We were chatting on-line.  She, in Paris, a professor of architectural history, had ordered a copy of my old book, A Hero For Our Time.  She mentioned how she liked my dad in the book.  She referenced a passage in the book where it's summertime.  Dinner conversation.  About how science became an instrument of corporate profit.  I mentioned to her how the Kirkus Indie review, for which I paid $400, completely misread that passage.

She looked up the review.  She didn't like the review.  She found it belittling.  She found it ridiculous.   "You should get that incredibly idiotic review of your book off the internet.  It is so awful and inappropriate.  What a crock of shit.  Here in Europe there are laws against that kind of shit."

Interesting, I thought.  I was taking my sad first day off walk alone down the path through the trees below the reservoirs, up on the bluff over looking the canal and Canal Road.  The previous day, I'd been to the wine tasting up at La Piquette, the sister restaurant, wine from Portugal, along with a St. Pourcain chardonnay blend, an Aligoté, an Apremont, a Macon Village, and Bruno's Alentéjo, then the reds, a Gaillac, a Gamay from the upper Loire, an Oregon pinot noir, Bruno's red.  After the tasting we'd had lunch, a beautiful paté, salmon tartar with avocado, a taste of skate wing for me, beautiful food.  I'd hung around and had dessert and more sips of wine.  I got myself back to the apartment in the DC muggy heat via two city bus routes.  Small independent wineries.  The hands of the old father farmer, Ed Addiss explained, individual personal wines from the earth, tended to by humanity.

But that much wine, and the rest to get you through the night after you wake up again at midnight after the tasting, leaves you down and tired the next day, and there are enough reasons for that anyway, so let's just take a walk down to the picnic table and have a walk if you're up for it.  Bring along your Thich Nhat Hahn, Being Peace, and your notebook, and, having lost your old Nalgene on the bus somewhere, a canteen of water.  Oh well.

So I'm walking along, I'm reading this on my iPhone from my new old friend in Paris.  I had shrugged it off, that review, unflattering, oh well.  What do you expect..  It all seemed like a set-up anyway.  I had attempted to be a dutiful citizen writer and submit my work appropriately, just as one dutifully attends writer's conferences where you can find them...

Yeah... so.  I'm walking along.  Walking is better for thoughts sometimes anyway, than sitting hunched over a notepad like St. Jerome, trying to get a word down.  And I guess as I walk along hearing the birds, looking at the grass beneath me and the dirt trail, the trees around me, a larger picture, I guess you could see, emerges, if one could say such a thing.

I thought of the whole pattern of belittling that seems to follow along in the book I wrote and the experiences therein.  The shitty book review from the shitty Kirkus kid, putting himself up by putting my work down, his cleverness, his MFA brilliance and understanding of literary laws stomping down on my plain homespun natural craft...  well, that just fit into the whole pattern of belittlement.  Institutional belittlement, for lack of a better term.

The institution, academic, is obliged by its laws to come down on the poor creatures that nature creates and nourishes herself, as a way of making the individual conform to a way of doing business. The institution is represented by more than one voice, many really, each voice capable of executing the rules of the institution.  One day, the professor whose lens has narrowed, one day the girl and all her girlfriends who treat you like a low-life weirdo.  (Low-life, the term my therapist used to help me understand.)  The institution tells you, "you're crazy."  What can you do?

And even if you're hurt by that judgment, even as it brings to you a deep pain you have to struggle with itself, the institution considers that it is not within your individual rights to be upset, after all given the great logic of the institution and its judgments...

So, you try to be a good boy.  You shrug.  Oh, well.  That's how it goes.

So I continue with my slow sad walk along the grass and a dragonfly buzzing here and there.

It will always be that way.  There will always be that tension.  The individual must represent himself and his connection to the earth and his way of seeing nature with a loving connected heart.  This is in Twain, in Kerouac, in Jesus, too, the need to represent the individual truths of humanity.  Huck and Jim on the river, outside of, escaping, society at large as it is.  Early Hemingway Michigan stories.

All the put-downs you'll internalize along the way.  All the quiet dignity of working away at a job that is not exactly fully connected to the talents of the individual within.

I get a hot-dog from the little old green tin shed where they rent the boats and kayaks down at Fletcher's Boat House and I walk along slowly in my hiking Keens and long pants and the shirt my mom got me at Murdock's in Oswego and mull all this over looking over the still river, the fish jumping now and again in big circles though it is hard to see them, the ducks making their soothing quacks as they motor along.  And for me these lonely times down by the river, there's a sense to them of being felt similar maybe to forty days out in the desert.  Even here not that far from the commuting cars above on Canal Road heading out of town at rush hour.


A person and his text, they merge after a while.


I began to wonder, how much I had put up with, underestimating myself as a writer.


There are lots of things to do in the world, lots of distractions, but you have to protect yourself, you have to protect your creative side.  This is actually rather tricky.  As a writer you feel you need some material, some action to report, but in my line of work this often means collateral damage, feeling like crap mentally and physically the next day...