraid that someday something could change." The enormity of tradition hangs over the teacher, artistry so perfect it becomes instruction: obey! discipline! shrivel! She's made worm-like and pathetic in the present held under this persistence and history, so she in turn serves and enlarges it before her students: obey! disicpline! shrivel! But who can forget this image of Erika bound up in the elaborate shibari of the stave when she later describes her desires to Klemmer. Please tie all the cords and ropes so tight that you yourself could hardly unravel them. She was trying to reverse the immovable difference: young person, break the cycle, please, be a light in the dark, dissolve the shadow. Let civilisation be just so, and not the costume of cruelty.

12 Jan 2026

I finished my book today and also Grandma died. How to grieve a stranger. I hadn't seen her in person in maybe a decade, and she was so estranged from her self and others in the past few years that speaking to her on the phone only deepened the sense that I didn't know this person. Mum always called this her 'confusion', blaming it on a failing memory and fretting that she had dementia. To me it always seemed like she found the act of speaking and being and participating in relation painful. She'd opted out of that after Grandpa died. Who can blame her for not making friends at the home. Imagine having to do it all over again and alone.

On the phone calls she seemed anxious. Trying to meet with as much conviction she could manage our demand that she was in fact still alive and should show herself to be by showing interest. It was also mercy on her part. She was assauging our own discomfort at the possibility that things would get awkward. She just had to keep things moving. And so she'd go back to the same, safe questions over and over. We'd retrace our steps in this small circle: jobs, cities, partners, pets.

The book I finished was Tove Jansson's Sun City, about the residents of a retirement home in St Petersberg, Florida, who mostly despise one another but find themselves their only companions in the humiliation of being old. From page five: "Silence protected her from the reckless need to confide in other people that can be so dangerous at the end of a long, lonely journey." When I first read this line I read it literally: the character had just travelled a long way and had lost her voice. Reading it back now I realise that Grandma was tending another kind of silence with her list of questions. It kept us all back from the edge of our shared world, one we were alive in and she was slowly exiting. Which is maybe the edge of death itself, where we had left her.

11 Jan 2026

Instead of resolutions I instead made a list of things I'm interested in. I suppose in an attempt to distinguish what I actually care about from the things that pull at my attention. On this list is depression, especially women's experiences of it. This morning I've been reading a paper on Melanie Klein's theory of depression. I'm new to Klein and psychoanalysis, so my grasp is loose, but the author's description of the origin of the 'depressive position' really struck me: that as a child starts to distinguish their self from the mother and recognise her as the object of both love and hatred, "the central conflict is now the one of ambivalence, the fear that hate may prove stronger than love" (emphasis my own). How nice to think of depression as such a timeless dualism, to think of what I feel when lying crushed in my bed by the thought of leaving it as no less than ancient pyschic forces, hate, love, locked together toiling like two thick-trunked snakes. Obviously it's more complicated than that. The fear, I think, is that in hating the thing it will turn away from us, even though we also still love it and care for it. So the depressive position is what allows us to experience fear and pain for that which is not the self, but on which we are dependent, so that any harm it comes to is also our own loss – it's the lesson of empathy, connectedness and interdependence if we can tolerate it, and pathological depression if not.

So depression is a poor border between self and world, maybe. The writer gives a clinical example, a boy named Michael who is aggressive and agitated (but also haunting; I picture him as the child-husband in Jonathan Glazer's Birth). The analyst speaks to him in the days following the Kennedy assassination, an act of political violence he takes into a fantasy of "all the bad people being just under the surface of the earth and the oceans, shooting up and killing all the good people," concluding, "And that brings us back to the bad Michael again, doesn't it?" This is what Klein would describe as depressive anxiety – he recognises continuity between wickedness in/of the world and wickedness in/of the self – because how is my hatred any different from the hatred I witness in others? Both are given meaning by their relationship to the perceived goodness / good objects they threaten. A good border is built on this recognition. A good ego knows its own power. Pathological depression (or, I think to be more specific, perscutory anxiety) happens when the wickedness is expulsed from the self and put out into the world or onto the other, darkening it unbearably, and moving further from the possibility of repair: "the despair is in the feeling that the damage he has done is so great that he cannot hope ever to undo it."