February 11, 2018:

There's nothing especially inventive or even unusual about that piece.

It's a perfectly ordinary Postmodernist technique common in the "microfiction" of that moment. Take two independent narratives, very short ones, interleave them so that they rub together, implying a larger canvas larger than actually there, allowing associations from each piece to suggest depth in the other. Highlighting their independent origins I gave each its own font.

The "reviewer" bothered me. A lot. With his pompous pastiche of critical lingo.

He had no training in microfiction or Postmodernism, so that he tried to read the piece through the trivial Realist lens they taught him in high school. Naturally that doesn't work. He'd may as well have read it backward or upside-down. It's not a fucking diary entry, although that's the way he tried to understand it.

One of the many downsides of the Internet. Incomprehension mimicking expertise. Dilettante prose, stolid, posturing as knowledge. My guess is he actually is a high school English teacher.

For me it was an experiment in marketing, in a period when I experienced readership enthusiastically. An early social media attempt at crowdsourcing criticism. Interesting. I think the site lasted a few months.

One of the lessons learned is that I value expertise, not opinion. Received or otherwise.

Which was a helpful insight, for me. It helped me to solidify my self-understanding, and it's since saved a lot of time. Now I simply shine the would-be experts who posture and aren't. Whether they're friends or erstwhile friends or just random interactions with opinionated whoevers.