‘I Will Ruin Him’: James Lasdun’s memoir of being stalked

illustration from NYT Book review

James Lasdun’s Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked is a creepy and compelling story of a teacher-student relationship gone bad, a memoir of being stalked, and an investigation into reputation and identity within 21st-century internet culture.  It also touches on other topics including contemporary Jewishness, Israel, and anti-semitism, and a son’s reflection on his relationship with and to a famous father (Lasdun’s father was the architect Denys Lasdun who designed the Royal National Theater in London among other prominent structures).

The Chronicle of Higher Ed ran an excerpt from the book a while ago and I sometimes felt that this narrative’s proper length may have been somewhere between that short piece and this full-length book.  Still, it is gripping and smart throughout, with a canny self-awareness about this story’s resonance with a long literary history of Gothic doppelgangers and mysteriously implacable enemies (I thought of, e.g., William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Nabokov’s Lolita among other such tales).  The title of the excerpt, “‘I Will Ruin Him’: How it Feels to be Stalked” evokes one of Lasdun’s major themes: the vulnerability of reputation and personal identity today, its susceptibility to “ruin” through online means.  I thought also of the recent story (which on reading, prompted me to go through the minor hassle of setting up two-factor authorization for my Gmail account; you should probably do it too) by journalist Mat Honan that begins, “In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.”

I personally do find it terrifying to reflect on how easily a determined, malicious enemy — or random hacker — can target you and wreak very serious havoc on your life.  Lasdun’s story is one of a personal encounter that goes wrong, but part of the takeaway from his story is the ease with which anyone can today do you harm through digital means.  There are a lot of Iagos out there on laptops and smartphones.

The book ends with the situation unresolved: his stalker, Nasreen, is still hounding him, posting invented accusations on online sites (she claims Lasdun raped, abused, and manipulated her in countless other ways, including plagiarizing her writing and stealing her work), emailing employers and colleagues, and so on.  It’s irresistible to look for possible signs of her activity out there now that the book has been published.  For example, there’s this recent Amazon review: “This was such a boring book. It was awful. I can’t believe this guy teaches writing…and no, this is not Nasreen writing (although your paranoid and egotistical self will probably think it is).”

And I found this one fascinating:

As a recovering stalker, this has changed my life,March 13, 2013

By Buckshot – See all my reviews

I was never as menacing or hateful as Nasreen, I never was talked to by the police or given any threats about legal action, and I never smeared my professor’s name, but in most other ways, this story is shockingly parallel to my life experience. The stalking took place in Western NY with my creative writing professor, between the years of 2007 to (well, today I had to send him a blurb about this book as a goodbye). That’s several years of unwanted emails. Which, like Nasreen’s, came in ‘fevers’ between silences. Sometimes addressing him like an ‘ever-dependable mentor’ and sometimes in a phase of hyperbolic disgust, sprinkled throughout with coherence and self-reflexive apologies, even humor. I relate to Nasreen so deeply, her existence gives me some strange relief. The author treats the subject with the respect and humanity that I always hoped I would be seen with. The increases in frequency of these unwanted emails correlates to times in my life that are more stressful and filled with doubt, as they probably did for Nasreen. The chasm between how I seem in real life (coy, near-mute, clumsy) with how I am in the emails is similarly jarring. For christsake I even used to use the phrase, “intimacy terrorist.” At times, I thought this book was written under a false identity of my professor. He kept a solid silence up, that confuses me to this day, but reading this book I think I understand what it’s like from the other side, and I don’t want to inflict that on anyone. I don’t want to be pathological. Again, I was never as extreme or punitive as Nareen, but the frequency and intensity of my emails are similar, and the origins and reasons for the attachment, nearly exact.

Jamie Quatro & George Meredith: Hiding the Skeleton

Jamie Quatro’s I Want to Show You More seems like the 2013 version of Ben Lerner’s hilarious & super-smart 2011 Leaving the Atocha Station: a first-book fiction breakout on a small press (Lerner’s was published by the really indie Coffee House press; Quarto’s is on Grove, so maybe not exactly the same thing) that gets rave reviews from James Wood in the New Yorker, the NY Times, and cascading ripples of underdog-new-author-loving accolades from that point on.

Quatro’s stories are really good.  They’re all set in the town of Lookout Mountain on the Georgia-Tennessee border, which on first blush sounds like a too-picturesque invented setting but turns out to be where Quatro actually lives.  (Her husband seems to be a business professor at the (Presbyterian) Covenant College in Lookout Mt.)

The one that seems to have received the most attention is “Decomposition: A Primer for Promiscuous Housewives.” This is a disconcertingly realist-allegorical account of a married woman’s adultery in which, following her confession to her husband and breaking off of the affair, her lover’s slowly decaying corpse manifests in the marital bed.  She zips up the body in a sleeping bag and hides it in an old playpen in the basement, disguised under piles of junk.  Finally she brings her husband down to look at the hidden corpse, which starts to scream at her and call her a whore.

My theory is that Quatro (who started but did not finish the PhD program in English at Princeton, specializing in British Romantic poetry) is drawing on George Meredith’s great 1862 sonnet sequence “Modern Love,” especially its famous section 2 in which the miserable, adulterous couple play “hiding the skeleton” in their performance of a happy marriage:

AT dinner she is hostess, I am host.

Went the feast ever cheerfuller? She keeps

The topic over intellectual deeps

In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost.

With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball:

It is in truth a most contagious game;

HIDING THE SKELETON shall be its name.

Such play as this the devils might appall!

But here ’s the greater wonder; in that we,

Enamor’d of our acting and our wits,

Admire each other like true hypocrites.

Warm-lighted glances, Love’s Ephemeræ,

Shoot gayly o’er the dishes and the wine.

We waken envy of our happy lot.

Fast, sweet, and golden, shows our marriage-knot.

Dear guests, you now have seen Love’s corpse-light shine!

There’s a new Yale UP edition of the poem (and a bunch of other Meredith poetry) reviewed (somewhat nastily to its editors) by Helen Vendler in a recent New Republic.

I Want to Show You More has various enjoyable & surprising things about it, including that it is (a) immersed in matters of religion; not only are many of its characters church-goers but several stories (like “the Anointing” and “Demolition”) are centrally about faith in different ways and (b) it’s unusually filthy/pervy by prestigious-short-story standards. In “Decomposition,” for example, one manifestation of the adulterous woman’s ill ease (with her lover in the basement) is that she “grow[s] desperate, watch[es] Asian breast massage how-to videos on YouTube with links to girl-on-girl porn.”  I wonder what the folks at Covenant College think of all this.

*Any relation to Suzi Quatro a.k.a. “Pinky” Tuscadero on Happy Days?  Weirdly conceivable but probably too good to be true.

Our love is alive, and so we begin

Foolishly laying our hearts on the table

Stumblin’ in

Our love is a flame, burning within

Now and then firelight will catch us

Stumblin’ in

Stumblin’ in

Stumblin’ in

I actually always thought it was “our love is a lie”… which I thought was kind of hard-hitting for that kind of song.

The pop song’s question: Why??

When I did a college radio show many moons ago, I always felt that the “theme show” was a bit cheesy, over-obvious, and often a cop-out. There were always a lot of bad and/or obvious theme shows, anyway. A set of songs all about colors… or girls’ names… or with goodbye or hello in the title. You get the idea.

But this morning I’ve been opening my mind to the potential of the Theme Show by listening to Meghan McKee’s WFMU show Underwater Theme Park, which I believe follows a different theme every week.

This week’s theme is Why? Songs about why, asking why, beginning with why.  Some of the songs that I have been listening to while grading papers:

Benny Goodman and His Orchestra featuring Peggy Lee- Why Don’t You Do Right?

Jack Wyatt and the Bayou Boys- Why Did You Let Me Love You?

Johnny Cash- Why Is a Fire Engine Red?

Hank Williams- Why Should We Try Anymore?

Wayne Hancock- Why Don’t You Leave Me Alone?

Reverend Horton Heat- Generation Why

The Bartlebees- Why?

Weezer- Why Bother ?

The White Stripes- Why Can’t You Be Nicer To Me?

Slick Rick- Why, Why, Why

KRS-One- Why?

Blakroc -Why Can’t I Forget Him

Ladytron- The Reason Why

Bronski Beat- Why?

As the playlist develops, it poses a meta-question about the essential role of the question in the pop song.  The pop song as question, questioning, “Questioningly” (like the Ramones song – “aren’t you someone that I used to know/ And weren’t we lovers a long time ago?”). The pop song addresses us, begs and pleads like James Brown, grabs our shirt and demands an answer.  But we don’t need to answer or respond in any way, we can just listen.

Kitty’s *D.A.I.S.Y. Rage*: Getting drowsy, Bena-Benadryl, y’all

I love Kitty [*but not in a creepy way].  Formerly Kitty Pryde, which I guess she had to change for copyright reasons (it’s a comic book character)– too bad, as plain Kitty is more generic.  Her free- download D.A.I.S.Y. Rage (which you can get here — throw her a few bucks when you do!– it’s on a pay what you like basis) surprised me, made me laugh, and felt like it was expressing a fresh perspective more than anything since Frank Ocean’s Nostalgia, Ultra (although I guess that one didn’t make me laugh so much).

Melissa Leon observed, “To a degree, you can’t blame the confused and angry hip-hop diehards who shunned her as soon as they saw her last year. Who’s really sure, right away, what to make of a red-headed, teenage white girl who lives in suburban Daytona Beach, Fla., works at a Claire’s, has a huge crush on both the major Justins (Bieber and Timberlake, natch), and calls herself a rapper?” Noted. Although you could also just say “because she’s an assertive teenage girl with a big mouth.”  (Truth be told, she faintly resembles Alyson Hannigan.)

She slurs, giggles, talks over the beat, mumbles, vocal fries, texts “Fuck Men!” to her buddies, internal- and half-rhymes, and tells her mom she loves her like the Florida suburban teenager in her room that she is.  The music is woozy-hypnotic, a buzzed-former-Disney-Princess soundscape with loops of toy piano and harp.  You kind of picture this 17 year-old in her bedroom, surrounded by stuff she was into when she was 12 and hasn’t had the energy to clear away.

Exhibit A as to her brilliance, she does a homage to the Wu-Tang Clan’s “”C.R.E.A.M.” (“Cash Rules Everything Around Me”) called “R.R.E.A.M” that follows the syntagmatic chain of associations from the song title to allergy/rash cream in order to rap about the hives, rashes, and propensity for blushing that she suffers from as a fair-headed red-head.  I mean, how completely brilliant!

I sctratch the bumps my skin /Stress Rash Rules Everything Around Me (RREAM) Getting drowsy, Bena-Benadryl, y’all /Rash Rules Everything Around Me/ Getting drowsy, Bena-Benadryl, y’all I’m blushing while I’m running the show/ I don’t wanna pose cuz I don’t want ‘em to see/ The anxiety rash I’m hiding under my sleeves /It looks weak, to get all red and itchy when I’m barely upset/ but it’s bad enough to make em call a medic

She also admits to stuffing her face and not being super-thin (“I’m kinda like a pelican, cuz my mouth/ Is way bigger than my belly and/ I like to keep some feathers on my skeleton”), and expresses her ambivalence about annoying cool boys: “I know you wanna prove your dominance, and you want all my klonopin/ You talk about the devil cuz you’re so black metal.”

Her idea of a threat: “I piss all on your bike, I like to see your fixie rust.” Watch out, hipster boys.

So great!!! She will be a star.  Or should be.  I swear it on my freckles.

Richard Hell: Cold, angry days on the houseboat

I had Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation and Destiny Street in high school and although those were never albums I listened to from start to end a whole lot, I’ve always really loved a few of Hell’s songs: e.g. “Time” (“Only time can write a song that’s really really real”), “Love Comes in Spurts,” “Kid With the Replaceable Head,” and “Blank Generation.”  He was a bit of a punk-rock Zelig: a founding member of the great Television before his high school buddy Tom Verlaine kicked him out; briefly in Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers after the breakup of the New York Dolls; slept with Nancy Spungeon for a while before she got involved with Sid Vicious; opened for the Clash with the Voidoids in Britain in 1977.  That year Time dubbed him “the demon-eyed New Yorker who could become the Mick Jagger of punk” (it didn’t quite work out that way). I don’t think I had really known this, but Hell’s memoir (I Dreamed I was a Very Clean Tramp) makes a convincing case that when Malcolm McLaren spent a while hanging around NYC in 1974-5, he admired Hell’s style — his good looks in torn leather jacket, the safety pins, spiky hair, aggressively graphic hand-printed text on t-shirts, a Situationist-influenced collage aesthetic — and that when he couldn’t recruit Hell to form his own band, McLaren just appropriated the look and gave it to the Sex Pistols. (Hell admits to spending some time feeling frustrated about his unacknowledged role as the originator of punk’s signature style, but seems Zen about it now.)

Robert Christgau claims that with the memoir Hell equals or exceeds Patti Smith’s achievement in the National Book Award-winning Just Kids.  I definitely disagree; overall I found I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp hit or miss. It has some great stories to tell, but eventually it devolves into a dispiriting narrative of heroin addiction, reflexive promiscuity, and missed opportunities– somewhat redeemed by the awareness that Hell eventually got clean and turned into an apparently healthy person.

Some examples:

Our record company was another source of disgust and disappointment.

Later, as the monotony and discomfort of the tour became more and more horrible, the great [Clash friend/ roadie] Roadent introduced me to his antidote for ennui — self-inflicted cigarette burns.  It worked and I still have the cherished memory on my left forearm.

Jake did a creative thing for us in London by renting a houseboat on the Thames, off Cheyne Walk, for the band to live in.  But it turned out not to be a good idea to cram us all into a tight space.  By the end of the first three days I was junk-sick and irritable… My hopelessness grew… It got labyrinthetically self-repellant… The entire… tour was just a stretched-out version of those first few cold, angry, nauseated days on the houseboat.

Some friend or editor also really should have gotten Hell to ease off on of the punk-groupie sex stories, which also get monotonous and depressing. He indulges too much in plain old objectification of the array of women who pass through his various fleabag Lower East Side bedrooms. “Although he’s self-deprecating about it of course,” Christgau writes (unfortunately), “Hell was New York punk’s great ladies’ man.”  Sabel Starr is one example of his conquests.  “Sabel was fifteen (Johnny [Thunders] was nineteen) when they met and she was already notorious as an L.A. groupie.  Word was she’d slept with Iggie Pop was she was thirteen… She always had the cheeriest healthy smile.  The smile was real — happy and friendly.  Everything about her was real.  She was heroic.  At least from the point of view of a musician she liked.  She truly lived for fun and joy, and the thing that was the most joyous of all to her was to make a meaningful rock musician happy.  That was her mission, the way someone else might join the Peace Corps.  Instead of digging wells and planting crops and offering medical care, she provided pretty and entertaining companionship, astute and sincere encouragement, favorite drugs, and magnificent blow jobs…. She was a soulful, sane, self-aware sweetheart of a committed groupie.”

Eww. As he comments at one point, while on coke his “brain and cock were one”… and he was high most of the time in the late 70s and early-mid 80s.

Hell is a pretty smart guy, one of the better-read and more intellectual of the punk generation (he always saw himself as a writer/artist who happened to decide to make music for a while), and there are some good/fun things about the book… he knew everyone in those days, and it’s fascinating to see the emergence of punk from the perspectives of one of its conceptual architects.

He observes interestingly at one point that “the British punk culture also seemed strangely asexual.  There were some classic teenage sexpectations among stray members of bands, but for the most part the relations between the boys and the girls seemed infantile, like prepubescent.  People kidded and cuddled and might even share beds, but it seemed to be in bad form to regard one another as sexual prospects.”  The book brought out the prude in me: I kept thinking, “stop doing drugs and chasing groupies, focus on your opportunities.”  Punk saw itself as an alternative to the excesses of 1970s rock and roll culture, but people like Hell got caught up in an arty downtown version of those same excesses, to the point of sleeping with the very same groupies.  Although he definitely gets the problem of drug addiction, it doesn’t seem to occur to him that there might have been something valuable in a (relative) prudishness and “asexuality” in the London scene, which may have helped to prevent punk from reverting into just a new form of rock and roll.  (Just read this Bookforum review which comments of Hell, “he’s a scumbag with an intimate, articulate understanding of scumbag psychology.”)

The “clean”/chaste vs dirty/ “tramp[y]” [vis. the book's title] dichotomy may also relate to Hell’s complicated feelings towards Tom Verlaine, who is the closest this book comes to the Robert Mapplethorpe of Smith’s Kids — e.g. the roommate/ best buddy/ co-conspirator from the early days.  Hell still seems to feel rejected by and angry at Verlaine to some degree, perhaps in part because of Verlaine’s aloof, un-rock-and-roll fastidiousness: he didn’t do drugs, didn’t hang out much, and you don’t hear a lot about his girlfriends.  I guess he just dedicated all his energy to making genius music… (Although to be fair, Verlaine does sound as if he could be a pain in the neck, a bit of a control-freak J. Mascis type, with Hell as the bewildered/rejected Lou Barlow).

But then, I was always much more of a bookish Verlaine than a bad-boy Hell type (sans any musical talent), personally.

*Amour* and *I Married You for Happiness*

Coincidentally (I think) I happened to be reading Lily Tuck’s novel I Married You For Happiness when I saw Michael Haneke’s Amour at the IU Cinema– both of which are about an elderly, long-married spouse’s response to the death of his/her partner.  You probably know about Amour.  The donnée of Tuck’s novel is a bit different; at its onset, the narrator Nina is at the bedside of her husband, who after going upstairs to take a quick nap, has died suddenly; the novel plays out in that night, as she stays by his corpse, thinking back over memories from their marriage.  As its title suggests, I Married You For Happiness is less about the death than about the marriage, and I found it to be a moving and engaging portrait of a not-untroubled long-term relationship as it spools out over decades.  They meet at a cafe in Paris where she is reading an avant-garde French novel by Natalie Saurraute (which hints at Tuck’s aesthetic program). Theirs is a C.P. Snow two-cultures kind of marriage, she a painter, he a mathematician, and one of its concerns is the way two people with different ways of thinking, kinds of mind, and perspectives can form a life together.  In this it reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s portrait of a somewhat incompatible yin/yang marriage in the Ramsays:

Whenever she "thought of his work" she always saw clearly before 
her a large kitchen table. It was Andrew's doing. She asked him 
what his father's books were about. "Subject and object and the 
nature of reality," Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, 
she had no notion what that meant. "Think of a kitchen table then," 
he told her, "when you're not there."

So now she always saw, when she thought of Mr. Ramsay's work, 
a scrubbed kitchen table.

Nina is a bit Mrs Ramsay-like in her bemused attitude to her abstractly-thinking husband’s worldview.  Although in other ways she, as an artist, more resembles Mrs. Ramsay’s protege Lily, the painter (Lily Tuck/ Lily Briscoe?).

I am a longtime Haneke fan (I’ve seen most of his films, I think — my favorite is probably Caché; I can never bring myself to watch either version of Funny Games), and I found Amour brilliant and/but hard to watch in some respects.  I read one review that asserted that it is “not a depressing movie” and in fact that it would be a good choice for a couple to go see on Valentine’s Day.  It’s true that it’s a notably realist and unsentimental depiction of long-term commitment– one that considers what the phrase “’till death do us part” might really mean in practice.  Not sure I’d really recommend it for date night, though.  One friend saw it at a different showing at the IU Cinema during which she reports various audience members were crying, one woman doing so throughout the entire film and, at one climactic moment (you can probably guess which if you’ve seen it), shouting out loudly “no!”  My friend says she actually kind of wished she’d seen it on DVD at home, as the emotion in the audience was a bit overpowering.

George Saunders’ & Sam Lipsyte’s Disrespected Worlds of Fantasy

My spring break pleasure reading, partly on a round-trip plane ride, consisted of two new collections of stories by authors I’ve read for a while, George Saunders’ Tenth of December and Sam Lipsyte’s The Fun Parts. It was interesting to read them in succession; you could construct a Venn Diagram in which they both overlap with parts of Donald Barthelme, Mark Leyner (although I admit I only thought of him because I just read Lipsyte’s admiring interview with him in the new Paris Review), Louis C.K. and/or other standup comics, Saunders’ one-time Syracuse colleague David Foster Wallace and maybe Kurt Vonnegut. What may be most distinctive about them, at least considered together, is the fundamental role of humor in their fiction — they almost continually crack jokes even in pretty serious and/or grim narratives, in a way that feels kind of post-David Letterman and contemporary to me.

It’s a slightly unfair comparison to Lipsyte because Tenth of December is probably the best book of an artist for whom the short story is his central and basically only art form, whereas Lipsyte’s The Fun Parts is more of an occasional collection and doesn’t, IMO, show him at his strongest compared to, for example, his last full-length novel The Ask which I believe I wrote about here a few years ago… Yes, I began that posting by observing that it will “probably long remain the funniest and best novel filed under this Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data: 1.  College administrators– Fiction.  2.  College benefactors — Fiction.  3.  Education fund raising — Fiction.”

Saunders’ book is fantastic. I guess my favorite is the amazing “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” which he discusses on the New Yorker fiction blog here. Saunders in his winningly unpretentious way comments that ‘If the only thing the story did was say, ‘Hey, it’s really wrong to hang up living women in your backyards, you capitalist-pig oppressors,’ that wasn’t going to be enough. We kind of know that already. It had to be about that plus something else.” This story would work really well on a syllabus in a course focused on depictions of immigrant labor or related topics.

Lipsyte is a master of that contemporary mode of cringing-embarrassment-and-shame, with a focus on the grotesque and abject body, that’s most familiar from t.v. shows like Louie C.K., Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Girls. And Maria Bamford’s stand-up comedy and her show. He’s hilarious and brilliant, but I found the stories a bit brutal and cudgeling when read all in a row.  They contain some pretty disgusting and/or emotionally lacerating moments, e.g. the story with the dad who taunts his son to goad him to take a swing at him: “Don’t be such a damn pansy!  I’m leaving your dying hag of a mother!” Maybe my favorite was the one about early-teenage Dungeons & Dragons players, which stood out for me as having more of a Saunders-like sympathy and emotional depth than some of the others.

That story’s D&D theme also reminded me of the final story in Saunders’s collection, “Tenth of December” itself, which starts in the consciousness of an odd kid who seems to have developed his own cosmology involving creatures called Nethers that vaguely bring to mind some of the creatures in A Wrinkle in Time:

They were Netherworlders.  Or Nethers.  They had a strange bond with him.  Sometimes for whole days he would just nurse their wounds.  Occasionally, for a joke, he would shoot one in the butt as it fled.  Who henceforth would limp for the rest of its days. Which could be as long as an additional nine million years.

That’s a characteristic Saunders thought, that this weird kid spends days, in his fantasy life, nursing the wounds of aggressive invented creatures whom he also humiliatingly injures for laughs, and with whom he has a “strange bond.”

It makes sense that both Saunders and Lipsyte would be interested in eccentric, childish, disrespected realms of fantasy and role-playing. Both authors return repeatedly to self-contained invented worlds and subcultures, lacking good aesthetics or high-cultural credibility, that provide opportunities for grandiose self-dramatizing on the part of losers and marginal types of all kinds. Amusement and theme parks seem often to serve this role for Saunders. This preoccupation seems fitting for an era in which literary fiction has vastly less cultural influence than, say, console or smartphone video games. There’s a resigned albeit slightly embarrassed sense on the part of both authors that they are working in a genre that has lost status in a major way and that cannot really even compete with the cheesiest of non-literate games. And of course part of their success is that they fully recognize this in the way a lot of authors trying to plug away at realist fiction do not.  (Maybe Jennifer Egan’s work has some of this too.)

I point this out as a former somewhat-dedicated D&D player circa 6th-7th grade…