Spiritual defender: James Lasdun’s stalking memoir, Give Me Everything You Have, reviewed. - Slate Magazine

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

James Lasdun’s stalking memoir, Give Me Everything You Have, reviewed. - Slate Magazine

James Lasdun’s stalking memoir, Give Me Everything You Have, reviewed. - Slate Magazine

2 comments:

RAYLOKEFebruary 6, 2013 at 5:28 AM
GIVE Everything that you have is in-deed the LAST Resort USUALLY in UNIQUE Situations, Normally plus NATURALLY !!! ===
In the fall of 2003, James Lasdun was teaching writing at a New York City school he calls Morgan College when he met a student he calls Nasreen. She was in her 30s and she seemed reserved—shy or aloof, Lasdun thought. The work she presented for discussion (excerpts from a historical novel based on her family’s experience of the Iranian Revolution) swiftly established her as the star of his class. “Her language was clear and vigorous,” Lasdun recalls, “with a distinct fiery expressiveness.”

Give Me Everything You Have, Lasdun’s new memoir, describes how Nasreen became his Internet stalker. At the height of her harassment, she was writing him dozens of daily emails, defaming him online (in his Amazon reviews, his Wikipedia entry, the comment sections of his articles), and sending off denouncements to his colleagues and employers. She is a tireless, mysterious bearer of ill will. She is a nightmare-scenario case study in exactly how easy it can be to “ruin” someone online, or at least to bother him very, very much, to the point where he begins to feel like he’s the one going crazy.

The story begins with an unexpected request for a favor. Two years after their class, Nasreen emails: She wants help with her book. Lasdun, no longer teaching, hesitates. But she’s persistent, flattering, and after all, a talented writer. They fall into a regular correspondence. He’s mostly terse but still helpful, putting her in touch with his agent and agreeing to read her work. She sends him chatty messages full of creative musings and daily gripes and links and Photoshopped self-portraits, but probably, he figures, this is just how younger people use the Internet. What a fun new friend he’s found, a sympathetic fellow writer, and one with an excitingly novel background —“most of my friends are middle-aged Western men like myself,” he notes. However: “At a certain point,” he writes, “I realized I was being flirted with.”

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The ominous precision of the book’s early pages is riveting. Lasdun’s description of email’s slippery nuances will engross anyone who has ever changed “Hey!” to “hey—“ to “HEY:” to “Dear James.” With its unexpected courtliness, its unspoken rules and parameters, its strategic sense of tone, and its endless archives, email affords plenty of opportunity for close-reading daily life. Lasdun is a skilled and sensitive critic of the accidental epistolary novel we’re all writing all the time.
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RAYLOKEFebruary 6, 2013 at 5:32 AM
... YES, THIS ia in deed some sort of a MIRACLE at the Eleventh Hour, LIKE Magice in UNIQUE WAYS NORMALLY, NATURALLY ! GIVE Everything that you have is in-deed the LAST Resort USUALLY in UNIQUE Situations, Normally plus NATURALLY !!! ===
In the fall of 2003, James Lasdun was teaching writing at a New York City school he calls Morgan College when he met a student he calls Nasreen. She was in her 30s and she seemed reserved—shy or aloof, Lasdun thought. The work she presented for discussion (excerpts from a historical novel based on her family’s experience of the Iranian Revolution) swiftly established her as the star of his class. “Her language was clear and vigorous,” Lasdun recalls, “with a distinct fiery expressiveness.”

Give Me Everything You Have, Lasdun’s new memoir, describes how Nasreen became his Internet stalker. At the height of her harassment, she was writing him dozens of daily emails, defaming him online (in his Amazon reviews, his Wikipedia entry, the comment sections of his articles), and sending off denouncements to his colleagues and employers. She is a tireless, mysterious bearer of ill will. She is a nightmare-scenario case study in exactly how easy it can be to “ruin” someone online, or at least to bother him very, very much, to the point where he begins to feel like he’s the one going crazy.

The story begins with an unexpected request for a favor. Two years after their class, Nasreen emails: She wants help with her book. Lasdun, no longer teaching, hesitates. But she’s persistent, flattering, and after all, a talented writer. They fall into a regular correspondence. He’s mostly terse but still helpful, putting her in touch with his agent and agreeing to read her work. She sends him chatty messages full of creative musings and daily gripes and links and Photoshopped self-portraits, but probably, he figures, this is just how younger people use the Internet. What a fun new friend he’s found, a sympathetic fellow writer, and one with an excitingly novel background —“most of my friends are middle-aged Western men like myself,” he notes. However: “At a certain point,” he writes, “I realized I was being flirted with.”

Advertisement

The ominous precision of the book’s early pages is riveting. Lasdun’s description of email’s slippery nuances will engross anyone who has ever changed “Hey!” to “hey—“ to “HEY:” to “Dear James.” With its unexpected courtliness, its unspoken rules and parameters, its strategic sense of tone, and its endless archives, email affords plenty of opportunity for close-reading daily life. Lasdun is a skilled and sensitive critic of the accidental epistolary novel we’re all writing all the time.
... cont/-
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