#writers of new zealand

[gamerswift13]

Mrs Maisel Musings!

Kia ora, friends!

Alright, here it is folks, the moment maybe some, maybe none of you have been waiting for: my thoughts on the The Marvellous Mrs Maisel final season. I did it, I finally got it done. I think the reason it took me so long, aside from previously mentioned mental health issues, is that writing stuff like this for five hundred and sixteen minutes of television is hard! It’s really hard. I would love to hear what you all think of this, and if you want to discuss what I’ve written here, or even just about the show or season in general, please hit me up! I would love to talk about it with you.

Now enough with the delays and the stalling - please enjoy my review (??) of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel season 5, the final season.

So, I really liked the first few seasons of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel. Even though it’s a bit cheesy and dopey at times. Rachel Brosnahan is a joy to watch on-screen, and a lot of the other actors here do a really great job with the script they were given... such as it is. On a recent rewatch, though, I started to see the strings a little bit - things that I liked the first time around just didn’t quite hit the same. I got through most of it, all the important parts, and then I started the new season. It’s been a couple weeks or so since I finished it, and I’m not as down on it now as I was when I started, but y’all, I am about to have some opinions.

This the final Mrs Maisel season really feels like creator Amy Sherman-Palladino probably wanted to do at least one more season after this, but someone at Jeff’s Website Studios said no, so she simply decided to burn the show to the ground.

Now as I wrote in the subtitle, I am about to spoil things here, so this is your final warning: if you don’t want to be spoiled for season five of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, get out now.

Also: foul language ahead! 🤬

The entire point of this season seems to be leaning into how much of a piece of shit Miriam Weissman is. We get glimpses of her in “current day” 1962 juxtaposed with scenes set in 1972 and 1982, and a couple of other random years, where we skip around and see all sorts of wild stuff - Midge is rich and famous, her kids Ethan and Esther are all grown up, Joel is in prison, and there are some bonkers and hilariously bad facial prosthetics.

Now, aside from the hilariously stupid idea that Midge as a stand-up comic somehow got insanely rich, there are some cool ideas here. The first episode opens with Esther in a psychiatrists office in 1981, searching through a backpack for something and seeming very annoyed. On first watch, I didn’t like that this is something that’s shown at all, but the more I thought about it the more I warmed to the idea. In previous seasons, The Marvellous Mrs Maisel has at times made a point of showing Midge being a terrible and/or absent mother, usually for comedic effect, but I think it’s interesting that they took this idea and bore it out, to show that mid-20’s Midge’s actions had consequences. In a later episode we also see Ethan as an adult, with Midge annoyingly landing in a helicopter nearby and upsetting everyone - this wasn’t as interesting to me, but it was still a good glimpse into how little regard Midge appears to have for anyone but herself, Joel, Susie, or Lenny Bruce.

Speaking of Lenny Bruce, I want to talk about his appearances in the final season. If you know anything about him from real life, you might know how his life ended, and where. The very first episode of season five has Midge bumping into him randomly at the airport when he is about to board a plane to Los Angeles. This made me so. Fucking. Mad. IRL Lenny Bruce was found dead in his home in Hollywood Hills in 1966, which lead me to believe that the very last time Midge will ever see him was this scene at the airport. Midge walks away from the interaction with Lenny with a strange look on her face, as if she somehow knows that this will be the last time she ever sees him alive, and it is my humble opinion that that fucking sucks. Lenny Bruce is one of the best characters on this show, with a ton of great appearances and lines and jokes, and Luke Kirby does a phenomenal job of capturing the real Lenny’s energy - it’s not 1:1, but it’s a great depiction, and I simply cannot believe Amy S-P would do my boy like this. The only other time we see Lenny in this season is years later, performing in front of a fairly disinterested crowd as he mumbles and rambles about this thing and that, and it’s so fucking depressing. This season, the show never outright mentions his drug use, but it’s heavily implied, and there’s a moment in a back room where he is talking to Susie and appears to be unable to stand up. On the one hand, I’m kind of pleased that they didn’t depict his death at all, but it really bothered me that these two scenes were all we got of him before the show stops referencing him at all.

The part of this season that really shines the most to me is a scene from episode eight, with Abe in a dimly-lit restaurant with Gabe, his boss, and a couple of colleagues. The scene begins with Abe checking his coat and coming over to sit where Gabe etcetera are already seated around a table and chatting. They order some wine. There’s a cut here to a few minutes later where the wine has arrived and been poured, and Abe sits silently, swirling his drink and clearly deep in thought while the others talk amongst themselves. Eventually, Gabe interrupts Abe’s thoughts, telling him that he had been raving to the others about his conversational skills. Abe apologises. “It’s just… the whole goddamn world, you know,” he says, clearly depressed about something. “Only that?” chimes in one of the other men at the table. Then ensues a conversation about the state of the world, about progress, about gender inequality and mental health, even, which was surprising to me. This scene is heartbreaking, and might be some of the best writing in the entire series. I cried watching this scene the first time around, and again just now rewatching it. It’s really sad that Abe never got the kind of character development shown here earlier, I would have liked to see that.

Episode six is an interesting sort of experiment; beginning with Midge on stage, in 1985, talking about her relationship with Susie, it then transitions into a roast for an indifferent and grumpy Susie in 1990, which is basically a device for a bunch of famous people you’ve seen in other things to come together as characters never seen before or again and tell stories about Susie’s rise to fame as one of the biggest talent managers in the United States. Here we get an explanation for why Joel is in prison, and a bunch of seemingly randomly selected stories about what Susie has been up to since 1962. As with the portrayal of Esther in episode one, this was another thing about this season that really bothered me at first, because it felt like it lacks focus, but as I thought about it more, it started to grow on me. This collection of tales about Susie’s exploits make sense for her character, and help to define who she is.

Overall, this season really fell down for me when I realised that a lot of really interesting moments never truly pay off. We jump around a lot between different years and perspectives, and we see a lot of things that could have been great story arcs, but they simply end and are never mentioned again. I really do feel like this season was supposed to be two or more, and Jeff’s Studio said no, so Amy Sherman-Palladino lit it all on fire. I think that if hyou like this show, it might still be worth it to catch the final season, but personally I feel like it should never have been made - at least not in this form. I would much rather have seen this stretched out more, over at least one more season. It tries to give the viewer some closure in the very last scene of the very last episode, but for me it falls flat. I don’t think I’ll ever watch this again.

Thanks so much for reading! What did you think? Once again, please feel free to hit me up in the comments, on the socials, or send me an email. And as always, if you want to read more stuff by me, you can check out my Letterboxd reviews - I recently reviewed The Craft (1996), Eradication (2022), and The Sand (2015)!

I hope y’all are staying safe out there! Have a great week and I’ll talk to you again soon. Ka kite anō au i a koe. 💚

Rebecca

Links | Twitter | Mastodon | Cohost | Substack | itch.io | Letterboxd | Instagram | Carrd | Email

[rebeccainaotearoa13]

i often feel like i could be doing a lot more to get my writing out there.

i feel like i could be writing more, tweeting and rooting more, going on cohost more.

but i just like, don’t have the energy, man. well, i have the energy to do all that. what i don’t have the energy for is going to all that effort to get my work in front of eyeballs and in response just get… crickets 🦗🦗🦗

it’s super frustrating because like, i know my work is not polished as much as it could be, but i’m like *begging* the universe to send someone my way who can help me with that polish. and it’s like, still *really good* stuff that i’ve been writing! people would like it if they gave it a chance!

but it really feels like people don’t want to read. and tbh i don’t really blame them lol. i have a hard time getting myself to read anything too.

idk man, it’s like you pour all this love and energy into a project and you edit it and scribble notes in a physical notebook when you have ideas, you type everything up and make it presentable, you figure out how to distribute it on multiple platforms to make it easier for people to find and access, you figure out payment systems.

and it’s so much work! and it’s work i want to do, but it feels pointless sometimes when i do *all of that* and then nobody shows up.

🦗🦗🦗😭😭😭

[rhymingtherapy]

hear the wind—

whispering in sighs

of all the places she’s been

over water—

transparent as glass,

rippled beneath the silken

fluctuations of her breath

& through trees—

overwhelmed by the

power of her perseverance,

who yield all their lives in deference

RhymingTherapy—February 2023 (my photos Queenstown NZ)

[hellish-cruelty]

The Lorde of the Mood Ring.

Solar Power Tour

[importantwomensbirthdays]

Barbara Anderson

Barbara Anderson was born in 1926 in Hastings, New Zealand. Anderson was one of New Zealand's leading fiction writers. While her work had appeared in journals and magazines, she did not publish a collection until she was in her sixties. That short story collection, I Think We Should Go into the Jungle, was shortlisted for both the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction and the Wattie Award. Anderson's novel Portrait of the Artist's Wife won the 1992 Wattie Award, and was critically acclaimed in both the US and the UK. She published nine more titles, continuing her international success. In 2011, Anderson received the Arts Foundation Icon Award.

Barbara Anderson died in 2013 at the age of 86.

[questionablequalia]

Dawn

yellow morning

through the cloud

everything is wet

the sun appears to drip

through the canopy

a n d

the breath can be seen

through the mist

light alights on life anew

a n d

lifts the veil of dawn

listen softly

f o r

nothing whispers

quite like this moment

Joel Lester // Hymns, Proverbs, Poems, and Prophecy.

[yourdailyqueer]

Kay O'Neill

Gender: Non binary (they/them)

Sexuality: Queer

DOB: N/A  

Ethnicity: White - New Zealander

Occupation: Illustrator, writer

[moonsstarsandscience]

Hello, I'm Ry (xey/xem/xyr), an author in need of some help.

I've been working on this one novel for well over two years, a queer coming-of-age story set in New Zealand. It follows a teenager moving from California to Wellington, and just trying to live life and be xemself.

The main issue I've come across is that doing research on the Internet can only give me so much information; after all, it'd be weird for schools to have every single piece of information about it on its website! The only people I know in Wellington are much younger than my main character, which leads me here, to my best shot of writing the most realistic story I can, asking anyone who sees this that lives/has lived in Wellington: can you please help me make my novel as realistic as possible?

I mainly just need explanations of how things work there, most specifically secondary school (to be precise, Wellington High School); nothing too personal or identifying, and I don't believe I have an excessive amount of questions. I'm still working on my novel, so I might have more questions come up as time goes on, but I don't foresee myself having many more.

If you're able to possibly help me, please reply to this post or message me. If not, please reblog this post to spread the word. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Thank you so much for reading!

[darchildre]

Me, about to read E W Hornung's "An Old Flame," thinking myself wise in the ways of fiction: Oh no, this is going to be some tragic heterosexual nonsense, isn't it? You already made me read "The Fate of Faustina" - surely we've had enough tragic heterosexual nonsense for one book?

E W Hornung's "An Old Flame": This is a story in which AJ Raffles (fiction's most dramatic bisexual) accidentally runs into an ex-girlfriend while impulsively attempting to burgle her house, and then spends the rest of the story trying to avoid her to the point of faking his own death from typhoid and running away to live in a cottage with his boyfriend husband lifelong partner in crime, Bunny, posing as Bunny's long-lost relative from Australia. Being Raffles, he did not tell Bunny about the part of the plan where he was going to fake his own death and, because he is an utter troll, went to his own funeral in disguise as a police detective and pretended to arrest Bunny at the graveside. Remarkably, Bunny is still pleased about the prospect of living together.

Me, suitably chastened: Ridiculous queer nonsense is welcome at any time, thank you.

[gamerswift13]

Speak Now (Taylor's Version)!

Hey!

So some of you will know this, others may not, but Taylor Swift recently re-recorded her 2010 album titled Speak Now, and it was released roughly 40 hours ago at the time of posting. When ‘Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)’ was announced back in the first week of May this year, I wrote a thing about how I feel about the original album. If you haven’t read that, you may want to to get caught up on how and why I feel things so deeply for this record in particular.

Since way back in February 2021, when Taylor first announced that she was re-recording a bunch of her old albums, starting with Fearless, I have been waiting for this moment. I won’t get into the whole sordid story about why she’s doing it, or how much I wish Scoote* B*aun would get hit by a car, but it’s a whole thing. What I will say is that in the long run, I am honestly happy that this happened because the re-recordings are flawless. Seriously, I’m just wonderstruck (lmao 😉). I haven’t listened to this record as much as I wanted to before writing this - I’ve listened a few times, but mostly I’ve just been thinking about it. I was b i g excited for this to come out, but I can’t lie, there was some anxiety too - this record is so important to me so it had to be flawless; and I think Taylor nailed it. Anyway, I have waited for this for a long time, and now that it’s finally here I have Some Thoughts.

I went back and forth in my head about how to do this, and I decided the best way would be to nail down exactly which songs I was most nervous or excited about, and then do a broader breakdown of the rest of the album, so here we go: starting with…

Mine

‘She is the best thing that’s ever been mine.’

Taylor always opens her records with one of the strongest tracks on said record, and this one is no different. I adore the original, and the re-recording is incredibly faithful to it. The only differences I noticed in this track versus the original were a few unsubtle moments where the growth and refinement of Taylor’s vocal range in the past thirteen years really shine through. It’s the same song, but new again.

Sparks Fly

‘The way you move is like a full-on rain storm, and I’m a house of cards,’

This song has always been one of my all-time favourites from any artist ever, and this new version is just as intense and moving as the original was back when I first heard it somewhere around 2012. This re-recording gives me chills. I am literally trying not to cry right now as I sit here writing this and relistening to it. Every line in this song is flawless. And oh my god, the strings. During the track, I find it difficult with my audio processing problems to tell if it’s a guitar, a violin, another string instrument, or all of the above, but whatever it is it makes this song so much more powerful.

Speak Now

“She floats down the aisle like a pageant queen,”

‘Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)’ is the first track here where Taylor’s strengthened and refined voice is apparent in almost every lyric. While it’s maybe not one of the biggest or strongest stand-out tracks on the record, but it has a very special place in my heart from when the original record made its indelible mark on me. Not a lot is different here, besides the sound of Taylor’s voice, and I think that’s okay.

Mean

“You, with your switching sides and your wildfire lies and your humiliation.”

Mean is so much fun, it always has been. The up-tempo of it contrasted against the subject matter has always worked really well for me. The opening is so peppy while she talks about how hard critics had been treating her, and how badly she used to take it when it happened. But I love how the song goes from ‘upset’ to ‘f**k you’ by the end. This re-recording feels really good, too, because the line “some day I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me,” feels like both a prophecy from 2010, and a vindication in 2023 that she was right all along.

Better Than Revenge

“He was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches.”

This is the one I was most anxious about going into this new version. For one, I really love the original song, despite its one glaringly large problem, but I was also nervous about whether or not she would change the lyric, and if so, to what? The first time I heard the new lyric, I was reading the prologue in the booklet that came with the CD hard copy of the album, and even though I wasn’t super paying attention I noticed it. I skipped back a few seconds to hear it again, and looked up the lyrics in the booklet so I could sing along and get it into my brain. I really like the new lyric a lot, and I expect I am going to think about it a lot in the future, too.

Haunted

“Something keeps me holding onto nothing.”

Haunted has always been a big favourite of mine to just scream-sing along to when I need to release some sadness energy, even the acoustic version is great. This version is… something else. It’s always been something of a rock song, but I feel like Taylor really leaned into that here, and the result is flawless. I sent Castles Crumbling to my sister (not a swiftie) during my first listen to the record, and she liked it so much that she listened to the rest of the album - during her listen, she sent me back this text:

This new version is incredible, and I’m so happy to have it in my life. And I’m stoked that ‘Haunted (Taylor’s Version)’ may have made a Swiftie out of my sister. 😁

Ours

“The stakes are high, the water's rough, but this love is ours,”

I love the way Taylor kept the little southern drawl from the original track here. This is the one track on this record that really makes my heart flutter. There’s very little in this track that feels different from the original, but I think that was a really inspired choice because it was honestly practically flawless the first time around. This song also has a really special place in my heart because the original video was the source of one of my favourite reaction gifs to use on social media or in texts (see below!).

Wrapping up… 🎁

The rest of the re-recorded tracks here are gorgeous, and you really can hear the different inflections and tones in Taylor’s voice as she sings these classics from her early career in the studio again. Altogether, I love this release of Speak Now and I really feel like if someone were to ask me which version they should listen to, my answer would be overwhelmingly this one; it truly is the definitive version of the record. It was honestly tough to nail this list down to just seven favourites out of the 22 tracks, even with excluding the From The Vault tracks which I will get to in a second. I’m so happy to have this space to gush about this record, and I really hope you enjoyed reading about my feelings!

From The Vault 🔓

As I said above, I excluded the From The Vault tracks from my list because I simply don’t have a ton to say about them yet. I have only listened to them a handful of times, so expect a follow-up post in a few weeks, once I’ve had more time to sit with them and form Some Opinions. What I will say right now, though, is that the immediate stand-outs for me were Electric Touch, I Can See You, and Castles Crumbling. I’m excited to listen to them a bunch more times. I also wanted to mention the Surprise Announcement video at the end of the album on Apple Music, too. Many hardcore swifties will probably have seen a version of it before elsewhere, but I had not - I have been avoiding any streams from The Eras Tour in hopes that I’ll someday get to see a complete version on Netflix or something - and y’all, this video almost broke me. I so wish I could have been there in person to feel the energy of the crowd!

The End 🔚

Well that’s it from me for this week, friends. Thanks so much for hanging out and indulging me while I am once again back on my Taylor Swift bullshit. If you want to see more writing from me, as I mentioned above you can go back and read about why Speak Now is so special to me, check out other things I've written on Substack, and as always you can check out my Letterboxd movie reviews. I recently reviewed Single White Female (1992) and Poseidon (2006)! Also! Please remember that if you have comments, questions, suggestions, or just want to say hi, please hit me up in the comments or at any of the socials in the links below.

Stay safe out there y’all and have a great week. You’re the best thing that’s ever been mine! Ka kite anō au i a koe. 💚

Rebecca

| Twitter | Mastodon | Bluesky | Cohost | Substack | itch.io | Letterboxd | Instagram | Carrd | Email |

[pearlmoney]

Readers wanted!!

I'm looking for people to read and review my new poetry book The Jellyfish before its release next February. If you are a poetry fan or writer I highly suggest you message me for the PDF version of the book.

The synopsis:

The Jellyfish is a collection of personal poems, showing the struggles of everyday life as a mentally ill queer person. Through love and hardship, art can be found and made, an outlet for those in need who have found themselves rejected by the ones in power.  See the world through the spectacle of a young woman, find the anger and pain that sits under the skin and hides in the pages.

Again if you're interested please message me here and you'll get a free PDF of the book. Thank you! (And please share this around if you can!)

[essiesmutantbiz]

I’ve done a new thing! My new weird metafictional novella (totally standalone yay) is now out in the world. It’s a murder and a mystery, a love story, it’s a pack of lies, a kiss blown to the waning moon.

You can check it out here:

[shamelessislamreligionhorse]

Lord Ganesha is widely adored, but Adi Ganesha is the Supreme Creator and the bestower of salvation. Unveil the mysteries of their significance! For more information, please read the book Gyan Ganga."

[questionablequalia]

Cold water stream

I climbed a mountain

To kiss your mouth

Joel Lester // Hymns, Proverbs, Poems, and Prophecy.

[dwreader]

i'm still so confused why bailey left the show like her ig stories are just of her shopping in nyc and going to disney world???

[words-and-coffee]

It is too much for me to hold inside. I am cracking from the pressure. Soon I will shatter and everything will scatter like ashes. Soon I will be a broken thing.

Jackson Nieuwland, I Am A Human Being: I am a egg