Later in life, I have become a scholar of light, an expert on sensing where the light is coming from, where it lights. Sophia Loren says the key to aging well is avoiding “old person” noises, like grunts or moans. I caught myself grunting when I got up out of my reading chair today and thought of her. I think the key to getting older is to not listen to anybody talk about aging. Doctors offer nothing but pills and more pills, advertisers pretend there are no older people, older people are trivialized in media and movies and most of the novels I read as well.
I am aware of my place in life, but I do not intend to give up work, love, sex or surrender myself to the old age chatter I sometimes hear. One friend came up to me in a grocery line and told me he wasn’t buying green bananas any more. I didn’t get the joke but he winked and elbowed me several times asking me if I bought green bananas. I finally got it and asked him why he spoke of himself in that way, and he mumbled something and left. Old people noises are not just about grunts and moans, but the words that come out of people’s mouth. At our age. How is your health? My health is fine, and why is it anybody else’s business? I don’t ask people I meet on the street how their health is. And I will not spent my remaining years talking about it either.
I take great pleasure in refusing the patronizing offer of senior discounts and suggesting they go to the people in our culture who need them the most – strapped young people with small kids. I can buy a cup of coffee without the assistance of Dunkin’ Donuts.
I looked over some demographic figures for my blog and Facebook today and was happy to see a third of the people reading my stuff are under 40, another third 40 to 55, the rest either older or men. Good demographics to have. I hope to be a reminder as I age that nobody gets to define us but us. I watch the old people noises that come out of my mouth. This is a great time to open up and change. In many ways my life began at age 58, when I bought Bedlam Farm and everyone in my life suggested I had lost my mind. Only later was it clear that I was just beginning to find it.
It was cold and windy this afternoon, freezing temperatures, snow showers. The chickens made themselves a nest near Maria’s Studio. Strut constantly patrols around the hens, he almost never sits down and rests.
I’m looking forward to Saturday. I’ll be at Battenkill Books briefly around ll a.m. in my job as Recommender-In-Chief, then heading for the Chatham, N.Y., Public Library with Maria and Red. I’m also going to see a wonderful free-lance editor who often works with me – Rosemary Ahern – and my new agent, Christopher Schelling of Selectric Artists in N.Y. Rosemary has helped me with my last several books and has become a very valued friend. Christopher is transforming my writing life. He is helping me publish several e-books this year – the first is “Listening To Dogs,” out shortly. He’s brought me to a classy speakers bureau Blueflower Arts. Together, we are figuring out how to be a professional era in the new era. Thanks in no small measure to him, I think I might make it.
As I often remind myself, getting to be a professional writer the first time around wasn’t easy either. At 3 p.m., I’ll be speaking at the Chatham Library, talking about the meaning of animals in our lives today. It is one of the Carnegie Libraries, and has a beautiful stained glass window where I’ll speak. Sunday, I’ll be publishing another excerpt from Florence Walrath’s journals and also writing a book review of the novel “Benediction” a remarkable book. Somewhere in there Maria and I will hang up our new clothesline – we have both long wanted one, and I have trouble getting people to let me photograph their underwear, so I’ll do my own. We also have two locust trees to plant, grouting to do on the floors around the wood stove, many minor repairs and cleaning up. Sunday maybe. Sunday night I will debut a new version of my multi-grain pizza: this one with dried tomatoes, ricotta cheese, pine nuts, parsley and maybe some thinly-sliced squash. I’m starting on a new book “Black House,” the first in a triology by Scottish writer Peter May. Supposed to be a very wonderful new mystery series.
Every day around 2 p.m., it is reposo for the animals, borrowing on the very civilized Roman custom of a nap after lunch. It is rarely to see animals like sheep and donkeys resting for too long, they are both alert for predators and are moving a lot. But they are smelling Spring and preparing to take it easy. It is lovely to look out the window and see reposo every day.
I bought this much praised, much publicized book (“Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked”) from Battenkill Books. The author has been all over NPR and drawn many gushing blurbs from literary people. I know something about stalking, so I was thinking I might review it. James Lasdun has written a very literary, powerfully written story about being stalked by one of his former writing students. Nasdeen (not her real name) has sent him an obsessive stream of vile and abusive messages, posted accusations of plagiarism and misconduct on websites, wrote hateful and horrible anti-semitic e-mails to his employes and colleagues, even wrote about his family. This, according to Lasdun, has gone on for five years and goes on still. The jacket says the experience has been “harrowing,” and “terrifying” for him. I’ve decided not to review it, but write about the experience of stalking.
I well understand why it is getting so much attention. Anybody who has been victimized on the Internet is something of a hero in America.The journalism and publishing worlds are obsessed with the Internet, alternately hysterical and phobic about it, as it has been displacing them for a long time. And in their own way, they have been stalking it for some time. The scions of media and publishing might argue and be skeptical about everything else in the world, but there is no bad thing about the digital age they will hesitate to promote, pass on and sound the alarm about. They will herald almost any story about predators, pornographers, hackers, scam artists, identity thieves and stalkers. Most Americans still do not know that their children are more likely to have a 747 fall out of the sky onto their heads than be harmed as the result of being online. When is the last book or NPR interview you heard about the good things that can happen online.
There is a lot to be troubled about in this book – Lasdun permits this student to flirt with him, meets with her in a cafe to help get her novel published, refers him to his agent, ignores hundreds of clearly inappropriate and overly familiar messages, communicates inappropriately with her for years and even long after she is writing disturbing messages about him, he is happy to read the latest drafts of her book. I was a professor for five years and e-mail like that from students present or past would have set off all kinds of alarms in my head.
The story is murky. Nobody’s real name is used, and hardly anyone but him with a real name is ever quoted. Lasdun claims utter helplessness and victimization. Nobody could help him over those five years – the police didn’t care, lawyers had no solutions to offer, and if they had, he couldn’t afford them. University administrators were stumped and helpless, e-mails can’t be blocked or filtered. Lasdun seemed to lurch from rationalization to rationalization. Understandably, he felt as if his reputation and career were both being destroyed, (as well as his peace of mind) but obviously, but as it turns out neither were – he has a new book out from Farrar, Straus, Giroux, all kinds of breathless and admiring interviews in classy places, and many dire warnings from famous writers about the ease with which reputations and lives are destroyed on the scary Internet. Nasdeen may have been seeking to ruin him, but she ended up getting him a big book and lots of publicity.
I never heard of James Lasdun before this book but now everybody knows his name. Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee said the book was a reminder of how, since the Internet “our peace can be troubled and our good name besmirched.” I’m not sure that has happened to James Lasdun.
I am sure Lasdun’s stalker is quite real, as is his discomfort, but I guess don’t get the story as he presents it. I should be feeling a lot of sympathy, but mostly, I feel queasy. By the time Lasdun ended up at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem pondering ancient temples, anti-semitism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I was lost. The dread Nasdeen had quite vanished from the story. But I don’t want to be trashing anybody else’s book, and I have to concede I just might be too personally affected to be unbiased.
I have been stalked a number of times, and the specter of it always hovers. My good name has been often besmirched, there are whole mailing lists and websites dedicated to saying awful and generally false things about me. In this world, honesty and truth don’t matter and no one is accountable for their words. Hostility is a bad thing about the Internet, even though it was not created on the Internet. Two of my stalkers were very real, very much in the physical world, one of them was hospitalized and then jailed after she was found with scrapbooks containing hundreds, perhaps thousands of photos taken inside my house, of me walking my dogs. She tried to break into Bedlam Farm to take more photos, perhaps grab one of my dogs, but Rose’s barking alerted me to her (we were up on the hill herding sheep) and she fled, and was caught shortly after that near Bedlam Farm.
She had followed me for a couple of years, called me from jail regularly to say hi, is free and seems to be doing well now. She was a school teacher. Another would be novelist – enraged that I would not read her manuscript – went away hundreds of angry messages, and then a lawyer’s letter. A third stopped e-mailing me a dozen times a day after after the police called her up and threatened her with arrest.
I’ve had several especially vicious and determined online stalkers, some who set up websites calling me all sorts of evil names and attributing many evil thoughts and deeds to me and making all kinds of completely fictional accusations about me. One was careful to send copies of her messages to anyone I mentioned or who she thought might know me. That is a common tactic of stalkers – to attack people you know as well as you. Almost everyone close to me has gotten one hateful, disturbing or bizarre message after another from a stalker. Nobody I know has ever believed any messages from stalkers, and none, so far as I know, has done me any real harm, unless you count being unnerved. As it happens, none of them are nearly as determined to spoil my life as I am to live it.
Some stalkers are quite intuitive, they relate very closely to my work and have a good instinct for how to cause pain and discomfort. They can definitely make me uneasy. That is their biggest danger, really. Nobody really believes anything a stalker says. Hollywood stalkers are more dangerous, they work in the physical world, most online stalkers are usually cowardly and ill. They love the Internet because it is not the real world, the same as nasty e-mailers. Stalkers are not frightening to me. They are frightened and disturbed. They are the saddest of people, and many of them cannot get the help they need, a commentary on us.
But the truth is, they are not difficult to stop, at least not in my experience, they do not make me hate or fear the Internet. I did have to take a federally-sponsored course in online safety for celebrities and it was useful. The bottom line: Never, ever, engage in any personal messaging with people you don’t know. That was pretty much my instinct, and I have followed it. There is not a day where I do not get messages from people demanding that I speak to them, promising to visit my home, rage at me for not calling them up and talking to them, advising them about their dogs or insisting that I help them get their books published. This week, a woman from Poland said she was coming to the United States to visit the country and to find my farm and meet with me, and if I did not agree, she would cause me great harm. I will not respond. Of course.
I live an open life, and will not give that up. If stalkers get into your head, they win. Otherwise, they lose, every time. Hiding from the world is just another form of slavery, like living for health care.
I do understand I have to be thoughtful. Any one of these strange daily messengers could become a stalker if I did not understand how to handle communications in the online world. If you pretend to be everyone’s friend, unhealthy people become enraged when you are not friendly. That’s how stalking works, as a general rule. Unlike James Lasdun, I have always found help in dealing with them. The police will respond, there are things lawyers can do, online mail hosts are especially sensitive to allegations of harassment and stalking and stalkers can easily be tracked. They can be fined, lose their computers and e-mail addresses, be jailed or committed. Courts are increasingly sensitive to online hostility, slander, and abuse, of which there is much.
But I have had a very different experience than James Lasdun. I really cannot imagine permitting myself to be stalked by someone for five years. I would head for Costa Rica first or go into hiding in the New Mexico desert. That kind of passivity is more frightening to me than losing my reputation. Lasdun says he couldn’t afford to fight Nasdeen. I can’t imagine that he could afford not to. I suppose that was my biggest problem with the book, which is certainly interesting. I have never met a stalker that powerful or clever or determined. Stalkers in my experience have short attention spans, there are lots of people out there to stalk. (I read this book with the idea of helping Connie Brooks sell some, and don’t hesitate. It’s an interesting read. You might have a different response than I did. If anyone wishes to buy it, it is a fascinating book in many ways and you can call Battenkill Books to get it: 518 677-2515.)
My own feeling is that the world is filled with dangers, online and off. A bullet grazed my arm during a labor riot in Atlantic City, a mob torched my car while I was sitting in it during a race riot in Philadelphia, I was knifed by a rampaging gang in Washington, I saw the body of a small child murdered and raped in Boston, saw many bodies dismembered in accidents, burned in fires. Online stalkers do not frighten me much, they are not the scariest things in the world. If all else fails, you can just delete the messages.
Disturbed people have access to celebrities in a very new way. So do healthy people. Social media promotes the idea that if you are on Facebook, you are everyone’s friend and you can talk to them and be available. That cannot be so, I cannot be friends with thousands of strangers, and I have learned to respect those boundaries. I am sorry James Lasdun was not able to protect himself and his family, silence his stalker and move on. Perhaps his book will help him to do it.
Red and Zelda continue to take measure of one another, each one patient but quite vigilant and alert, the sense of two strong animals working something out. In the morning, Red inches closer to Zelda and fixes his border collie stare on her, and she never takes her eyes off him, even while she’s eating. She never let him get this close before, and he never tried. But they are working it out, I can see it. There is respect there, professionalism. She will not knock him over again, for sure, I think, and he will not be caught unawares. A small drama, an ancient one in the life of animals and dogs.
