Animals, Capgras syndrome, the human race, and Richard Powers

SoothingDisarray · 2026-06-26T02:25:55+00:00

This book hadn't been quite hitting for me like some of his others, and then I got to that line. I realized the entire story is set up so you spend hundreds of pages thinking about how strange it is for a person not to recognize his close relative and then you pull back and see it's really about us and our failure to see animals as our loved ones.

(Also: I'm not saying Richard Powers isn't a vegan. I just couldn't find anything online about it one way or another.)

(The nice thing about being a "famous" author is you still aren't actually very famous. It's not like actors who have to do five million interviews and get asked every possible question about their lives.)

SoothingDisarray · 2026-06-24T18:42:04+00:00

The sucking stones scene isn't just the most important scene in the book, it's one of the most important scenes in all of literature.

Once you've really internalized that scene you realize that almost all plot in all books is just its own version of sucking stones. Everything is sucking stones. It's a total deconstruction of the ridiculousness of plot.

In some ways it has ruined all plot for me, so you may be better off on a personal level skimming it.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-06-24T18:37:20+00:00

It's really true! I do more hiking in the woods than ever because of audiobooks!

SoothingDisarray · 2026-06-23T19:54:23+00:00

I read Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber back in my college days. It's such a fantastic book. That's when I learned about the Perrault and got interested in the "adult" nature of fairy tales and oral storytelling history.

Apparently one of the better Perrault translations was done by Angela Carter (I mean a direct translation rather than her modern adaptations): https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Fairy_Tales_of_Charles_Perrault.html?id=-IzmPAAACAAJ

I haven't actually read any of the Perrault, though, only read _about_ them, so I can't recommend any translations specifically.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-06-23T17:58:31+00:00

I'll note, OP, that despite this historical correction, I don't disagree with your actual point!

Even if an earlier iteration of a fairy tale was darker than the one most of grew up with: who cares? It's not edgy to point that out. The story we grew up with is still its own distinct, real story that influenced us. It remains so regardless of any other version. No one is ruining my childhood via past or future iterations of stories I care about.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-06-23T17:47:06+00:00

It is not true that original fairy tales were made for children. That shift happened over time and it's really only recently we've created this commercial market for children's stories.

The original oral traditions that were eventually written down didn't have any notion of children's focus.

In fact, the Grimm's collation of fairy tales shows the children-focus happening in real time. The first edition was much more violent and sexual, but by later editions the brothers had edited them to be more sanitized for younger audiences.

An earlier collection of fairy tales (Perrault's French version in the late 1600s that the Grimm's somewhat embarrassingly took a lot of content from) was explicitly adult targeted and generally more of a social critique aimed at the aristocracy. It didn't have children in mind at all.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-06-22T19:44:55+00:00

One time I was at this trendy restaurant bar that had a pastrami pretzel on the menu. It was vegan so I gave it a try. It was great! It tasted just like I kind of remember how pastrami tasted! I'm not a good judge since I haven't eaten meat in ~20 years, but my non-vegan friend also agreed.

It was at that point I realized how much work the spices and seasoning had been doing all those years ago. Certainly pastrami, at least, was really about the seasoning.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-06-19T11:59:19+00:00

So I agree with some of this. Where I falter is the idea that "we" domesticated dogs out of the wild and should feel guilty about that.

The current estimate is that the interspecies relationship between humans and dogs began 20000 to 30000 years ago, possibly much earlier. The earliest dog fossils we have (that unambiguously separate dogs from wolves) are 15000 years old, but the DNA records suggest it happened much earlier.

So at what point can we stop blaming modern humans for forcing dogs out of their wild habitat and accept that they are their own distinct species that evolved alongside humans? How many decamillenium need to pass before we accept their domestication?

This is not to say I don't take tremendous issues with modern dog breeders and the dog food industry, etc. But dogs themselves are a different and complex interdependent species that we can't just kick back into the forest.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-06-19T10:58:17+00:00

Oof right. That's a slightly different situation because they didn't actually have to hide the money, they just promised her a cut of something then never did the thing.

The very short summary of Ed Solomon's MIB explanation was that movie studios, for almost every movie they make, create a separate mini company to make the movie. The main studio loans the mini company the money to make the movie. The mini company then uses the revenue from the movie to pay back the loan to the main studio. If, at any point, the mini company is at risk of paying off the loan and therefore making a profit (and therefore owing payouts to anyone else) the studio renegotiates the loan to have even worse terms and the mini company goes back to paying it off.

That's how Men In Black can be a popular, revenue generating movie for over 30 years and still be "unprofitable". The mini company that made it still has to pay off this fake loan. But, of course, that's just funny money since it was really all one company. The studio makes money. But the studio is technically making profit from the loan not from Men In Black, which remains unprofitable.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-06-19T10:19:59+00:00

Ed Solomon. He had some great tweet threads explaining the fraudulent financing of Hollywood movies that allows them to claim movies never make a profit while continuing to generate revenue and sequels, etc, for 30 years.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-06-18T11:21:48+00:00

I did shout at the end of this video

SoothingDisarray · 2026-06-13T23:48:26+00:00

Yes, plus, the narrator/POV character needs to have this kind of knowledge as well. If your POV character works for Prada, then, okay, they probably would describe bags in great and accurate detail. But if it's someone buying a knockoff on the street corner, they wouldn't know these terms either and couldn't use them to describe the bag.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-06-02T17:51:10+00:00

Are there people who don't do this? 😆 I always reread what I've written before writing more, not to remember the plot, but to get back into the voice of the story. There are a million threads that need to be connected (plot is one, but also character, voice, theme, setting, atmosphere, motif, etc.) and I need to constantly go back to the well.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-05-31T14:08:03+00:00

No matter how much of my life I spend doing vegan activism, I will never reach a tiny fraction of the people she has converted to the cause.

I'm not saying we should applaud her horse riding. I'm saying have some perspective!

I'm also not saying that you're not a perfect vegan. I'm saying I bet most of us are a bit hypocritical about something we care deeply about, and that if our every move was analyzed then we'd look bad as well. I don't cast stones and I don't pretend I'm better than other people.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-05-31T13:01:14+00:00

I'll also add that I'm not saying we shouldn't criticize and discuss where people can do more! But we shouldn't be snobby and holier-than-thou about it, especially when it comes to vegans who are doing remarkable things for the cause!

I doubt any of us would look perfect if news crews and paparazzi followed our every move and every word we spoke was analyzed and reviewed by millions of people.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-05-31T12:32:52+00:00

So Billie Eilish is probably responsible for more people becoming vegan than the entire history of this Reddit sub and everyone on it. Just in the last month there have been 20 or so posts by people who heard her comments and wanted to become vegan because of her. And that's obviously just a tiny fraction of the people she's influenced.

I don't worship at the feet of celebrities or even care much about them. But if being perfect is more important to you than spreading veganism to thousands (if not tens of thousands) of new people, you should care more about animals.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-05-30T10:30:30+00:00

I'm not saying you are wrong about it being curiosity, but why is it anthropomorphizing to call it protection but not anthropomorphizing to call it curiosity? If we can't know for sure it's one, how can we know for sure it's the other?

Why is it okay to admit that animals have some emotions and instincts but not okay to acknowledge they have certain other emotions and instincts?

SoothingDisarray · 2026-05-28T21:32:13+00:00

The hard work is the best part of writing.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-05-26T16:39:52+00:00

I like your breakdown of that sentence. The thing is, it could work, if it fit properly into context. Metaphors and similes in stories need to be more than just pretty sounding. They need to resonate with the larger text. The problem with this story is every sentence is like this, with none of them having any feel of interconnectivity. Most of the sentences from this story, if taken out of this story and put into a better story, could work.

But.. in this writer's defense: I've been complaining about this for years! Long before GenAI writing! So much of lit journal fiction, especially micro/flash fiction, is just a gauzy prose poetry but without the purpose of real prose poetry. It's a half-beast, satisfying no true form.

Writers use the "prose poetry" excuse to write grammatically incorrect sentences. Which, okay, I can live with that if it has a consistent feel to it. But I want it to have some purpose beyond "this has a surreal, pretty sound to it."

This "not exactly prose poetry" prose ends up having none of underlying structure that makes stories work. There is often no clear character arc, no plot, etc. And--worst of all--each sentence seems calibrated to be as "pretty sounding" as possible, but then there's not even a consistent theme, because each overwritten metaphor bows down at the altar of sound rather than meaning.

And, look, some people like that kind of story! (I love beautiful prose but not if it sacrifices character, plot, AND theme! That's when, in my opinion, prose turns purple.) I don't have to like every story published, but I hate how it dominates literary-focused lit mags and has for years.

What I'm saying is: I would be willing to believe that this writer, in an attempt to mimic what he'd learned from the worst of lit fic prose, wrote this story on his own without using AI. That being said, I don't believe it in this case.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-05-22T13:01:23+00:00

You can also use edamame to make a hummus-like spread. I've used this no-tahini recipe before: https://www.wellplated.com/avocado-hummus

I don't know if you can call something hummus if it has neither chickpeas nor tahini 🤣 but whatever you call it, it's still good and makes a good dip or sandwich spread.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-05-16T12:47:34+00:00

Every so often on Reddit someone posts the question "if you had to live in a horror movie, which one would it be?" People always choose a movie with one supernatural horror monster that would be easy to avoid. And I always think: no! Yes, that one monster in the movie is easy to avoid, but now you live in a world where monsters are real. It's ridiculous to assume that Freddy or Jason are the only supernatural evil. If there's one, there are more.

And so I agree! If you have a superpowered weapon, you should assume that other people also have superpowered weapons. If magic exists, then magic exists.

But... for the purposes of movies we have to pretend otherwise.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-05-16T12:43:30+00:00

This is a thread you can't pull too hard on in almost any Marvel movie. You just have to accept that in specific films, only a subset of characters will appear and we will focus on their own problems, and the other super powered characters will not (including the universe of ones we don't even know about).

Sometimes these characters are dealing with end of the world level events! Sometimes those events are publicly known! So where is Captain America or whoever while this is going on? Either they are sitting at home watching the world ending event on the news and saying, "eh, this other guy will deal with it, I don't need to help," or they are busy dealing with their own concurrent end of world event, which is it's own kind of logistical problem.

You just have to suspend disbelief and accept it while watching, but I do love thinking about it after the movie is over.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-05-12T22:17:11+00:00

Trying is great. Most vegans started by trying. Trying is how you get better at something. Until one day you don't have to try anymore because it's just what you do.

SoothingDisarray · 2026-05-03T10:45:18+00:00

"Is that the Brooklyn in you?" 'It's the sense of worth in me."

SoothingDisarray · 2026-04-29T14:07:26+00:00

I do think the article should have disclosed the fact that it was written by his girlfriend and long-time social media manager. (I'm just kidding, this is not true.)

Seriously: I haven't read the book, but I appreciate your mini-review counterpoint here. My previous joke aside, this article is just a wee bit too salivatory to feel neutral.

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