cat person

we all love you

it’s better to read your own old posts and realize personal growth than it is to read them and consistently think “this guy? otm”

kind of nice to do the latter a bit, too

if I was in charge of the marketing for this movie I would change the name from 'Cat Person' to 'The Ick', gotta move with the times

from a studio bottom line $$ perspective, this is a A++ idea

I can’t believe there is nearly 1,000 posts in this thread. Who says ILx is moribund?

One of my coworkers heard the word moribund for the first time last week! So if people are calling things moribund maybe they just learned that word.

I didn't really like this story but somehow I never got around to saying so in the 1,000-post thread about it

It needed more stalking and murder imo

people who use the word moribund sound bad. they are like cat person, who is bad

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e1/Moribundmusic.jpg

xp Like Philip Parsons in the Times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lAQHCpbUDw

Idk why but for some reason when I think about cat person I think about bad art friend why is this

Both short stories controversial for twisting real life stories without asking permission

Both short stories controversial for twisting real life stories without asking permission

― Zelda Zonk

as someone who doesn't write professionally, i have wondered for a while how professional fiction works... i'm definitely a "write what you know" sort of person. everything i write is rooted in my real-life experience, whether i mean it to or not. anything "original" i come up with in terms of characters is just combining different qualities of different people i know, or looking at someone i know and using them as a kind of basis for a character... not drawing from actual incidents but thinking of a person and asking myself "what would this person say in this situation?" and then as i keep writing the character diverges from the real-life person i originally modeled them on. or if i am writing about an incident that happened, i feel like it's something that happens often enough and in enough different ways that basing a story on that situation is more or less "original". where's the line, i guess? i don't mean this as "discourse", i'm just trying to refine my process as a writer!

people who use the word moribund sound bad. they are like cat person, who is bad

― imago

how about "moribundity"

i use that word

it’s better to read your own old posts and realize personal growth than it is to read them and consistently think “this guy? otm”

kind of nice to do the latter a bit, too

― mh

future me hates me

well, i guess not "hate", but a lot of my "personal growth" has come from reading my old writing and realizing "wow, i have said and done some genuinely awful shit"

it's pretty hard for me to read my old posts sometimes. i have a tendency to be ashamed of myself, which isn't helpful to anybody, particularly me... idk, sometimes it almost feels like the whole "so a fool returneth to his folly" thing is a form of digital self-harm, like when you log on to facebook and see old pictures of you with your ex (or in my case, see old pictures of just plain _you_ in the before time)... i've never understood why social media believes that people want to be reminded of their pasts...

I’m about halfway through the movie — has anyone else seen it??

I haven't---please give us your take when you've seen it all, or as much as you can take.

so far the only point at which i said omg noooooo out loud and with genuine horror was when i heard the opening notes of "enjoy the silence"

ok so "based on the story Cat Person" only goes about 2/3 of the way through the movie. there is an entire section at the end after he texts her calling her a whore in which many completely insane events occur, including a fight scene and a massive fire and a return of the dog i don't remember from the story.

the parts that were actually based on the story i thought were pretty good and true to life, somewhat subversive in their unvarnished truth. the scene you imagine being borderline unwatchable with cringe is just as bad as you're imagining it. i like the dissociated self talking to the real self parts. the ending though? idk wtf was going on there. i did enjoy the small role of the woman from The Bear as the cop.

A movie about the author’s shitty ethics and the subject killing himself would be far more interesting.

xp yeah the movie is better than i expected.. i think the end kinda works in its own odd way… i think the movie needed a way to get margot and robert face to face again outside of the end of the short story.. yes it is slightly absurd but not outside of the (mostly)truth of the characters

the most read story in n+1 history. the Cat Person of its day? i couldn't read the whole thing. i got bored. i looked for it after reading most of a very long profile in the nyt. which i also got bored of. i guess i was hoping the story would be funnier since they said he was a "master comedian" in the NYT thing.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-35/fiction-drama/the-feminist/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/magazine/tony-tulathimutte-rejection.html

!!!!!!!!

"For his novel, “Private Citizens,” which he worked on for more than seven years, Tulathimutte netted an advance of $20,000. His new book, “Rejection,” a volume of linked short stories about losers in love, was acquired for $350,000."

incel sells by the seashore.

was actually just about to fire that story up. it’s included in the n+1 collection that came out last week

I just skimmed a bit. Seems pretty awful.

urgh, forgot about that one.
one of those short stories where you attempt to guess what the author thought they were doing as opposed to how the work actually reads. then you realize it wasn’t interesting enough to waste more time thinking about it

i met this guy in college, so 20 years ago. “young writer” is relative i suppose!

gender dystopian fiction was kind of a micro-genre in the late 2010s.

damn, I still have time to become a young writer

ok, just read it. it certainly wasn’t boring, and as a rule I don’t think “how something reads” is a particularly enriching lens for appraisal. I wanted to like it more than I did — I think it starts pretty strong, feinting at a gender politics that might genuinely be challenging, but ultimately there’s a missing humanity to the piece I think, and the ending, if I’m understanding what seem to be it’s obvious implications, is a bit too easy and conventional

apprehensive about reading something both anti-feminist and boring, i asked chatgpt to summarize it for me. this is what I got:

"The Feminist" by Tony Tulathimutte, published in n+1, is a satirical short story that follows the complex dynamics between a writer and his ex-girlfriend, who is a prominent feminist influencer. The story explores themes of gender politics, social media, and personal identity, highlighting the protagonist's inner conflict as he navigates his feelings of envy, guilt, and disillusionment. It reflects on the performative nature of modern feminism and relationships in the digital age.

do i need to know more? what does this have to do with cat person?

i skimmed and settled on this as a place to stop reading. does something happen?

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Issue 35
Savior Complex
The Intellectual Situation
Spectacle of ParticipationThe Editors
Politics
On the Mueller Report, Vol. 1Mark Greif
The Evangelical MindAdam Kotsko
Essays
Cash/ConsentLorelei Lee
Predatory InclusionKeeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
White VoiceDan Sinykin
Holding PatternsAlice Abraham
Fiction and Drama
Parasite AirTrevor Shikaze
The FeministTony Tulathimutte
The CreatureSarah Resnick
Reviews
Dreams Are Lost MemoriesA. S. Hamrah
On Design ThinkingMaggie Gram
Letters
Right EffortThe Editors
Fiction and Drama
Tony Tulathimutte

The Feminist
A straight flush of stable-pair-bonding qualities

Published in Issue 35 : Savior Complex

Publication date Fall 2019

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Alida Cervantes, NO TE ENTIENDO. 2018, oil on found wood. 17 × 24". Courtesy of the artist.
If you ask him where he went to high school, he likes to boast that, actually, he went to an all-girls school. That was sort of true—he was one of five males at a progressive private school that had gone co-ed just before he’d enrolled. People always reply: Ooh la la, lucky guy! You must’ve had your pick. Which irritates him, because it implied women would only date him if there were no other options, and because he hadn’t dated anyone in high school. One classmate junior year had a crush on him, but he wasn’t attracted to her curvaceous body type so felt justified in rejecting her, just as he’d been rejected many times himself.

Still, the school ingrained in him, if not feminist values per se, the value of feminist values. It had been cool, or at least normal, to identify as asexual. And though he didn’t, he figured it was a better label than “virgin.” His friends, mostly female, told him he was refreshingly attentive and trustworthy for a boy. Meanwhile he is grateful for the knowledge that female was best used as an adjective, that sexism harms men too (though not nearly to the extent that it harms women), and that certain men pretend to be feminists just to get laid. After he graduated he started to feel slightly sheepish about never having even kissed anyone. Everyone knows, though, that real dating starts in college, where nobody will be aware of his track record.

But in college, he encounters the alien system of codes and manners that govern flirting, conveyed in subtextual cues no more perceptible to him than ultraviolet radiation. Learning in high school about body positivity and gender norms and the cultural construction of beauty led him to believe that adults aren’t obsessed with looks. This turns out to be untrue, even among his new female friends, who complain about how shallow men are. Now that he’s self-conscious, he realizes he can’t compete along conventional standards of height, weight, grip strength, whatever. How can he hope to attract anyone with his narrow shoulders?

The women he tries to date offer him friendship instead, so once again, most of his friends are women. This is fine: it’s their prerogative, and anyway, lots of relationships begin platonically—especially for guys with narrow shoulders. But soon a pattern emerges. The first time, as he is leaving his friend’s dorm room, he surprises himself by saying: Hey, this might be super random, and she can totally say no, but he’s attracted to her, so did she want to go on a “date” date, sometime? In a casual and normal voice. And she says, “Oh,” and filibusters—she had no idea he felt that way, and she doesn’t want to risk spoiling the good thing they have by making it a thing, she just wants to stay . . . and he rushes to assure her that it’s valid, no, totally valid, he knows friendship isn’t a downgrade, sorry for being weird. Ugh!

Right? she replies, dating’s so overrated and meaningless in college anyway, and she knows that he knows he’ll find someone who deserves him, because he’s great, really great, so thoughtful, so smart, not like these SAE sideways-hat-wearing dudebros, but of course he already knows that, and she really appreciates it. Then he thanks her for being honest, because it’s proof their friendship is real, and don’t worry about him, he gets it.

He does get it. It sort of kills him, but he knows his rejector was only trying to spare his feelings, since men often react badly to “hard rejection.” So he validates her condolences and communicates them back until she’s convinced he’ll be fine. “Grrr, friend-zoned again!” he says, shaking his fists toward the ceiling, and they laugh together and hug and he walks back to his dorm just before sunrise.

He gets into bed and sighs. While he’s confident he handled everything respectfully, the girl’s praise only reminds him that none of his ostensibly good qualities are attractive enough to even warrant him a chance, which makes them seem worthless. He also suspects that her flattery was . . . exaggerated, and a bit . . . patronizing? If she didn’t think friendship was a downgrade, she wouldn’t have said she “just wanted to stay friends.” By persuading him to reject himself, was she just offloading her guilt? He stews at the familiarity of the situation: once again, he’s got to be the one who accepts, forgives, tolerates, pretends not to be wounded, pretends he has stopped hoping—all this sapping emotional labor not just to preserve his dignity and assuage her guilt, but also because he doesn’t want to spoil his chances of dating her in the future, since it’s her prerogative, after all, to change her mind.

He’ll be fine, hopes everything’s cool—and if she ever changes her mind, he’ll be around!

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Still, he respects her decision. He gets out of bed, feeling compelled to let her know where he stands, to check in, so he composes a long postmortem email, reconstructing everything that happened from the beginning, assuring her that he knew nobody was to blame for a lack of attraction, and that if it isn’t clear, yes, he is interested in her, but he’s not one of those fake-feminist guys who snubs any woman he can’t fuck, so, sorry if this is completely graceless and exhausting, by no means is he making his embarrassment her problem, he just wants to get everything out in the open. He hits send.

An hour later he sends a second email: Just out of curiosity, could she say a little about why she rejected him? It’d be really helpful for him. Is it because he’s narrow-shouldered? Is that a deal breaker for her? Because he can’t help that, as she knows. Or is it a specific thing he did or said, because if so, they could discuss that, clear up any miscommunications. Anyway, he’ll be fine, hopes everything’s cool—and if she ever changes her mind, he’ll be around!

Considering his tremendous effort to be vulnerable, it seems unfair when a day passes with no reply. Fearing that he might not get one at all, he writes a third email clarifying that she’s by no means obliged to reply, though if she wants to, he’d love hearing her thoughts. He is somewhat annoyed when she again doesn’t reply, though he’s glad to have given her that option. At least nothing’s been left unsaid.

This exact scenario happens four or five more times.

whoa sorry about that monster post
i can get a mod to fix if it's bothering anyone

why don’t you just read it and decide for yourself lol

lol i don't think i can tbh

well, i could but it would not be healthy for me.

I always thought Cat Person was partly about how our own individual decisions and agency don't make as much difference as bigger social forces outside our control - like there's a bit towards the end where the protagonist says something about how part of what she finds distressing is that she can't really identify anything the guy did *wrong* per se, she goes into the date feeling like she's the one in control and playing with him and then has this rude awakening, but it's not like the guy is personally the one in control either, they both come away confused and hurt, it's these gender dynamics that exist outside of and above the two of them that actually determine everything that happens.

This story seems similar in that you could read it as being about the futility of this guy's attempts to be a 'good feminist', however much effort he puts in, the position assigned to him by society is ultimately more consequential than his own beliefs or choices? They're both fatalistic views of gender relations?

that excerpt, or at least the paragraph that starts "Still, he respects her decision," is basically borrowing the style of david foster wallace's "the depressed person" but I think you have to be as good as dfw in order to bring it off, I don't want to say this is bad, it's not bad, but it also doesn't have the force of the very best, it's very hard to write like this and not have it come out a little bloggy

not just bloggy but dehumanizing. the characters become types rather than people. but maybe that is the point -- that the internet has done that to people, made them dehumanize themsleves

xps like in cat person the guy doesn't really pressure her into sex with him, but there's a sense that this doesn't matter because she's already been pressured into having sex with him by society before the two of them even meet. It was odd when the story first came out and I saw women advising men to read it as a kind of self improvement what-not-to-do guide, how to not be cat person, when it seemed to me like it was more about how there isn't really a way to do it 'right'

what does this have to do with cat person?

is presumably answered by

the ending, if I’m understanding what seem to be it’s obvious implications, is a bit too easy and conventional

which is also the case for "Cat Person"

that excerpt, or at least the paragraph that starts "Still, he respects her decision," is basically borrowing the style of david foster wallace's "the depressed person" but I think you have to be as good as dfw in order to bring it off, I don't want to say this is bad, it's not bad, but it also doesn't have the force of the very best, it's very hard to write like this and not have it come out a little bloggy

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Sunday, September 15, 2024 11:41 AM (two minutes ago)

yes! i appreciate this because the only DFW that has really stayed with me is "the depressed person" -- i think about it a lot, or have over the years in the same way i have thought about cat person.

honestly i don't think it would be healthy for me to immerse myself in the thoughts of this protagonist, and i appreciate the discussion. it's interesting even if i can't bring myself to read it.

(although i found the ending of cat person incredibly satisfying in its, idk severity? and partially what made the story so compelling beyond it being a relatable story)

well, i could but it would not be healthy for me.

not super-healthy for anyone to boil a lake in order to help a fraudster’s plagiarism engine work fractionally less worse tbh

ok now I read the end (of the n+1 story) I am not sure I even get it, I'm afraid "the obvious implications" are supposed to be that he, what, has an AR-15 in his backpack and shoots up the place? I would not have thought that just reading the story, but I also don't really know what "He must commit himself to action, pull out the serrated knife that’s been in his chest for decades. Before he dies he must stop nothing from happening." If it's actually supposed to mean "he whips out his AR-15 and shoots up the place and then probably offs himself" then I think it is a very cheap stupid ending! Not being David Foster Wallace enough and trying to do "The Depressed Person" is bad, not being Salinger enough and trying to do "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is worse.

I don't want to crap on this story too much, I think it is actually a very acutely OBSERVED piece of work, I think there are a lot of word choices in it that are exactly right, I just think -- to what purpose? To participate in a discourse and not add something to it that the internet can't already provide. Fiction should do the things only fiction can do, it should have people in it, which "The Depressed Person" does and this does not

TBF I started reading that NYTimes profile and the writing there is much, much worse than Tulathimutte's writing: "These days, when the faintest gust of heterodoxy is enough to start an internet stampede," you don't say, might you by any chance have a newsletter

Tulathimutte quoted as saying "Even though I considered the story almost unforgivably heavy-handed as I wrote it" -- he was right!!