What a slop of violent ego. Phone case blokcing a fw key ports, incommmunicative ranter. the technician said ‘Open up a little’ and this is what we find. Remove the filler in the filter, it’s blocking the sound of the women trapped inside.
4. Identify the corner of the phone case that seems the loosest. This will be your starting point for removal: (4th wave)
Look at Warhol struglging with his phone case, he can’t even open it. He’s got tears in his eyes. Serves him well. The man’s a misogynist ! A gaslighter. Toxic. Liar. The way he talks about these women. What a loser. Emojis ! Objectigfication as celar as day. What pathos? he’s pathetic. He’s a meagre miser and the hypcorit of hisghest deisgn, for thsoe he calls nihilists are the hearts on which he feastss. He hates all around him. He flicks smicoke in my eye and twirls his moeny stacks above me. He thinks he an artist wbut that flatters him with a liar;s honesty. What a Piece of shit ! He is nothing.
But lok at him he can’t open the phone case. He’s sweaty again he’s even brought a choptsikc to no avial. He makes his girls shiny by adding preservatives, filters of ariticficiality. she is a commidty to be fetischised under modern (He calls it capital) but the words he chooses are not his. He thinks this effect is better in polyphonic voice. The collision of man and woman excites this heteropessimist. He’s weak !
Ew.
Let me tell you how he does it all, this fraud of of pure pretence. He picks words from ppretension, saying how we’ve all got it wrong with a high strung chastise of a man insecure. I’ve seen him steal and plant. I’ve seen him struggle all through the night. I’ve seen him grab with a fish hand and say he loves my skirt. I’ve seen him whistle to the darkest receses and say his truth is mine. I’ve seen him leer at me with a pen in his tongue and close off cold without a concern for my welfare under his thumb. He prettys me up for trysts and promise, then retreats inward with detachment in scwols of disgust like some happy prisoner in a modern facilitay of his own narcisstic inaccessibility.
He’s a new fluid. He argues his mind. He asks me — begs me — to see him pitied, to leave him in a meeat rump. He exploits a new dyad, the individual consumer and her phone, from desperation from despair and from touchdeprivation. I wish I never told him it will all be alright. That smug bastard said “you might be right”.
(Lorde, “But you''re not what you thought you were ” Liability (Reprise) (2017))
Have you ever seen him frighten his mind and say he’s all alone? He throw his hands to the wall blasts my terrors in to irrelevance, curls his lip, taps his foot, scans his fire eyes in lust. He has no will to survive. He prefers life through dark eyes, and he crushes mine inside. He was, has always been, casual and heartless.
Bet you’ve never seem him callous with me. Bet you’ve never heard such a word. he’s all goospi and freak, scrolling the crystal hatreds of male desire sitting over there all lazy in panic, psuhing his pace across the floor running himself manic.
This boy is chronically terminally catatonically online, as all of them are now. Every woman knows what I mean. A boy whose self-analysis outweighs his selfesteem. He has the male disease. that particular combination of arrogance and timidity that sets my teeth on edge. He has a bad case alexithymia, for he’s either an erratic paver of prefaced spiel, or thinking in conceit (not there at all). He sustains patterns of lying and manipulation to excuse his behaviour. he blame-shifts, minimises, denies, and provokes me so that he can call me aggressive and crazy. He was jealous and resentful of my professional relationships and isolated me from friends. Bascially, he blamed me for everything that was wrong in his life.
Man, you’re a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an obstacle to civilisation. Feel the shame.
(Lorde, “So I guess I’ll go home into the arms of the girl that I love / the only love I haven''t screwed up,” Liability (2017))
Look at the objectification the objectification the objectification of his outlook. Hes turned women into emojis! He can’t relate to anything other than his own physical sensations. He preferred to feel my eyes on his cheek bones, and would swing his head in an amusing circular motion to speak to the ceiling, and then canter down to look at my chest. He would speak to the whole city on our walks up to his room. It’s clear like any consultant, he knows 50 sexual positions but no woman.
He told me all about the socialist society he attended once, where, in code for his discomfort with facing real working class people caught in life altering employer disputes, he lamented the lack of theoretical discussions. That Gramsci’s distinction between Western and Russian systems of cultural hegemony was not applied to New Zealand’s ripe revolutionary consciousness. He was honestly saddened that there would be no revolution tomorrow, and a little bit surprised. But this is the very same man who also says he’s from South Johnsonville and not plum Khandallah.
He also seemed to take pleasure in humiliating me, blatantly flirting with women in his apps in front of me. Laughing at my words. I was an accessory unacknowledged in a public place. His property.
Ew.
It is clearer and clearer by each book on his shelf from Nietzsche to Nabokov to poor Sylvia Plath (dog ear curiously positioned very early on), how little he cares for the consequences of the ideas he theoretises. How much he overlooks. How desperate he is for their justificaiton.
I had half his attention at all times, that half of treating me like a feature of novelty, worthy of comments and simple questions, and the other half he was doing god knows what to me in silence. It was like he would sit me down to hear his voice memos while he went off on a mission to slow the sun.
3. Using your fingers or a thin, non-metal tool, gently pry the loose corner of the case away from the phone: (3rd wave)
As I lay there on his unwashed sheets, hair matted and throat burnt, I regretted that in his enchantment he never could understand why I was there, what I needed, what satisfaction I was trying to claw at, what I was distracting myself from, that void that I needed to fill. This never needed his comment or characterisation but just honest attention, a careful handling of my needs. Instead he was drawing from a manual to perform the pleasantries of a role he didn’t value.
(Lorde, “bet you rue the day you kissed the writer in the dark,” Writer in the dark (2017))
A wrtier, is there nothing worse? Like all people with inconsistent personalities his arrogance is unlimited. Stone cold liar he’d cut me off mid sentence so he could hear me shut up. He had me hold him, but never looked up, or if he held me in his spoon, where he could relax out of my gaze, he would assault me with neck kisses, something I never provoked. He also made me feel bad about my intelligence and education, making nasty remarks when I wanted to read or do something intellectual I enjoyed.
He knew he looked alright and paid so few complements to me, it was clear he thought that kind of common decency beneath him. Or more pathetically, I think he was so afraid of discomfort that he thought it was in my best interests to save me from any kind of “objectification”. Probably hearing once from a joking lecturer, that under no circumstances was a complement appropriate when a woman is now everything but an artform. An idea that obviously terrorised him.
(Eleanor Catton, “...wondering, not for the first time, when exactly she had become so technologically dependent that her first instinct in every unpredicted circumstance was to outsource her imagination to her phone”, Birnam Wood (2023))
It was so apparent that the opiinons he held were entirely because they were palatable to the girls he fucked. all he would do was mould his words into my agreement. In those recycled internet opinions he branded me with, he would end every conversation parroting what I said. This defect of his, of massaging extreme opinions into complete supplication by praising me, patronising what he clearly viewed as basic and novel, was almost frightening. He never once saw that I understood how desperate he was.
This is not to say that he wasn’t an edgy contrarian, but in every conversation he would start from the most extreme point of view and think I wouldn’t notice him dissembling it in such a way that whatever I replied would slowly dilute his vitriol, until he would exhale out his nose and say something like “it’s just so true the harm Taylor endured at Kanye’s hands. I agree with you completely.” Or “you’re right silence is complicity”. For this is the new social skill of the male sex: Total placation.
I could tell this manufactured epiphany, this total submission to the language I nodded towards him, was the product of countless conversations formed on the indecent foundation that words have little meaning. That ever since being handed the whiteboard pen by his early childhood teachers, of cruising to speech competitions wins by a combination of tedious diction and supplicant glances of appeal to his teachers’ eyes, of stealing the stories of his friends and whispering them across pillows, of memorising the political positions of his lecturers in wildly sycophantic essays, that he had such little regard for language that it became anything in his hands. When I questioned him on his comments he said “skux is as skux does” and started kissing my thigh.
2. Carefully work your way around the edges, continuing to lift the case away from the phone: (2nd wave)
At the forum before Pegasus Books and Mother of Coffee, he stopped two steps above me, turned and straightened up to deliver the more serious end of his impromptu sermon, partially ithin earshot of Satay Kingdom’s night owls.
“Ah but Sylvia Plath is so misunderstood! The positioning of her trappings of motherhood, which I don’t deny are significant (my mum is a working mother, and had three natural births), and her sojourn into the literary world, that unique feminine perspective. She was Joan of Arc taking on 1950s New York. Or maybe Boudica for the aggression of her depressive spite. How she chastised those, on the whole, pretty well-meaning men around her. You cannot just ask to be an artist and then wallow in depression, I reckon. But all the same, you don’t do that sort of suicide thing when you have children. Artist or not.”
He said all this with quavering emotion, the grave social value of feminine literature curling his smirk. Now the crescendo.If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.
“You see I always preferred Janet Frame who isn’t so forthright with her second wave feminism. She sticks, rather impressively I think, to her mental state intensified by trappings of this small minded society of ours. In this country, the jandal clad philistines wander into Unity Books about once a year to demonstrate one sliver of respect for art, and then like the pōhutukawa they shed this red and fade bland again. Or actually, our other very own, the great Mansfield, now she inspires. I don’t see why the girls I know who studied her at school loathe her so much. Maybe she’s too boojwazee but you don’t get anywhere in this country by avoiding an experimental kind of spectacle. ‘The Garden Party,’ now that’s a story. Privilege affords the deeper conforntation with emotion. maybe it’s not in vogue to say that, but she was correct. She had the luxury of a carefree eye to spot “the little faint winds playing chase, in at the tops of the windows, out at the doors”. You must feel like Laura when you put on your dress. Getting all tidied up, to carry that little gift to the widow, trading it for the immediate oppression of that young man’s death. To me, that brings Laura the breakthrough of artistic consciousness. What do you think about the great Sally Rooney? Or are you more into the popular, I wouldn’t call it smut of course, but sexual dramas we find behind Whitcoull’s toys?”
I said I liked Sally Rooney.
“Nice. You see I’ve had two girls gift me Sally Rooney’s books as well. Can you imagine that? I think I should give them back but it’s too late now. I couldn’t get past the lack of punctuation, too radical I say for too poor of an effect. You wouldn’t think she’s from the same country as Joyce. Anyway I found the TV show better, which I never do by the way. I’ve tended to shy away from the lower art forms, and feel better for it. Anyway are you familiar with Patricia Lockwood’s essay, ‘How do we write now?’ (2018)?”
Bah blah blah. I never met a liar with a bigger smile.
And then the weekend nights week after week, nothing had changed. He was slow, uncomfortable and gasping heavy. And so tedous, so miserbale a fuck, so slef-aggrandsiing in his messages, so ruthless in his expeectation, so alien in his feeling, so brazen in his comparitive anlayses of all the girls he’d previously fucked, that I found him a skeletal oblong provider too sad to get hard.
(Janet Frame, “I am writing about a girl who is not me”, Alison Hendry (1947))
He wrote my body poems. He wrote my tits a poem each. He worte all the world into my looks, spilt anxieties down my inbox, only to go mute for days at a time and hide behind his screen. And then he would say after the most horrific of scroll intensive midnight messages “what one says comes from the depths of one’s ignorance, the depths of one’s own underdevelopment”.
Wtfff !
Near the end of things, when I was under him counting the flicker of his chandelier, he grabbed my throat, opened it, and spat in it when he came.
(Janet Frame, “where Naida used to live, in the small square house with its wooden latticed eyebrows and the straggled lupines in the garden and the rusty old pump with dirty water pouring out”, Gorse is Not People (2008))
What he was, was so far from himself that I couldn’t tolerate a boy so divided. He wanted me inconsistently and made his sadness my problem. It was not that I didn’t like him but his diction, so antithetical to his heart, his effort so lacking, his refusal to recognise the he had heard the limits of my needs, was obviously too much for him to process. In his arrogance he would never just see me, for he was a zealot in bow or looking down from a bloodied crown.
I had to go to great lengths to reassure him and even stopped speaking to certain people, who were absolutely no threat to him, to make him happy. This was a two month fling people ! The man was hijealous off weekend nights !
Warhol is completely egocentric, unable to relate, empathise or identify, and filled with a vast mental terror. I am never the women he sees, because he’s seen hundreds between our Friday nights. I could see it in his defeated absences, feel it in his provocations, he was losing grip on what he knew too scared to stand back and just fall. He could not handle me or my salary or my neglect to eat from his palm and say “thank you daddy”.
(Janet Frame, “It’s a poem of himself and everybody else, an awful poem certainly but a sincere one because it’s unconscious and beautiful one because what the heck”, Alison Hendry (1947))
I owe this man no voice. Have my silence you dead eyed ‘poet’ of self pity and violent love. I am never replying. Fuck someone else up not me.
1. Once enough of the case is lifted, slide the phone out of the case by pushing it through the opening you’ve created. Be gentle to avoid any scratches or damage to your phone: (1st wave)
Phone case removed. For any author to affirm a vision of masculinity, one must find it in Women’s fiction. What is this pen sans masculinity? There are no manifestos here. In order escape from convention, Lorde, Eleanor Catton, Janet Frame, and Katherine Mansfield, craft women of defiance. Not cookie cutter film heroines, but women measuring their entire essence against the chambers they find themselves in. A definition based on possibility rather than the limits of convention.
Where the women in each author’s work strokes and feels the walls like Frame’s Alison Hendry on her bed, the man in each author’s work is constructed from wishes, from inverse presentations of represented forms. Men do not anchor any of the four authors’ texts. They do not have thought written outside a women’s thought of male thought, because each author operates from the material. Each author writes the text within her skin.
Mansfield writes of a dead man in ‘The Garden Party’ (1922):
“There lay a young man, fast asleep — sleeping so soundly, so deeply, that he was far, far away from them both. Oh, so remote, so peaceful. He was dreaming. Never wake him up again. His head was sunk in the pillow, his eyes were closed; they were blind under the closed eyelids. He was given up to his dream. What did garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful. While they were laughing and while the band was playing, this marvel had come to the land. Happy… happy… All is well, said that sleeping face. This is just as it should be. I am content.”
This is a dead man not living. This is a dead man not elsewhere. This is a dead man written as unwrtten. This is a dead man dreaming but not of a dream of Mansfield’s pen.
What little scholarship there is of these female writers, so tedious, so institutional, so dry and instantly extrapolated to imported ‘On feminism’, neglects the softness of possibilities. Nought is sharp but the mystery of the sad in the withholding of even just one slice of fruit by a work mapped out in wants. All is banal when unthreatened.
Nature is a complement, the socius is a distance, interiority is — to use a shit word — empowering not limiting. The male stands in the distance blurry. He retains indifference, not agonised assumption. In ‘literary fiction’ women agonise over men, but in skilled literature of these authors there is not even a “One”.
A modern man thus honestly reprsented is not some reduction to a ball of tears in need of castration. A man is not a silver tongue. He is the limit. He is an affirmation of awe. He is presence rid of its haze. For a man in New Zealand literature must surpass all self-abasement called “self-deprecation” and instead arrive at impulse, sweating, lecherous and poisonous so as to demand the attention of these women’s words. To present a material form outside their own. To make love on the limit, ripping space from the confines of chronotope.
Lorde, Catton, Frame, Mansfield never faced a man anywhere near their depth of their women. Not even close. Show me the complexity of man in any of their works ! The discourse is right to point out that Mansfield’s innovations meant that the man is not a repressive artefact in her stories. But the question is not “is there a women in the text?”. Such a question is a trial a repudiation an insult a thinkpiece a degradation a misery a weak manicured hand diluting New Zealand’s literature historically. Literature renders only the most exact hands with the most exact of hands.
In the most modern, the latest of secular states, the only woman alive, the Nietzschean ‘last (wo)man’, is Mansfield’s ‘Woman at the Store’ (1912). The creationists, Frame and Mansfield, create a world unconcerned with the above question whatsoever because as creationists they ask “is there a text in the woman?”. They seek out of themselves story, they extract man from women. They create from confinement, using materials of thought, not thought itself, not the abstract.
0. Gently slide the phone into the case, starting with one end, and then press the edges down until the case snaps securely around the entire phone (New Wave):
Escaping the intelelctuallisation of the women in the first person perspective demands a visit to the characters of women, and the dreams of the men they wished for from the scraps they were given! Thus the new era, precisly where Witi Ihimaera asked where New Zealand literature is heading, is one of deamdning through callous transgression that there is a text in man. Overcoming himselef to afinally arrive the fucking flake ! Lorde sings of prohecy, it is for him to sing on his arrival and the women have already built the stage.
For if we are to bring at last some immanece to New Zealand literature, to reject the global tides and pathetic appeals to trnscendece (whether offshore or in god or in becoming or selfactualisation or liberation or in the prudish, or really underfucked, euphemisms of sexual relations); If we are to stop reducing the whole chain of feminine experience to the unspoken ponderings, msuings, completntations, mediations, speculations, ruminations, reflections and introspections of unsaid thought (ironically, the major critiques of Birnam Wood (2023) fixate on the ideologies rather than material realities that arise abstractions — literally disbelieving, as Macbeth himsef, in the Birnam Wood); If we are to stop pathologising Frame and start understanding the world as her text;
then the man, the “kiwi” man arrives fulfillling, demonstrating, possessing, materialising the constraints of the wishes they scribed from imagination. He puts a cock on the cover and cums on your screen.
Am I making sense?
Not lip service but earnest explanation. The fucnitonal elemnt: Phone Case. This is not skin this is protection. Condom-lite. In the works of these women lies the New Zealand man. In the women before him he earches for protection, and for the women, the man they conceive liberates them from their impriosnment in tedious social dsicourse (specifaclly, the New Yorker, Newsroom, Spinoff, North and South and all the other wretched proptery management companies of moralistic literary landlords they call essayists). These women you trap in themes and regurgitate under asphyxiating categories of female thought, are victims of your menopausal pen. You need a road out of the female for the arrival of the male.
Confused? DUmb bitch, let a man explain: The case is for protection, it gets oily and yellow, it has a sticker on it and clings to the phone. Mobile accessories include any hardware that is not integral to the operation of a mobile smartphone as designed by the manufacturer. Its purpose is to protect the phone from being damageed or to use for more convenient use of the phone. People can choose weather to use these accessories for their mobile. The phone case is optional, a shield, a sheath. It’s a struggle to get the phone cass off. It’s glued on, it’s never been taken off. And we are not sure he ends up taking it off. There is a man that exists in all four authors works that is him. Begins by trying to take off the sticker, chipping the corners removing some parts in response to harm and self-reflection. Ripping it off is an inherently violent process and the women in their literature give no such place to masculine violence. Are the men in their text’s our user? Remaining skintight to the process of violent struggle, is the chosen opetional exterior that every man displays. Can he take it off? Not with his language of violence. Case is waterproof, no tears around here. Cosmetic features mask a violent turmoil reacting against confortnation.
(“I need my women to do it for me. Not a hot water bottle with tits but force of anture wiht a fresh pen. I need her under me. I need her instead of me. And if I am admired for admiring so be it !” This Author, 2024)
I’m running my mouth again, dripping lies from a poisoned tongue. With your pretty eyes fluttering berryaing an honest preach, I’m annhiliating myself in screems. With my liquid promises betrayed by my superficila sppecch, you’re licking me benaeath, beneath. With your hair tied up dwon on your carpet burnt knees, I’m undressing this dysangelist in dream.
(“Look me in the eyes when you drink from me !” This Author, 2024)
I can’t rid this shield I can’t take it off it is a jar I cannot open even with dry hands and a sticky wet rag. Sans nude, exterior to being, sought in the traces of pretneded reads, sitting heavy on dusty shelves by the black sand beaches, lies the platform of this man finnaly arrived wiht a evil glint in his eye and the New intense, the New efforescence that says “Give me my case, for I am a man and a man is I !”