Edit: that somehow turned into a link to the void - how appropriate. — unenlightened

:)

That was my hot take @csalisbury. And I don't want to sound like I'm being contemptuous for the sake of it. I am serious in my view that this is bad writing, and its success, such that it is, is reflective of something negative about the way we live now. Maybe come back with some cold reflections later.

(1) youre a monster (2) I agree that it fails aesthetically, tho I’m torn on the quality of the writing. I think its quite in good in places. I think the style and voice goes well with the material. Also, i read along listening to the author read, and her (literal voice) is a familiar one. Its a faintly sexualized simplicity of
speech that I associate with english or art majors from good schools, especially ones into poetry. Simple because it knows it has the background not to have to prove itself. Faintly sexualized because it has a bored and ironc stance toward the texture of normal life, so it needs to make a kind of game out of it. Like the beginning where margot is flirting, like for tips, even tho its a tipless job.

I think what i find interesting in the story is less its aesthetic value than yeah that it it reflects particularly well a bunch of problems with How Millenials Date - and then, also, that the material actually gets away from the author despite her attempt to control it (I think the consensus is the ending is really bad, and I think we’re all saying, in different ways, that this is why). So in that sense the story is both the story (here comes the meta again) and an interesting artifact brilliantly - if unintentionally - showcasing one way how the substance of the uncomfortable parts of romance are becoming scrubbed away through simple narrative. And how (since the new yorker published this) its becoming more and more socially sanctified to do this kind of rewriting without any pushback(Have more to say but I’m typing from a small and broken phone and it sucks)

Gonna give the carol oates a read once I’m back home

I see some similarities between the two, but I felt the New Yorker short story was something that could happen, where the Oates story has this quasi-magical feel to it.

I think that the New Yorker story is passed along because it resonates with people's experience.

But, then again, maybe it was more personal than the story lets on - like it happened to the writer or a friend of the writer. — Moliere

I read an interview with the author and she did say the inspiration was a real bad date that began with text-flirting. No hints about whether something like the story’s end happaned tho

Though to preserve ambiguity I'd say that Robert would have to not show up at her bar, too. That already shows the lie.

Good point, I forgot the detail that Robert indicates he doesn’t go the bars in this area himself. Maybe the idea is that him drinking despondently alone is an intentionally constructed tableau he hopes she’ll see. (I’ve actually done this, younger)

The whole thing is just Age Gap Romance twisted with subverted Beast and Beauty by finally affirming the monstrosity of the beast (Robert). Add a pinch of subverted Single Woman Seeks Good Man by making it an explicitly internalised motivating narrative for Margot, in contrast to what she actually wants, and you're done — fdrake

I agree that the ending turns in into something like this, but I think, before that, it does something more interesting - all those tropes are there, floating around, but there's a lot more of them too (there's a weird class dynamic going on, there's a mutal drawing from the manic-pixie quirk well etc.) but they're all bumping around in a kind of incoherent way. I think the story is good in that, until the end, it doesn't commit to any one of these tropes definitively. They're more like a mental environment, or half-conscious background, that's both part of the date, and also a frantic attempt to make sense of the date. You could say, I think, that the collection of tropes present is incompossible, so both Margot & Robert are just kind of tossed around from one to another ( I think you're right, that if we saw Robert's point of view, something similar would be going on)
I think this is the point that @StreetlightX was making:

Or rather, we play games that we don't even know that we're playing; Or, we have these hazy outlines, absorbed through a mishmash of observation, gossip, some mixed experiences, and we do - or think we do - what we're 'supposed to', and you commit yourself to this network of expectations you (or your partner) didn't even quite know you've bought into. And normally this is fine (life is like that) except no one wants to talk about this stuff because sex is still treated as this weird and dirty thing that you can only whisper about, even as we're meant to be this sexually liberated society - which ends up confusing things even more — Street

I think both Robert and Margot know the game, but are both utterly clueless about the meta-game: the motions are right, and there are real consequences of those motions, but the meta-game is incredibly fuzzy for both of them ('Do I want what it is I'm supposed to want? Do they?' - Margot to her credit, asks this question, even though she doesn't quite act on it; Robert remains oblivious). At the story level, one thing that's striking is the lack of any real, motivated 'decisional' action, I think. The whole relationship - with maybe the exception of the initial asking out - is built off reactions. Both are consistently unsure about what the other is thinking, and you consistently have this weird retroactive confirmation of motivation where each acts decisively only ever based on some expression of vulnerability in the other (with the vulnerability evoked by the other to begin with). — Street

Margot's central motivation seems to be the boredom that comes from having no clear motivation. LIke, fuck it, why not, he's got a tattoo at least. Not that she doesn't want to hae motivation, I think, but she just truly doesn't know how. (Though I agree that the disgust/narcissistic fantasy that springs up probably goes a little deeper than some of her other ones.)

[regarding the class subcurrent - this line, in particular, irked me.

For some reason, he’d chosen a movie with subtitles, — Story

This 'for some reason' is a lie (or at least it's something that would be said to her imagined future boyfriend.) Because, earlier:

She wondered if perhaps he’d been trying to impress her by suggesting the Holocaust movie, because he didn’t understand that a Holocaust movie was the wrong kind of “serious” movie with which to impress the type of person who worked at an artsy movie theatre, the type of person he probably assumed she was[...]

[...]He kept coming back to her initial dismissal of the movie, making jokes that glanced off it and watching her closely to see how she responded. He teased her about her highbrow taste, and said how hard it was to impress her because of all the film classes she’d taken, even though he knew she’d taken only one summer class in film. He joked about how she and the other employees at the artsy theatre probably sat around and made fun of the people who went to the mainstream theatre, where they didn’t even serve wine, and some of the movies were in imax 3-D. — story

So, she knows the reason very well. "For some reason" really means "look at this: weird, if not pathetic, right?"

But the thing is this 'for some reason', in the story, isn't addressed to the imaginary boyfriend. It appears to be addressed to the reader (though maybe, in the end, the whole point of writing this story is that your readership gets to be the imaginary boyfriend, who otherwise would 'never exist.'

Thinking some more about this: I think the formula of the story is Mumblecore + texting/internet + Nice Guy Cautionary Tale/Affirmed Beast.

If you take out the fear-of-being-murdered aspect (which is, I admit, a pretty big thing to take out) the awkward and uncomfortable conversation in Cat Person kinda reminds me of this kinda atmosphere, just with the gender roles swapped:

I'd give it an F. It's badly-written, boring, and painfully contrived. — Baden

You are a tough grader. I didn't think it was that bad. But what I did think bad was that the New Yorker saw fit to print it. The New Yorker! Publisher of Welty, Cheever, and Nabokov; Updike, Jackson, Roth, Spark, Mary McCarthy, et al. Why bother with this piece--F or B-? The New Yorker gets enough submissions to publish only A+ stories. They published The Lottery which ends with a stoning. Maybe Cat Person would have been a better story if Robert had been a psychopath (per Timeline) and had taken her into the woods and murdered her. Or maybe she was the murderous one: The Case of the Killer Co-Ed. Hey, this is fiction -- murder is perfectly legal in a short story.

Flannery O'Conner has a wonderful story -- A Good Man is Hard to Find (I think that's its title). A family goes on a road trip and the grandmother insists on a pointless detour to look at something inconsequential. The result is, of course, that the family encounters the murderers who they have been hearing about on the car radio. Murderers murder and that's what happens to the family. At the last moment the frivolous grandmother perceives the human worth of the desperado who is about to kill her, and says so. Bang. She's dead. The murderer says "She would have been a good woman if she had a gun pointing at her all her life."

It's not a wonderful story because the old lady get's murdered along with the rest of the family. It's great because of the tightly drawn but simple plot, the banal characters in the car, the exceptionally evil murderers, and then at the end, the vision of goodness which comes too late.

The New Yorker just needs to stick to its established standards.

In some ways, I think Cat Person has the function of a gun pointed to produce displays of goodness, and so kind of perpetuates the cycle of fear and facade its talking about. Like, Robert seems like the type of guy who would probably encounter Cat Person, so you can imagine this same scenario only now both of them have read Cat Person (maybe they even discuss it) so Robert’s savvy enough to conceal himself even better, at least until the next such story reveals him once more. I think the internet kind of speeds up this process - whereas before people exchanged samizdat about red flags in private circles (slowly until things finally crystallized in, something like say, Fatal Attraction) now everything’s in public, so theres barely time to catch your breath.

You are a tough grader. — Bitter Crank

Well, I should try to justify my criticism. I read it through again and I'll try to be more nuanced while still contending that it fails both in terms of form and content, aesthetically and narratively, in composition and in content. And, yes, I am holding it to high standards, at least partly because it was published in The New Yorker. You mentioned Cheever. The New Yorker published "The Swimmer". Enough said.

It fails aesthetically because it's poorly—if competently—written. It would be impressive as an actual diary scribbled down by a relatively well-educated young person similar in age and experience to the main character herself. But artistic renditions of the real thing are supposed to be aesthetic distillations not faithful copies. And I haven't heard a lot of argument in support of the writing anyway, so I'll take it as not particularly controversial at least that we're not dealing with the top-level here.

It fails narratively because there's a general lack of tension in the story:

1) It has a very stale and unengaging opening.

"Margot met Robert on a Wednesday night toward the end of her fall semester. She was working behind the concession stand at the artsy movie theatre downtown when he came in and bought a large popcorn and a box of Red Vines."

Nothing at all happens then until the mild sexual (mis)adventure and even that is not much of a something. We finish with Robert in loser mode writing a rude text to the woman who rejected him. And that's it. Again, I'm sure it resonates with young women who have had similar experiences, but there doesn't seem to be any attempt to go beyond that. Soap operas do the same thing. They resonate with experience. But at least they tend to have a variety of characters to appeal to a wider audience. The audience for this story seems not to extend much beyond millenial women.

2) The ending commits the cardinal sin of descending into kitsch, of providing an excess that detracts rather than adds to its value. We are told at the end who the villain is almost just in case we try to figure it out for ourselves.

Again, there seems to be a reasonable level of consensus on the bad ending, so I won't go on about it too much. Just to note though that if it were just that it copped out on the ending or went into excess mode somewhere in advance but before was authentically engaging, it might still pass in my book. The narrative of Breaking Bad, for example, had tension from the beginning but became unbearably kitschy with the religious metaphorical excess of the exploding plane and falling doll. And the first season of True Detective had a lot going for it until it descended into absolute kitsch with the happy/sad ending. Both were still reasonably good examples of narrative overall. This though never got going, so I suppose the ending was less of a disappointment in that respect.

2) The characters are poorly drawn (even for a short story where character development is necessarily limited by the nature of the genre).

One is a cardboard cutout "modern" villain where "modern" means emasculated and somewhat pathetic. The second is a pastiche of a typical young western woman, presumingly to appeal to as many millennial western women as possible (a bit like a horoscope is designed to say at least something somewhere that resonates with everyone who reads it). And in so far as we are defined by what we want, and the main characters' desires are the driving force of a narrative, what have we got here? Robert wants sex, and he got some, but apparently not enough. And Margot wants what? Love? excitement? better sex? more self-respect? better judgment? to be free of cognitive dissonance? confidence? all of the above? Who knows? She's confused; we're confused; and though we might more or less resonate with her experiences (depending on who we are), we're not deeply engaged with her desires (or fears) because they're not well-drawn. We don't know who she is any more than she does and we don't care all that much. Or I didn't anyway.

3) Ideology/message. So what's the underlying message here? What does the story bring to the table in terms of cultural criticism etc?

Hard to say. It seems you've got the usual normalizing discourse surrounding the empty lives of these two that revolve around consumerism and entertainment. They go to the cinema; they buy stuff at 7-11; they drink at bars; they text each other. That's it. That's life folks, and as long as you don't meet a villain like Robert, you'll be fine.

But then others like @csalisbury see value at a more meta level, which is fine if it was intended but I don't really see that, so far anyway, though I'm open to being wrong here. I mean, the movie "Plan 9 from Outer Space" arguably has meta value too. In this case, it was bad to the point of genius, a great, if perverse, example of the Hollywood dream. (And spawned a decent biography narrative / Johnny Depp vehicle about the director.) Point being, if you go meta enough you can probably find value in just about anything. But it may be that you're putting it there much more than retrieving it.

I think that the New Yorker story is passed along because it resonates with people's experience. — Moliere

Agreed. But that's pretty much all there is to it in my view.

I see some similarities between the two, but I felt the New Yorker short story was something that could happen, where the Oates story has this quasi-magical feel to it. — Moliere

The Oates story is engaging from the start; it doesn't try to be ambiguous and then tell you what to feel at the end in case you didn't feel the right thing. It has a simple goal, which is to paint the fear of an adolescent girl, embodied in Arnold Friend, in a way that anyone (though maybe especially adolescent girls) can relate to. The desire is strong on both sides; his desire to take her, and her desire to escape him, and that keeps the engine of the story running on high octane throughout. Plus, it's brilliantly written. So, I'd say in terms of villainy, Oates gives you the best of homemade meat and potatoes, whereas Roupenian gives you a Starbucks Decaf Mochalatte.

But I'll continue to read other contributors here with an open mind. It's always possible I'm missing something.

(1) youre a monster — csalisbury

So, this means you wanna date, right? :razz:

Gonna give the carol oates a read once I’m back home — csalisbury

:up:

As I said above, I'm going to try to unearth some of the value you, Street, TL and others see in this and respond more.

One is a cardboard cutout "modern" villain where "modern" means emasculated and somewhat pathetic. — Baden

The view of the pathetic male has been worked over in various ways in other threads, and there will be disagreement about how pathetic our villain (if he is a villain) is supposed to be. Pathetic, ineffective, clueless men exist, of course, and so do pathetic, ineffective clueless women; neither of them are especially good characters for short stories, unless they deliver something dramatic. The villains in A Good Man Is Hard to Find by O'Connor are pathetic. But they deliver in the story -- the murders of course, but also the most important line in the story.

Similarly the grandmother is a pain; petty, domineering, etc. But she steers the story into the ditch where she meets her demise--where they all meet their demise.

As you said, short stories don't have enough space for character development, so their first appearance has to be outstanding, and their character given the necessary complexity to make them interesting in only a few paragraphs, or brush strokes, to mix metaphors.

The kind of short stories that deliver all that are the pieces you finish with great satisfaction. You just know you had a real literary experience.

So I'll lower her grade to a C, which these days is pretty bad.

Flannery O'Connor wrote another short story that, at least used to be in freshman lit anthologies: Everything That Rises Must Converge. It takes place on a bus on a hot summer night in the south; there are four characters: a black woman with her 4 year old child, and an older white woman with her recent college graduate son. It's a simple set up but it is loaded with years -- and generations -- worth of hatred.

The characters are presented, established efficiently, and moved into position, and the inevitable storm breaks and tragedy ensues. So much is condensed into such a short moment.

Give it a read from the link above if you like. It's from the early 60s, so it's a bit dated -- but not all that much. Women aren't wearing hats, these days. If there are criticisms of the story, they will be altogether different than those of the Cat Person.

I recommend anyone try this exercise. Read "Cat Person". Then read "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" by Joyce Carol Oates.

https://www.cusd200.org/cms/lib/IL01001538/Centricity/Domain/361/oates_going.pdf — Baden

*long, slow breath out*; man, that was brutal - and a useful foil for talking about Cat Person, I think. One of the things you can't do with the Oates piece is necessarily relate it to a common, occasional experience (not a criticism). There's something 'everyday' about Cat Person, it means - I think - to capture a particular experience that (can be) resonant and I think did resonate with alot of people: that strange nexus of feelings/ambiguities that happen around bad dates and/or bad sex. Oates obviously isn't aiming for that even though her characters are obviously far more realized and starkly drawn, which is why the story resonates on a different level. So with respect to the following:

She's confused; we're confused; and though we might more or less resonate with her experiences (depending on who we are), we're not deeply engaged with her desires (or fears) because they're not well-drawn. We don't know who she is any more than she does and we don't care all that much. Or I didn't anyway.

There's a sense in which I think confusion is - or should be - the point. 'We' don't know, as a society, how to play amorous games very well; we're confused, right at the level of desire itself, whether our desires are themselves what we want. This is what accounts for the ambivalence of affect that seems to be exhibited by both Margot and Robert - they're both profoundly unsure about what they do/should be doing, even as they do it. So I guess I'm taking the sketchiness of the characters at face value: they're thinly drawn because they really are 'thin people', at least with respect to their romantic lives.

There's a sense in which I think confusion is - or should be - the point. 'We' don't know, as a society, how to play amorous games very well; we're confused, right at the level of desire itself, whether our desires are themselves what we want. This is what accounts for the ambivalence of affect that seems to be exhibited by both Margot and Robert - they're both profoundly unsure about what they do/should be doing, even as they do it. So I guess I'm taking the sketchiness of the characters at face value: they're thinly drawn because they really are 'thin people', at least with respect to their romantic lives. — StreetlightX

Sure, and I get that's an understandable angle to take, but it's not just that characters are thinly drawn but how they're drawn thinly that matters. So, it comes down to figuring out the significance of how they're drawn with regard to other elements of the text in terms of it being a particular type of narrative, a short story, and trying to include the context that brings in looking at what the author's options were and what the rationale behind her choices were with regard to form and content. There are lots of ways to make the uninteresting, interesting (and, unfortunately, even more of making the interesting, uninteresting).

So, it may be as you said that she has deliberately made the characters somewhat unengaging and incoherent because they are so in relation to their romantic lives, and that's something we should reflect on. OK, fine. But given this is in The NewYorker, I'm looking for evidence in other aspects of the text that this is a consistent and strong feature rather than a bug or simple side-effect, and I'm not really finding much. In other words, what I'm seeing seems indistinguishable (apart from being a bit tighter) from a university creative-level writing attempt by a competent but undeveloped writer whose teacher for some reason has yet to hit her with the rule "No kitsch". And that's more or less the crux of my criticism, not that there's nothing at all to talk about here in terms of the plot, but that the story doesn't offer much, if anything, artistically.

To give an example to try to get more at what I'm on about (*warning—about to repeat something heard in YouTube video and back it up with a wiki quote*) Lars Von Trier, when he made the movie Breaking the Waves, was aware of the danger of emotional excess because of the subject matter of his movie. In order to avoid this, and actually offer something of artistic value, he had to play with the form. In his own words:

""What we did was take a style and lay it like a filter over the story. It’s like decoding a television signal when you pay to see a film. Here we encoded the film, and the audience has to decode it. The raw, documentary style that I imposed on the film, which actually dissolves and contradicts it, means that we can accept the story as it is"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_the_Waves#Style

So what he's saying is something like the cognitive work the audience has to do in matching the form and content, the cheap documentary style imposed over the romantic-type narrative creates enough tension to offset the release the excess of emotional content might otherwise cause, and allows the film to offer something artistically that it otherwise couldn't.

Similarly, for Cat Person, the thinness of the characters could be offset somehow in the form, maybe with a stronger plot, for example, or a richer more evocative writing style, or a play with the narrative structure etc. Look at Oates and it's the opposite. She hardly even needed a plot she was so well-able to express the fear that drove the story, which as you said is "brutal" and there's the other point, the emotional payoff—in Cat Person it's as if the ending was the only thing the author had left to deliver the necessary wallop that would even make the short story worthy of being called a short story, and was willing to be kitschy just to suck that out of the work. But if it were any good to begin with...

Anyhow, the way I see the analysis so far is then that most here have more or less discounted the ending and are treating the rest of the story as if it's a list of events rather than a full narrative (which must have an ending), and so have sort of already given up on this being a credible short story and are viewing it more like it's a diary or a news story, and analyzing events in that way, which is fine as you can always get something from that as long as these types of things happen, which they do.

here's something 'everyday' about Cat Person, it means - I think - to capture a particular experience that (can be) resonant and I think did resonate with alot of people: that strange nexus of feelings/ambiguities that happen around bad dates and/or bad sex. — StreetlightX

And so, yes, the events resonate. I just wish they had been given a more effective vehicle from which to do so.

Well, I'll give you my take to respond to yours, but I don't know if it'll actually persuade you :D. I thought the story was pretty good.


I would say that the conflict in the story is between Margot and herself, rather than between Margot and Robert. And she is conflicted with herself in a way that many people are be they male or female. She kind of doesn't know what she wants, and she doesn't bother to ask Robert what he wants either. Neither of them do. At most they talk about pop culture and try to judge one another based upon reactions to it.

And if it weren't for the ending, if it had been cut short, then that conflict wouldn't have been resolved. The ending provides the cap to this conflict by saying "not him, certainly, whatever it is I do want".

I can see that the appeal is to millenials, but I'd say it's not just young women -- because the theme is really dating, and not Margot and Robert. The whole story touches on everything weird about dating, from my perspective -- from unwritten rules that are assumed, to following a script that you didn't have a part in, to feeling uncertain about yourself and your desires. It's not going on a date that's the target, from my view, but just the whole concept of dating -- because going on a date can be natural and normal, like anything, but somehow this strange sort of alienation has been built up around dating as a dance or a ritual -- how there are these sort of false pretenses "baked in" already from the get-go that lead to confusion of the self and conflict with the self.

Cool. I expanded a bit in the next post above, which might give you more info on where I'm coming from including regarding the ending, and I don't disagree with you on much except the part about it being a good short story :D. Another thing is because I used to write fiction myself for quite a long time, I may be to an extent csal's monster in terms of critique. But I mean it at least.

I'm looking for evidence in other aspects of the text that this is a consistent and strong feature rather than a bug or simple side-effect, and I'm not really finding much. In other words, what I'm seeing seems indistinguishable (apart from being a bit tighter) from a university creative-level writing attempt by a competent but undeveloped writer whose teacher for some reason has yet to hit her with the rule "No kitsch". And that's more or less the crux of my criticism, not that there's nothing at all to talk about here in terms of the plot, but that the story doesn't offer much, if anything, artistically. — Baden

Yeah, I think this is entirely fair on it's own terms, but I suppose I just can't not see the piece from a critical-sociological angle which is the 'level' at which is resonates for me. As I mentioned earlier, I first came across it in the context of the Aziz Ansari 'awful date' story, which I always saw as a kind of 'test case' for the MeToo movement, and gauging the kind(s) of response that occurred in relation to it. And what Cat Person helped me to do (along with the Ansari story and alot of what's been in the air since, of which Cat Person was one piece in an assemblage) was put into narrative form how a certain kind of situation can develop, and the kind of 'ingredients' that go into making it.

I mean, to delve back in a bit - and to follow some of @Moliere's comments in his last post - one reading of the story is as a critique of desire, where both characters are alienated from their own desires - in different ways. Margot literally narrates her own situation (via imaginary boyfriend/narcissistic projective fantasy) as if she were other than exactly what she is. Robert, for his part, doesn't question his desires, but it doesn't take much to see them as thoroughly socially scripted, especially the way he reacts to Margot's tears outside the club, where he clearly finds comfort in playing the 'comforting, strong man' while projecting an image of feminine vulnerability upon Margot. Robert is so alienated from his desire he doesn't even realize it. Which brings be back to @Timeline's question:

Was his reaction at the end merely evidence of feeling emasculated from the experience - like when she laughed or when he received the text message from Tamara - or was it because he is one-sided in the experience and could not understand at all how his behaviour was wrong. — TimeLine

If what I said above is valid, then it's not just the case that Robert was emasculated (although he was) and that he couldn't see things from a non-ego perspective, but more that he can't see his own alienation from himself, doesn't realize just how thoroughly mediated his own desires are, and the effects they have. And the point of all this being that this kind of alienation cannot be thought in isolation from the social (the masculine script Robert sticks by), and the thoroughly confused relation to her own desires that Margot has (she asks him back home!, when by all accounts the night is going awfully, or at least very, very blandly). And if you read the Ansari story (written from Her first-person perspective as well!), you get a very similar feeling that She was uncomfortable for alot of what happened and it progressed to a point far beyond what it should have been (n.b. not blaming her, it's fucking terrifying and bewildering to be put in that position, and we are not educated and socially prepared for how to deal with it for the most part).

And it's these kinds of resonances, where I just can't see Cat Person outside of all of that, where I find it's value. On the other hand - yes, I totally agree that there could have been a far more effective vehicle to carry that fourth, and that yeah, alot of what I've said above is clearly not reading the story from a compositional perceptive. But yeah, that's just where my head's at when I read it.

Never judge a person by his/her texts, I suppose. We're less likely to be disappointed with others when our encounters with them aren't physical; when they aren't physical, in fact. Perhaps the inconvenience and burden of the real will be eliminated someday, replaced by some technological form of interaction between adaptable versions of each other we can manipulate in comfort from afar.

I was hoping there'd be cats, you know.

I did a ctrl-f on the story for “fear” to try to find a passage. The word fear comes up four times. Twice in reference to Margot’s fears, twice in reference to Robert’s. What’s most missing, in this story (in a lot of irl dating) is a way to express fear without an additional fear of being rendered pitiful for doing so.

Anger’s usually a secondary emotion, as we all know. In a lot of ways - and here I agree with @aporiap - Robert’s misogynistic outburst is a cover for his inability to process the date, which is, unequivocally, both his and Margot’s fault. The way he handled it was undeniably shitty, but I think we’ve all been beset by ugly thoughts that come suddenly upon us - I condemn the action, but understand what let up to it. The abruptness of Margot’s friends text is equally violent, and frankly hateful. Ugly emotions are part and parcel of actual romance. Obviously there are helpful and unhelpful ways of dealing with these emotions, and robert opted for the latter. But the way cat person functions, as part of the broader conversation around #metoo etc, is to pinpoint an evil core, and then retroactively make all the ambiguity of the date symptoms of that core.

In that sense it exacerbates the problem its trying to illustrate. As I mentioned in my response to Bitter Crank above, the natural progression is this: Same scenario, but now both participants have read Cat Story.

I’ve never called a woman a whore, but I am prone to emotional outbursts (cf my post history) which I usually feel ashamed of after the fact. I think the only way to deal with this kind of pattern is to take responsibility for it, which means something like: I could have chosen not to do what I did, but I still did it anyway, and that’s on me. The next step is to figure out why (the real reasons why) you fall prey to those patterns and then address the problem from there. But the ability to take responsibility means shifting from shame to guilt.

Shame means “I’’m essentially bad at my core.” Guilt means “I’m flawed, both good and bad, and that means its my responsibility to act in a way consonant with my values.” Cat Person, imo, is shame through and through - it really wants someone or something to be all bad. But when you uses this tactic, you don’t fix the problem, you just drive it underground. If bad behavior is seen as symptoms of an unalterable core badness, then those who recognize themselves in that behavior aren’t going to try to change at all. They can’t, after all, if the shame narrative is right. But they, like almost everyone, still deeply need intimacy, so even if they internalize that theyre bad, theyll wind up eventually, dating - except concealing their flaws, rather than have worked through them. So you get a sort of antibody/virus dialectic for red flags.

I’m just just out of a three year relationship and my therapist asked me if I’m thinking of trying to date again anytime soon. I told him I want to, in a bit, but I can’t figure out how to balance appearing dateable while not simply hiding my emotional baggage, because it'll just make stuff off from the beginning. He said something like: well you know just be up front that you're sensitive. My immediate, reflexive reaction, was like whoa guy, you don’t understand what “sensitive guy” connotes these days. I feel like what I'm looking for is something between a red flag and a flawless facade. Some way to communicate: this is what I struggle with, this is how I'm working on it, what are you struggling with, how are you working on it - and will these two struggles and ways of working through them fit together? But I have no idea how you would do this, unless you trust that the other person is cool with doing that too, and it seems like people are getting less and less cool with doing that.

I think this is the heart of my fascination with the story (how the particular way it tries to discuss a problem ends up perpetuating it.) I also find it troubling that the New Yorker published this - less for aesthetic reasons, than that it uses Kitsch (as @Baden put it) in a moral way, and in a way that kind of puts it a new yorker story on the same level as any other hot-take. It seems to exemplify a broader flattening.

So its pretty clear this a personal topic for me. Does any of this make sense to others or sound more like rationalization? This stuff has been knocking around in my head the past month.

Yeah, it makes sense. People are flawed, people have baggage, but The Date is meant to showcase yourself as a desirable object -- yet, in order for us to have a real connection, we can't just hide our bad and show our good.

I think friendship is the best basis for building love, for that reason. It's slower than The Date really allows for, but it's a real connection built on trust. Not everyone seems to feel that way, but maybe they're just looking for something else than what I like. What love through friendship does is create something built on trust that maybe isn't super sexy and exciting, but is worthwhile and on the whole better than purely erotic and spontaneous pleasures (which is all The Date seems to be about, to me).

There's excitement and ecstasy, but not connection and relationship. And certainly not love.


Also, with respect to shame/guilt: I definitely see where you're coming from on that. You're wanting a path out, in a sense, for people who fuck up -- because we all fuck up after all.

On the other side I think there's a sort of exasperation which stops feeling care for people who fuck up. So shame is the end of a process in which someone is just tired of cleaning up the fuck ups.

I don't really know which is right, or if there even is a right way to respond. It almost seems to depend upon the circumstances of an individual -- where they are at and all that. I don't think either reaction is really better, per se. They honestly both feel like understandable sorts of reactions to the world.

I’m with you on friendship. Almost all of my long-term relationships have begun from within a group of friends, with someone I’ve known for a while. To be honest, I’ve never dated-dated so I’m scared to death of the prospect. But now as you get older there’s fewer opportunities for this kind of thing (for me and a lot of people at least. There’s work but I’ve seen the aftermath of work-romance breakups and they suck.)

I’m also with you on the exasperation thing. I’ve been on both sides. There’s a point where you’re like jesus christ [person]. There’s also the insidious thing of instinctively realizing you can play on sympathy for infinite free passes. One way to put this: I don’t think Margot should have had another date even if she sympathizes with Robert. She could say something like: ok so this is why, but I’m not gonna be the one to stick around while you fix it. I think thats a good response. This takes away the possibility of “playing good” to avoid change, while still communicating what went wrong. And then I guess it comes down to whether Robert takes that to heart, or plays good for the next person. What the friends text precludes is a way for Robert to reflect and make sense of what he’s doing.

(Also, lest it seem like I’m venting vicariously about my ex. She’s much closer, in this regard, to the helpful non-shame response. We still live together for the next few months and, tho we both know we’re going our separate ways, and the sex is done, we still talk about this stuff - at least when we're not awkwardly getting ready for separate evenings in the same space.)

Then read "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" by Joyce Carol Oates. — Baden

According to Gore Vidal, the three saddest words in the English language are "Joyce Carol Oates."

bullshit, three saddest words to Gore Vidal are: "Not Quite Elite."

Vidal could be unduly waspish. I just remembered he made the comment, and thought I'd note he had. I've haven't read Oates' novels or stories. I read some of her poetry. I hope her prose is better.

I think Vidal wrote quite a few good things. I especially like his essays. But I don't know how one identifies the elite.

As the story is written in first-person, I can only go by what the protagonist explains and I think that since she is consistently unsure about what he is thinking, that underlying intuitive response telling her that 'he could be a murderer' or that he has no cats etc, is telling of the authenticity of her actual motivations, that she really is afraid. — TimeLine

I think it's telling that these thoughts pop-up in the text, in each situation, in context in which she put herself willingly and was actually looking forward to up until something made her uncomfortable. Basically she was fine as long as her expectations were met.

You are right that this is telling of the authenticity of her motivations, but not that this display some form of fear on her end. It just shows that she was no more authentic in her willingness to open herself and engage another in a relationship. Her retreat to safety was this move to "maybe his a murderer - lol - not really", which saved her from having to realize that she's as guilty of playing games as he is.

From the perspective given, what we have here, are 2 rather introverted individuals who are stuck in their own prisonner-dilemma scenario, unwilling to admit that reciprocated vulnerability is the cost for the possibility of a relationship.

Creation is one of my all times favorites. it’s fantastic - but its also about how ruling classes are able to indulge in leisurely speculation while ignoring what lets them do that - there are a lot of frankly awful things that some of the elites do in creation, but the authorly tone is one of ironic and sympathetic “sure, but.” Vidal knows what “elite” means - its access to power, and the kind of do-what-you-need vibes that come with it. Only he never quite seems, himself, to be sure he’s reached that point. Only lowly courtiers write popular novels, I mean.

I first read this back when it was first published and loved it. It's always insightful when someone of a different identity, whether class-based, ethnic-based, religious-based,and, in this case, gender-based etc. can so effortlessly describe experiences that they've had, which are held in common among those of said identity, and, in doing so, rocks you to your core, for not having previously understood/experienced it yourself. It allows you to step into their shoes, empathize better, and hopefully, enable you to be a better, more thoughtful person.

I agree that the ending turns in into something like this, but I think, before that, it does something more interesting - all those tropes are there, floating around, but there's a lot more of them too (there's a weird class dynamic going on, there's a mutal drawing from the manic-pixie quirk well etc.) but they're all bumping around in a kind of incoherent way. I think the story is good in that, until the end, it doesn't commit to any one of these tropes definitively. They're more like a mental environment, or half-conscious background, that's both part of the date, and also a frantic attempt to make sense of the date. You could say, I think, that the collection of tropes present is incompossible, so both Margot & Robert are just kind of tossed around from one to another ( I think you're right, that if we saw Robert's point of view, something similar would be going on) — csalisbury

Perhaps the meta meta point is that modern dating is its own kind of unhappiness. The ending kind of ruined this possible conclusion by trying to make Robert over-the-top disgruntled. It then just becomes a cautionary tale, when it seems at parts, this was supposed to provoke social commentary about the psychology and sociology of dating culture. There is the unhappiness of finding a mate, the unhappiness of trying to create attraction or romance, there is the unhappiness of feelings that are not mutually shared, etc. etc. This stuff has been happening since the beginning of time, but of course the modern spin has information technology interwoven which creates more opportunities for unhappiness.

This falls in line with what I've said about the given and work. It is the individual versus the social dynamics of the given. Vulnerability and uncertainty brings with it awkward social realities of unhappiness. Loneliness is just one psychological layer away from restless boredom. It is the will constantly striving.

What does @Bitter Crank think?

What does Bitter Crank think? — schopenhauer1

Bitter Crank thinks that CSalisbury's phrase "manic-pixie quirk well" will come in handy for some devious purpose, as yet unknown.

Other than that, Cat Person has absorbed more energy than its agreed-upon mediocrity merits.

Crank is reading an excellent Sci Fi piece by Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem trilogy in an English translation by Ken Liu. Much better than Cat Person. The Three Body problem belongs to the Trisolarians. Their three-sun system produces constant instability, and they -- having become aware of earth because of a foolish astronomer's actions during the Cultural Revolution, have decided that Earth would be a better place for them to live, so they are on their way to wipe us out and take over the planet. It will take them about 400 years to arrive. In the meantime they have sent entangled protons to the earth (which unfold to higher dimensions, turning them into super-smart spies with instant communication abilities).

Earth is trying to figure out how to survive, given the advanced's civilization's numerous advantages.

This stuff has been happening since the beginning of time — schopenhauer1

Probably not quite that long -- something less than 13.xx billion years. I'm guessing that the first tedious dating story happened about 324,071 years ago. And every human has added to the immense pile of tedious dating experiences.

But yes, modern dating seems to have turned into its own kind of unhappiness. That's because our routinely super-educated young folk insist on analyzing the meta aspects of rituals which lead to people getting properly laid. A metaanalysis of these rituals invariably leads to intensely unsatisfactory sexual experiences. The secret to getting properly fucked is to stop thinking about it and just do it. Of course it's an act of disgusting animality -- but that who we are, that's what we do. So get busy.

Just do it and enjoy every minute of it, and when you are all done and washed up, have had a smoke and a beer, go to sleep. In the morning think about something else. Do not engage in restaurant-review-criticism of your sexual partners. If it felt good, schedule a rematch. If it didn't, get back to the bar or go on line and find the next study partner with whom you can gain carnal knowledge.


In other news, I have come up with a new slogan for Christ Church's refugee project:

Jesus is coming: stay where you are

You don't need to flee to Europe or the United States. Salvation is en route, so stay at home where god can find you. God gets confused trying to keep track of overly mobile people, flying here, driving there, even riding donkeys. Help god, stay put.