cat person

if somoene wrote a story in which my ex-girlfriend was depicted as being abusive to me, and the story was a viral sensation, and everyone who knew us knew that this story was based on us, and then she was tormented by this, i would absolutely want to correct the record.

whatever harsh feelings i have for my exes, or whatever, there is still a principle of fairness.

i agree that the essay is primarily about her standing up for herself and her own story. but charles is definitely a part of it. this is part of what made the story so disturbing -- that it was not a pleasant and fun story. i imagine she would not care as much if the story was lighter in tone and didn't depict her as naive and him as predatory.

Wanting the record corrected and writing an essay primarily to clear an ex’s name when your personal deets were poached & your experience misrepresented — not the same thing. The only thing I don’t buy is that the essay writer PRIMARILY wrote the essay to clear his name. That was secondary because he deserved to have his name cleared. I feel like there are way too many potential spots of misunderstanding (in good or bad faith) that I should probably just bow out.

i don't think it was primarily due to that either. i just think it's part of it.

so i think we agree.

i just often repeat the same points over and over. if someone wants to create a pedantic internet poster character, just change my hometown please.

what is the main idea of this passage?

a) potaotes from ireland started the potato revolution
b) the average american eats 50 pounds of potatoes a year
c) french fries are made from potatoes
d) potatoes are a key vegetable in america
e) the various terms for potatoes have a long history

She could have corrected the record and stood up for herself privately. I don’t think it was cool to do publicly unless the motivation was attention/pay. Which are fine motivations for a lot of people, who could justify the downsides. I could not.

cat people...got no reason

Sounds too close to “women speak up either for attention or money.”

What would the benefit be of standing up privately? Readers who recognized her might still assume she was the naive, somewhat self-absorbed girl of the story. To set the record straight she needs to speak out.

Also I found her essay more compelling than the initial story. So I think it justifies itself as an essay in its own right that raises questions about ethics in authorship.

Was wondering how you correct the record in private.

to be fair, james joyce presented skewered visions of real life people in 'ulysses.' i'm certain that none of his easily identifiable models consented to this.

it is not clear how he could have disguised these people, given the fact that the novel itself was so autobiographical. he *was* stephen, biographically; and he *was* bloom, spiritually. (italo svevo was also bloom).

i don't know if this is ethical, if autofiction is ethical. knausgaard writes extensively, in his books, about how pissed off everyone was by his books, which didn't even include a fig leaf of a name change. i guess the difference with joyce and knausgaard is that they implicate themselves in their work more than anyone else? or maybe the difference is that i love ulysses, and i love the 'my struggle' novels, and i don't love cat person, so the literature doesn't seem to justify the violation.

there are all kinds of sexist implications to this too. in my defense, though, i also will defend virginia woolf's use of people from her real life as obvious models.

I could at least understand better where the objection was coming from if it was something like "the original story said something really important and I don't think it should be discredited".

i guess in this case it seems like whatever one finds valuable in the story could have been preserved if they changed the details? whereas in these other cases, it's not as easy, as the work is about the author and the people they knew

also, like, i am not totally clear on the ethics of those other examples, even though i appreciate those works as literature

haven't followed all the intricacies, but it seems to me the response essay may be a case of......

.....putting out fire with gasoline

It seems to me that if someone researches biographical details about you in order to write a sex scene between you and your actual ex-boyfriend in which both of you can be easily identified, you are justified in writing anything you please about it.

I would simply correct the record privately

xp. otm

sorry y'all, just making a david bowie joke.....

Just heard there’s a Cat Person movie! It stars two ppl I’ve never heard of which is perfect (for me) and I’m weirdly psyched to see what it looks like as a movie. I’d imagine it’s going to be REALLY uncomfortable 😀

damn, Greg the Egg getting done dirty with this casting.

Cat Person - Official Trailer (2023) Emilia Jones, Nicholas Braun, Thriller Movie pic.twitter.com/on9gU0QU4q

— Movie Coverage (@MovieCoverage_) August 24, 2023

Lol what the fuck

Isn't it a truism that a longish short story is the perfect length for a movie? So what the fuck is going on there? Why does it continue? They don't think that's enough for a film, they've got to amp up everything? Such a shit decision, whatever you think of the original short story.

What’s wrong w a cat person movie? I think it’s an appropriate length/level of complexity

the trailer has the whole original story as just setup for some stalker / thriller thing.

One of us has to die

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

The Horrible Twin

lol the poster art directly references the photo that accompanied the NYer story (with a font that feels very late 90s)

https://people.com/thmb/D-Z4q769sW6zWUTo7T4bf2GJS5Q=/1500x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(749x0:751x2)/cat-person-poster-082323-288b858191b0498fb2d084fde6581d6d.jpg

this person still sucks

damn, Greg the Egg getting done dirty with this casting.

― Judi Dench's Human Hand (methanietanner), Friday, January 20, 2023 10:42 PM (seven months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm was very OFFTM with this one in retrospect. Knowing what we know now about Nicolas Braun, it's kind of like when Chris D'Elia played a celebrity who groomed teens on YOU.

Reading over my posts on this thread, I understand why some people don’t like me.

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...